Goblin Mode McGoblin Modeface

Each year, Oxford Languages, which produces the Oxford English Dictionary among other things, selects a word of the year, "a word or expression reflecting the ethos, mood, or preoccupations of the past twelve months, one that has potential as a term of lasting cultural significance." This year, the choice was opened up to online voting.  Over 300,000 people cast their votes over the course of two weeks and the winner was goblin mode

a slang term, often used in the expressions ‘in goblin mode’ or ‘to go goblin mode’ – is ‘a type of behaviour which is unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly, or greedy, typically in a way that rejects social norms or expectations.’

The runners up were metaverse and #IStandWith.

The press I've seen about this tends to emphasize the online voting aspect of the selection, with the suggestion that those rowdy internet folks got one over on the stodgy old OED, but I think that misses a couple of important points.

First, the OED as an institution isn't particularly stodgy. While Oxford might suggest the British power structure or Tom Lehrer's indelible image of "ivy-covered professors in ivy-covered halls" (leaving aside that that's more a US reference), the dictionary itself has historically been concerned with documenting how people actually use the English language, rather than trying to dictate what "proper English usage" might be. It is descriptive rather than prescriptive.

The dictionary styles itself "the definitive record of the English language". This is meant to include everything, including dialects from all over the world, terms of art for all kinds of trades and professions, archaic words from a thousand years ago and all manner of other English usage, including today's internet slang.

From the OED's point of view, goblin mode is a perfectly good term to research and define, as is anything else that people actually use. If a bunch of internet trolls had decided to vote for glurglebyte or some other made-up word, and the OED actually went with it, that would have been a different matter, but there are plenty of examples of people using goblin mode prior to the online vote. The word of the year page even gives a couple of examples from The Grauniad and The Times.

One might argue that people weren't using goblin mode all that much, and some other term, whether metaverse, #IStandWith or something else, might have made a better word of the year, but the fact that hundreds of thousands of people voted for it suggests that, even if the votes were meant ironically, there's something there that led people to coalesce around that particular word. You could even argue that the online vote gives an otherwise ordinary bit of internet slang a much better chance of becoming "a term of lasting cultural significance".

The word of the year page goes further and argues that goblin mode is indeed a good word for a year in which people are finding their way out of a world of lockdowns and overflowing hospitals and questioning just which pre-pandemic norms are really worth keeping. Sure, the Oxford folks may just be trying to put a brave face on being pwned, but to me it seems more like they saw the results and weren't particularly bothered.

I think there's another important point to note here. While there have been plenty examples of internet-driven crowds doing bad things, or even horrible things, it's worth remembering that this particular crowd of net.denizens was operating from a completely different mindset: As with Boaty McBoatface, they did it because it was fun, for sheer hack value.

While it would be a mistake to ignore bad behavior, it would also be a mistake to over-focus on it. Like anywhere else, bad things can happen on the web without making the whole place a cesspit. There's lots of questionable content out there and a certain amount of outright lies and hate, but there's also a lot of good information and not a little outright goofiness. However much there are people out there trying to steer us toward conflict and anger, we still have choices about what we browse and what we post.

A few hundred thousand people upvoting a random bit of slang may be a drop in the bucket, but there are a lot more drops like it. That says something about who's out there and what they want, just as surely as the nastiness elsewhere does.

The Great American Eclipse (and a bit about the web).

Most of this post is probably better suited to the other blog, but Field Notes has been a bit quiet for the past, um, years, so why not?

You may be aware that there was recently a total eclipse of the sun in the United states.   If you've never seen a total eclipse, I highly recommend it.   If you happen to be near the path of totality when one occurs in your area, don't be lulled into thinking that seeing a 95% eclipse or whatever is 95% as good as seeing a total eclipse.  The difference is, literally, night and day.  During totality, the sun is not so much covered as replaced by a black hole surrounded by the corona, about as bright as the full moon.  And then, before you know it, there's an impossibly bright spot at the very edge and you have to look away.  Seconds later the light is already a thousand times brighter and it feels like day again -- a weirdly dim, clearly-lit day, to be sure, but definitely day.  Miss totality and that last part, the strange light, is about all you get.  So if you get the chance ...

