Names

As I was finishing up grad school and looking for ways to satisfy the final requirements for my degree, I attempted to answer two research questions on the "digital divide" by exploring a concept I called "ambient advertising." Don't ask me to clarify what I mean by this because I haven't the faintest idea. But what I remember about this experience, after the committee quickly rejected my feeble attempt at an answer, is the power of naming.

What the committee should have said upon rejecting my work was that I was attempting to name a phenomenon prematurely, without establishing any sort of track record in the academic literature. They should also have said that I needed to design and implement a relevant quantitative or qualitative study of the media, which are the two main avenues of research in mass communications, and gather results that would lend support to my suggestion that such a thing as I was naming actually exists.

Alas, I was too much of a poet (or a dilettante) to abide by these implicit rules on naming in the academy. I did eventually find a different way to graduate, but this, I think, was the formative experience of grad school for me. By having my attempt at naming rejected like this, I learned that the act of naming is powerfully correlated with experiential knowledge of the context within which naming occurs.

Dan Abromov, the talented developer of Redux and now a key engineer on the React team, engaged in some naming himself during his fantastic, if short lived, JustJavascript email course. In his case, however, he brought years of experience with the Javascript namespace to bear on his act of naming. One of the first things he did was clarify what was meant by a value in his Javascript mental model. As he explains it: "In the beginning was the Value. What is a value? It’s hard to say. This is like asking what a number is in math, or what a point is in geometry. A value is a thing in the JavaScript universe."

It's interesting to me that he's not saying what a value is existentially in the JavaScript universe, but he's intimating that values refer to things in the universe, so, in other words, a name describes a functional relation between things.

One of the biggest gains I've made in my thinking over the past few years has been my (often times clumsy) attempts to relate my use of words and symbols to some functional activity. So a name doesn't exist by itself, but only in relation to something else, perhaps even as the embodiment of something else. My friend the psychoanalyst calls this process "inscription" and it plays a very important role in helping people to metabolize their experience of trauma.

As I type these words, my partner and I are anxiously awaiting the first pangs of labor pain that will announce the imminent birth of our second child. We've settled on a biblical name for him. Our family doesn't practice Christianity, but even so, I felt it important to read the book of the bible that will be his namesake. It's a paradox of life, as I see it, that in naming something or someone you are also naming yourself. My self definition after becoming a parent is very much tied up with the way that the little being I help to name is now helping me name my experience. And I'm grateful, because a name for me, when the rubber meets to road, is just a way to describe the process of sinking my roots deeper in the earth.

Reading:

Kalanithi, Paul. When Breath Becomes Air. Random House, 2016.