[Air-l] A verb for using social networking sites

[Alex Goldman]

Personally, I find the appropriation of corporate/software titles as verbs
to describe certain activities more than a little insidious. It's certainly
a sign of marvelous branding, but also limited public creativity. Perhaps
people find IT so mysterious that they are compelled to defer to this new
generation of engineers turned magicians. However, I also recognize that
there is plenty of precedent for product titles morphing into generic nouns
i.e. kleenex. To help lead a linguistic reconquista (here I'm influenced by
my family that that works for the French govt), I recently formulated a fun
acronyn for use in descriptions of certain social networking products.  JANC
- "just another network connection".  I hope will gain adoption as a a
device aiding a social critique these online products that increaingly shape
our behavior and identity processes.  It helps that I appropriated the
original phonetics from "jank", a piece of african american slang meaning
"unnecessarily redundant, superfluous, or meaningless."  It can serve as
both a noun and adjective, the latter preferably in combination with
colorful expletives such as, 'Dude, that's some janc ass bullshit you've got
on your facebook profile."  So, use it as a way to refer to networking
connections made online that amount bto little more than a device to
heighten the appearance of connectivity and popularity - hopefully helping
to gain access to even more connections - more janc likely.   Anyhow, feel
free to use the term as you see fit, capitalized or not, without crediting
me or street vernacular.  Let's think of it as a people's term - a way to
stimulate interest in wresting back ownership of our language from marketing
experts.  Hey, maybe the kids across the digital divide will feel some
affiliation with it.  P.S.  In the same vein, ever notice how the terms
"twerk" and "tweet" (a form of the new verb "to twitter") share the same
sort of sensibility?  They're both quite new and denote an somewhat
undefined set of activities.  I enjoy these kinds of thoughts regarding Web
2.0 language trends...

-- 
ALEX GOLDMAN
www.alexevasion.com <javascript:void(0)>