There are two main concerns in getting a good view of an eclipse: traffic and weather.  Some people are able to bypass traffic by booking a train, or flying into the zone, or even being in the air during totality, but most of us will end up taking to the road.  If enough people decide to do this, things can get hairy.  A rule of thumb in traffic engineering is that one lane of highway can handle about 2000 cars an hour.  If your main route into the zone is a four-lane highway, that is, two lanes each way, that's about 4000 cars an hour.  If it's an hour before totality and you have 5000 cars between you and the zone, your chances are not looking good.

It would be nice to have some idea of what to expect, something like "If you live here, you should try to go here (assuming good weather).  Leave at this time and expect the trip to take this long."  But the problem is, nobody really had a good idea how many people would be trying to go where, when.  I'm not a total umbraphile, but I'm sure I paid a lot more attention to this eclipse than most of the population.  My personal attitude of "Yeah, gotta try to see that" was probably not typical.  Typical attitudes were probably more like  "Sounds kinda cool ... but I've got work on Monday.  Maybe I should take a look on my lunch break."  So not everyone is going to hop on the freeway or book a hotel months in advance.

Furthermore, a certain number of people who were thinking about it will hear reports of possible gridlock and think the better of it, or try to find an alternate route, or whatever.  In this internet-connected age people will be telling each other where they are and how conditions are, and watching real-time traffic, or at least trying to.

This sort of uncertainty makes projections a bit difficult, and there's not really any relevant historical data.  The last time an eclipse went all the way across the continental US, in 1918, there was no interstate system, much less an internet (though telegraphs were very much in use).  Even in 1979, the last time a total eclipse was visible in the contiguous US, the picture was still considerably different from today, if only because there were only 70% as many people in the country.

None of this stopped people from trying to project.  One such effort calculated the "drivesheds", analogous to watersheds, to show which locations on the centerline of the eclipse were closest, by road, to the highest number of people.  The top three were Santee, SC, where I-95 meets the centerline,  Idaho Falls, ID, where I-15 meets the centerline, and Sabetha, KS, where US 75 meets the centerline.

The first sounds pretty likely.  I-95 gets a lot of traffic to begin with, and it runs from the Canadian border in Maine through Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Washington,  DC on its way to Jacksonville and Miami.  The second seems plausible.  It's the closest point for Phoenix, Salt Lake City and, perhaps surprisingly, San Diego and from the looks of it most of LA.

The third ... well, it seems to assume that anyone in Texas wanting to see the eclipse is going to head up I-35 toward the Kansas City metro, a chunk of which is directly in the path, then veer off onto two-lane local highways to get to the (technically) closest point on the centerline.

I don't think traffic works that way.


In the event, traffic was bad in a few places in the days leading up to the eclipse, but not too bad.  It looks like people trickled in from here and there over a period of days, and relatively few people headed into the zone of totality on the day, or even at all.  There are 25 million people in the driveshed for Salem, Oregon.  Officials in Oregon planned on one million.  It's not clear that there were even that many.

Coming home, on the other hand, was a different matter.  There was no particular schedule for getting to the zone of totality, but the show ended at a very precise time, and suddenly there was no reason to stick around.  Hours-long delays were common across the country.  This seems obvious in hindsight, but in the run-up to the event the main concern was "will I be able to make it in time?" Most people were probably not really concerned about getting home at any particular time.

As far as I can tell, Sabetha, Kansas saw the same thing in miniature [Toward the bottom of the page it mentions that Sabetha's Sixth Street Park had a crowd of ... about 200 people --D.H.].

So much for traffic.  The eternal concern for eclipse chasers everywhere, whether on the I-95 corridor or Mongolia, is the weather.  Personally, I've seen two total eclipses (this one and the Great European Eclipse of 1999), and in both cases sheer dumb luck brought a break in the clouds in time to see the corona and the diamond ring.

I followed weather forecasts closely in the days leading up to the eclipse.  Unlike 18 years ago, there were a number easily available online.  Weather forecasting has advanced significantly.  Live radar is available on any number of sites, as are recent satellite images.  If there's a hole in the cloud cover, it doesn't seem like it should be too hard to find.

If you've got an internet connection.

I gave up trying to get online and our party ended up just picking a spot.  My guess is that if we'd had to make an emergency call it would have had priority and it would have been connected.  Data, not so much.  It's almost as though there were more people in town than usual and they were all trying to get on the web at the same time.

