Wednesday, October 15, 2014

The Anthropomorphized Company We Keep

We live within the ridiculous notion--now legally certified--that corporations are people. It's easy to assert this notion as nonsense, but there is an unfortunate use of language we employ that works in opposition.

It is common when speaking about corporations, or organizations in general for that matter, to say things like "XYZ company wants such-and-such" or "ABC company decided to do X." This kind of language assigns human qualities to an organizational idea we invented. In short, we have anthropomorphized a concept.

This is not a small thing. How we use language is not something to be dismissed as irrelevant. How we talk and write informs how we think and the decisions we make based on those thoughts. Given the way we now refer to the virtual as being not only real but human, it'll be hard to get out from under the faulty notion that real people are indeed different abstractions we invent.

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