[X] My Assistant

[ChuckRozool]

[James McMurray]

It was only invented so that some poeple could use it and make other people go "huh?" :)

[nezumi]

[hyzmarca]

As long words go, it is hard to beat pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, a lung disease caused by inhaling silica. But technical terms rarely count. If they did the name of a certain enzyme would top the charts at 1,913 letters.

But keeping the CHurch of England is a great cause for a hermetic druid to support.

[Fire Hawk]

This reminds me, I still need to come up with a good definition to "gakfoyiheminarian"...

[emo samurai]

Okay, to segue from this back to the topic, do you think the Newspeak from 1984 resembles the way that slang term is slowly replacing normal speech in SR?

Let me expand on this. Even with the advent of balkanization and "postmodernism," isn't thought and the way that people are connected to reality in SR becoming more and more narrow? Everything is a job, a contact, or hard, hard fun to forget the job. Maybe that's just the result of this being a game with a very serial plot structure; everything must be quantified. Or maybe people really are becoming dangerously limited in their connection to reality. "Professional, meet problem. Problem, meet professional."

[John Campbell]

[emo samurai]

Hmmm... true... So do you think modern newspeak is pretty much limited to corporate slang and political slogans?

And that tunnel-vision issue; how about that?

[mfb]

to an extent. it's only natural, really; in the world of SR, everyone is being subject to constant future shock. once a decade, at least, some major event occurs that could easily shake up the paradigm of everyone on the planet--this, on top of the widespread local changes and disasters. there are a number of ways to deal with being constantly bombarded by new things; the most common is probably just shutting down and focusing on what you know, treating everything new as strange, untrustworthy voodoo.

i'll note that the UCAS general population seems to have taken the opposite approach, welcoming anything new and strange as being automatically a good thing. witness the fact that despite the terrible destruction which the nation had been through over the past few decades, they elected a dragon to the presidency. i tend to see the UCAS as not being the inheritor of the old US; rather, the UCAS is where all the lunatics and wackos go, both ultraliberal and ultraconservative. the CAS, to me, is where the more middle-of-the-road types have gravitated to. they seem more willing to look before they leap, embracing change only after checking it thoroughly.

[Kanada Ten]

It's hard to judge, but I think an important factor in SR language development will be the influence of simsense. Roughly half the SIN population has a datajack, which says something about how important the technology is. We use it to connect with everything (the matrix), you can drive a car with it (virtual dashboard), and it provides entertainment.

In tight corporate enclaves, the media is censored and controlled. This would lead to simsense that resembles newspeak - only includes emotions, values, and rest of the human experience. It really is a corp manufactured way of life. This incest of ideas resulted in the bratpacks just as the fear of change and instability made the wageslaves before them.

But in the real world, outside the firewall, competition for ideas and the melting of cultures would be accelerated. I think it's a given that we do pick up language from television and movies and the net, things like
"dude" and "meh", and so on become part of culture after a time. Now imagine that with simsense... You wouldn't have grown up in the UCAS without having felt Old Yellar, and you can identify with the local mage because who hasn't lived as Jack Blackhand, the eager young mage growing up in the mid-west. You've spoke Chinese, and even understood it on an emotional level, while kicking Yakuza ass in LA. You have friends all over the world, each adding a tiny bit to your vocabulary; and then your neighborhoods are filled with every ethnic group on the Earth crammed into sprawling apartmexes. You have to learn "Excuse me" in fifty different languages just to make it up stairs. Not to mention educational simsense. I imagine, they give you a VTC for Etiquette(Corp) when you first start a job, inducting you into their jargon as well.

[emo samurai]

Okay, so the people outside the corps are becoming more urbane. Are they becoming more capable of individual thought? All your examples of urbanity are done through programming; very literal programming, in fact. Does this mean that people are able to think outside of "I am Johnson I sit in shadow and talk about associates" or "I am Rigger I make cars move weird?"

And how is the CAS good for not being accepting of magical newness? They hate metahumans and magic; the UCAS at least accepted sasquatches as citizens and stuff. I don't think the thing with sasquatches was bad, and neither was electing Dunkelzahn president.

[Kanada Ten]

[emo samurai]

It would definitely help them be more open-minded... and it's different from the vidscreens from 1984 in that they often invite you to question them and find your own interpretations and reactions.

[mfb]

[emo samurai]

But how is magic screwing up UCAS society now? There's really no reason for them to resist magic anymore. As long as it's not blood magic or invae-based. And there was never a good reason for the CAS to resist it, either. Those were all cases of other people having magic, people not themselves.

[mfb]

...okay. if i punch someone in the face for ten minutes, and then stop, do you think they'll still be crying and cowering (or otherwise reacting to being punched) a minute later? should i wonder why they're still lying on the ground, bawling? after all, i stopped punching them over sixty seconds ago! it's not like Bug City happened during a different generation than the one that voted for Dunk. Bug City was still going on during that election.

[emo samurai]

It's like hating technology in general, though. Insect magic isn't "magic" in the general sense. It's like hating plows because some people turn them into swords.

[mfb]

the common man doesn't understand enough about magic to tell the difference. read your Shadowbeat. magicians, in the mind of the common man, come in three types: the wise shaman, the klutzy but loveable sidekick, and the main villain.

[emo samurai]

Heehee, Garthganar, Dark Sorcerer of Darkness.

[Voran]

I could see a feeling of detachment setting in. Or the feeling you're just 'going through the motions' with the general populace. Simsense would be a start, when you're relying on others to provide you with feelings of excitement and various other stuff, I'd say your will to go seek out your own excitement would decrease. When you can program your home to give you environments of nature, far away places, etc, that may also jade you from going there yourself.

I don't even know how much the 'work hard, play hard' mentality would continue through to 2070. Among sinless and runners, I'm sure it still would, as they deal with more tangible daily stuff than a corp drone, but a corper would probably participate in corp-only functions or tone down their funseeking cause the corp tells them it might hurt the bottomline, etc.

[Kanada Ten]

Corp fun is mandatory: Everyday you must spend one hour in recreational activity, such as group cleaning where six not-so-random members of your peer group are selected to race around a residential area (with actual mops and sponges, dusters and dust busters!) in a competition with the cleaning bots. After thirteen days of work, you must spend three hours with your family or a selected group of eligible singles in the park, and then three hours with your corp elected buddies watching corp sponsored sporting events. Once a month you run in a marathon, and yearly you participate in a triathlon. Is that clear, citizen?

[SL James]

Don't forget the mandatory overcomsumption and that 40% of your take-home must go to paying off debt (preferrably only the minimum payments) to banks and credit cards owned by Ma Corp.

[ronin3338]

[Voran]

And add that to meatpuppet sorta situations where even 'individual people' don't have to be individual anymore, you just do a little plastic surgery and implant the chip and voila, you have 16 Jenna Jameson clones, or whatever. You have access to whatever your desires are, pretty much on demand, and a relatively low cost.

[ronin3338]

Ms. Jenkins, come in and shut the office door.

As part of your yearly review, I'll need you to slot this chip so we can, umm, assess your capabilities. Really. :D