Evgeny Morozov, of ‘The Net Delusion’ and ‘To Save Everything, Click Here’ fame, takes on Tim O’Reilly as the poster child for Silicon Valley’s transformation of language and the loss of complexity it engenders:

While the brightest minds of Silicon Valley are “disrupting” whatever industry is too crippled to fend off their advances, something odd is happening to our language. Old, trusted words no longer mean what they used to mean; often, they don’t mean anything at all. Our language, much like everything these days, has been hacked. Fuzzy, contentious, and complex ideas have been stripped of their subversive connotations and replaced by cleaner, shinier, and emptier alternatives; long-running debates about politics, rights, and freedoms have been recast in the seemingly natural language of economics, innovation, and efficiency. Complexity, as it turns out, is not particularly viral.

This justification of “feeling” in the classroom from Stephen Downes continues to piggy-back off previous posts on fiction:

The first stage isn’t empty. It tells the other person how the problem is affecting you, developing a sense of urgency and empathy. The idea is that if the other person sees the consequence of the problem, and not just the symptoms, they can respond with something that solves the underlying issue, and not just the symptoms. Why is this important? If you skip the first stage – or can’t express what it is that really bothers you about something – your communications with others become just a repeated set of “I want I want” statements. The other person, if they care what you want at all, tries one after another band-aid solution without ever solving the problem.

One of the things that concerns me is using economic arguments to bolster what I feel are moral imperatives, but it is definitely an aspect of this I hadn’t considered.

Go read his piece – it’s quite interesting.