We thought about trying to move toward what looked like a clearer spot, but in the time it took to try to figure it out the clouds shifted and a beautiful blue gap opened up with about 30 minutes to go.  Then closed again as the encroaching moon shut the light down by bit.  Then the sky abruptly darkened more.  The eclipsed sun was up there somewhere.  The clouds above were dark, but the horizon was dusk (or dawn, if you prefer) in all directions.  It looked like some of the low clouds were moving away from where the sun must have been, but it was hard to tell.

And then the clouds shifted and there was the silvery ring of the corona a minute or more into totality.  A little washed out, like the full moon through high clouds, but there.  Then, after what seemed like no time at all, an incredibly bright pinpoint of light widening into a slim maybe-crescent.  Time to look away.

A mile down the road, people saw nothing but clouds.  On the way back, through what had been overcast and rain, the sun was out.  Would live radar really have helped?  Who knows.

The two eclipses I've seen happened to be part of the same Saros series, a set of eclipses at 18-year intervals with nearly identical geometry.  The latitude was similar.  The duration was similar.  As it happens, the weather was similar.  In theory, technology would have played a much larger role in this one than the last one, but in practice, not really.

How many is a crowd?

According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, it's hard to tell how many centenarians there are. There are several reasons for this, but paradoxically, one reason is that there aren't that many of them. As a result, it's difficult to make a generic statement like "There are N people in this county over 100 on Social Security," because N is liable to be 1 or 2, in which case you've just told the world that those particular people are on social security. One comes to value one's privacy as one grows older.

The same situation arises in tabulating election results in sparsely-populated areas. Announcing that six people in the county voted for candidate A and two voted for candidate B is somehow different from announcing six thousand and two thousand. Granted, in a county with eight voters, lack of anonymity kind of goes with the territory.

So at what point do we start to feel that aggregate results are comfortably anonymous? There's almost certainly no single point, and I'm being deliberately vague with "comfortably anonymous", but it's an interesting question. Discussion of web communities often revolves around social networks, in which anonymity is specifically not such a concern, or "megacommunities", which are big enough that aggregates are almost certainly comfortably anonymous.

But even on the web, if you slice out a small enough niche, the question can come up. If I hear that forty anonymous members of the left-handed Dutch-speaking pigeon fancier's society are in favor of some proposition, I may not have too much trouble figuring out who that is.

Take me out with the crowd

Previously I described the currently popular setup of crowd, performer and large display and said there must be some basic human reasons why the experience remains popular despite the obvious inconvenience. Here are some guesses. I suspect the real answer is a combination of them and other obvious stuff I've missed:

• Not all senses virtualize well or easily. If you're at the venue, you don't just hear and see the show. You jostle with people. You smell all manner of interesting (and not-so-interesting) aromas. You feel sound in your entire body, not just your ears, even without a high-powered sound system.
  
• Meeting people in person. People still like to meet face-to-face, for a number of reasons, including the previous point, even if it's only in small groups. Sure you can invite your friends over to watch the game on TV, but you can't invite the vendors or the random people you'll be seated around or run into in the parking lot.
• Ambient noise. To my knowledge, there aren't a lot of (or any?) virtual experiences that provide the murmur of 50,000 people chatting before the house lights go down, or the roar when the stage lights go up, or the sudden hush when something dramatic happens.
• Spontaneous mass expressions. There's probably a better name for this, but I mean things like chants, songs, the wave, synchronized clapping and so forth. Ambient noise could be simulated, but that would break the feedback loop behind these.
  
• Sense of community. When thousands brave winter weather to watch a crucial away game on the big screen in their home stadium, it's clear that they're there (and not at home watching TV) largely because they want to show that they care and be with people who care the same way. This has a lot in common with a mass political demonstration.

There is definitely overlap among these, but each has its own effect. Some of the items have analogs in the virtual world. Current home theater systems can bring the noise reasonably well. The slashdot effect is not unlike a mass reaction to something on the screen and there are word-of-mouth phenomena similar to a chant or wave getting started. Not all reactions in real crowds are spontaneous -- think applause signs or the organist/PA at a sports event -- and neither are they on the web -- think viral marketing.

Nonetheless, the combined effect (together with whatever else I missed) remains unique, which is why the virtual element of the big screen is more an adjunct than the main show. As far as that goes, the big screen is just an extension of the amplified sound of the PA, which has been around considerably longer than the net. Neither is necessary for a large crowd experience. Those have been around forever.