Down a Rabbit Hole

And into a wonderland of babble

How to begin, but more - how to make sense of what makes no sense. At least to a curmudgeon such as myself.

So I happened upon an article at the Spectator that mentioned the Kate Starbird interview on 60 Minutes (and as the article stated - her concern about the censors being censored), and that led me to the University of Washington’s department of Human Centered Design & Engineering. Which is an academic program, such as they exist today, that was an out-growth (in the way cancer is) of what was once a humble effort to produce competent technical writers. Initially, this program in technical writing terminated as a minor; the monstrosity that it is today (a mere 50 years later) grants baccalaureate and graduate degrees - though precisely what discipline that is, is a bit murky, as you will see the further down the hole we go.

If you scanned the history (link above), you’ll see that the dissertation of the first PhD award was titled: Mobile hybridity: supporting personal and romantic relationships with mobile phones in digitally emergent spaces. Now if you can derive some meaning about what intellectual discipline, what body of knowledge this explores and that this institution serves, you are clearly better aligned to modern academia than I am. Let’s start with the second word in the title - hybridity. As a reasonably well read human, I am familiar with the noun, hybrid and it’s Latin etymology. It can also be used as an adjective. I was even well aware of the concept of hybridization. But hybridity had me stumped (and apparently the spellcheck of the substack editor as well, since it is highlighted it as [sic]). You won’t find it in a dictionary - I tried. Oh, it’s there, under hybrid, but with no elaboration beyond that association (as with hybridism - which oddly enough does not trigger a spellcheck underline). You can find it in Wikipedia, though you may regret, as I did, doing so. For what you get is a headache from a steaming pile of post-modern deconstructionist bullshit. As best I can tell this abomination was coined in the mid-90s by post-colonial “scholars”. Being that I was last in an institution of higher learning less than a decade before that - but in a field not so ripe for abuse - I did not have the misfortune of encountering that brain rot, until now. All this dear reader for only the second word in the title.

If you want to mildly abuse yourself, here is the abstract. If you want just a taste:

This dissertation constructs a new theory of "mobile hybridity" that is framed by hybridity theory, or the evolution of new behaviors and spaces from the contact and fusion of multiple influences. The culturally shifting and blending landscape occupied by users often fractures their intimate relationships with physical distance or cultural differences.

That word salad has no coherent thought - at least that I can find. I had occasion some years ago to coin my own term for this style of speech/writing - reasobabble. They were so convinced that they were reasonable and it was just the failure of the audience to grasp what they were trying to convey. Probably because of our innate wickedness and refusal to admit to that. Sinners can be so stubborn.

Subsequently, I found another link that UW proudly offers, about the PhD alumni of HCDE, and it helpfully includes the dissertations that they all wrote. Most are chock full of post-modern academic jargon - and that is just the titles. I don’t think my poor psyche could handle the abuse of delving into the details under those titles. Then there is the affiliated and sublimely titled Center for an Informed Public (Kate Starbird, Grand Inquisitor, I mean, Director). Which in turn led me to the Information School, or as they abbreviate it iSchool (apparently without befouling Apple trademarks). The iSchool boasts it “is dedicated to preparing a rising generation of information leaders to embrace the challenges associated with the way we create, find, store, manipulate, and share information”. Not at all like that old fashioned Information Science (which was either librarian training, or for developing and managing information systems). The fixation on leaders, and not simply students of an academic discipline that may or may not be their professional future, certainly not if equally contaminated with post-modern nonsense (and of course if you read the page I linked, you know). Yes, you got a degree, and it qualifies you for jack shit. I’m torn between Orwell’s disdain for abuse of the language and the line from Pulp Fiction: “English, motherfucker, do you speak it”. It makes a poor old man’s head swim for this is all under the UW College of Engineering. That airplanes should be falling out of the sky can hardly be a coincidence.

What I can conclude is that in less than 50 years time, a simple writing program has been turned into an entire department dedicated to abstract idiocy. Some might accuse me of mocking this fine institution, which I can’t say I have the talent to do. Juvenal himself would be hard pressed to mock something that is a mockery in its entirety. Swift might offer a modest proposal, but nothing short of Ripley’s “I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.” might really capture the zeitgeist. After all, that was an action to address another failed bit of human colonialism, even if it was terribly othering to the Alien.