There are certain bits of technical information I need to know to do my job. Things that aren’t common knowlege. There are other bits of technical information I know because I’ve done that job in the past, or because it’s interestign to me.

And every once in a while, I see someone say something online that kind of drives me bonkers because they’ve used incorrect terminology. But I hold my tongue because in the grand scheme of things it doesn’t really hurt things. Too much.

I mean, it doesn’t matter if you call it hacking when it’s actually that you clicked a link and triggered a worm or virus. It doesn’t matter if the software has always worked that way and most people didn’t notice how incovenient it was until recently. It doesn’t really impact the grand scope of life.

But instead of ranting about this, I’m going to muse on it instead.

They say the victors write history. What if that wasn’t the case? What if perception wrote, and re-wrote history? In a way it kind of does. For instance, most people are taught that the US Civil war was a war fought because of slavery. But that doesn’t change history, just our perception of it.

Say, for instance, that once upon a time, robbery meant the stealing of property from a person by using or threatening to use force .

And over time, people the definition started to change. Instead, robbery started to mean someone tricked you into giving them something you didn’t really want anyway, and then used that event to convince all your friends it was a good idea and to do the same thing.

As in “Mary gave me this old shoe that doesn’t have mate. Everyone is tipping in. Got any socks you’d like to add to the collection?”

But, even though the definition changed, the perception of the word didn’t. People still thought any robbery, even one fitting the new definition, was a horrible thing that required extreme jail time.

Or, I’ll take an example from the movie IDIOCRACY. Say someone convinced almost everyone in the world to water their crops with sports drink, because ‘they have the electolights plants crave’. Once everyone starts watering their plants with the movie equivelent of Gatorade, all the plants die. But no one knows why because they were just doing what they were supposed to.

Then again, over time we’ve realized the practicality in things like cleanliness, how we treat disease and illnesss…we’ve learned that things once declared evil and magic are just technology, and frequently very useful.

How much have our lives changed because we’ve allowed public opinion to shape what we believe to be truth and fact? Does it actually hurt us, or is it the nature of social evolution and sometimes we’ll learn and grow from it and sometimes we’ll suffer?