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This saddens me because it seemed like a good opportunity for the mainstream media to reacquire the good definition of "hacker". I had started to see newspaper

by jordigh 12y ago

This saddens me because it seemed like a good opportunity for the mainstream media to reacquire the good definition of "hacker". I had started to see newspaper articles that used the good meaning. Cultural inertia on terminology can change, and in the hacker case, I think it should. We certainly rarely say "negro" nowadays in the US except in historical contexts. I'm saddened that Hacker School gave up on the language.

nostrademons 12y ago
A for-profit company's name isn't really the right venue for that. No matter how successful Hacker School is, it's unlikely that a significant enough fraction of the population will have positive personal associations with it to alter their emotional perception. Newspaper articles don't count, generally; they reflect the popular mood more than they influence it. The way to reclaim "hacker" is to use it and adopt it, personally, in 1-on-1 social conversation. Preferably with non-techies who you are close to. That way people's positives associations with you rub off on the terms that you use to describe yourself. We don't use "negro" these days because most of us know and have positive associations with black people in social contexts; that makes its old connotation of inferiority incongruent with our personal experience. Similarly, the LGTBQA movement is succeeding because a large number of people now realize they have friends and neighbors who are gay, and it's much harder to cast that as deviant behavior when you personally know good people who self-identify as gay.
benihana 12y ago
What I don't understand is who are they targeting this towards? Hacker School might have started as a place to teach the general public to code, but the only people who seem to get into that place now are already in the industry, or were already looking to join the industry in which case they should understand the term hacker. It's not like my mother will suddenly sign up because they changed the name.

by jordigh 12y ago

nostrademons 12y ago

A for-profit company's name isn't really the right venue for that. No matter how successful Hacker School is, it's unlikely that a significant enough fraction of the population will have positive personal associations with it to alter their emotional perception. Newspaper articles don't count, generally; they reflect the popular mood more than they influence it. The way to reclaim "hacker" is to use it and adopt it, personally, in 1-on-1 social conversation. Preferably with non-techies who you are close to. That way people's positives associations with you rub off on the terms that you use to describe yourself. We don't use "negro" these days because most of us know and have positive associations with black people in social contexts; that makes its old connotation of inferiority incongruent with our personal experience. Similarly, the LGTBQA movement is succeeding because a large number of people now realize they have friends and neighbors who are gay, and it's much harder to cast that as deviant behavior when you personally know good people who self-identify as gay.

benihana 12y ago

What I don't understand is who are they targeting this towards? Hacker School might have started as a place to teach the general public to code, but the only people who seem to get into that place now are already in the industry, or were already looking to join the industry in which case they should understand the term hacker. It's not like my mother will suddenly sign up because they changed the name.