Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

Kevin Marks takes Andrew Orlowksi to task for his rant about how an altered meaning of "second superpower" came to dominance on Google.

Orlowski spends some of his rant dollars complaining that the term changed its meaning (from "global popular protest" to something like "the emergent democracy enabled by the Internet"), some on his dislike of the thinking behind the phrase, and the rest on the injustice that Google changed its ranking because "A-List" bloggers picked up on it. So what, so what, and so what? The article by James Moore that has irked Orlowski explicitly moves from the second superpower as the "world peace movement" to the way in which the Internet is enabling that peace movement to become more than a disconnected set of marches. That's how catchy phrases change their meaning as they are absorbed. And, yes, getting lots of links will boost your Google PageRank; Orlowski ominously calls this "Google ... being 'gamed'" by which he seems to mean simply that Google pays too much attention to weblogs. As for the sloppy thinking, yeah, sure, it's a sloppy thought, as most good ideas are at first, but Orlowski counters it by name-calling.

Worse, Orlowski's comparisons to 1984's NewSpeak are dangerously wrong. NewSpeak is a totalitarian government's intentional subversion of language by changing the meaning of the culture's most important, elemental words: Peace becomes war, freedom becomes slavery, etc. James Moore and the bloggers who linked to him aren't a totalitarian power, and Moore only shaded the meaning, not cynically reversed it. Further, the phrase isn't an elemental term; according to Orlowski, it was coined just this February. Orlowski seems to have confused folk music with a totalitarian state's national anthem.