What is in a name? A domain by any other name would sell as cheap

by Hugh M. Lewis

A key characteristic of human-like intelligence and symbolic human-like language is the capacity for prevarication--for deception and the presentation of alternative, fictitious realities in lieu of the actual, concrete world. Like the Internet itself, this has been a great boon and a great bane for humankind. The boundary between fact and fiction has become so blurred on the Internet that it is virtually indistinguishable, and even otherwise completely legitimate and honorable companies regularly employ promotional and advertising tactics that purposefully deceive or misrepresent the reality. As one disillusioned Japanese woman wrote, any dog can have a website on the Internet, and one would never know it was a dog. I will call this the widening gap of the parallax of credibility on the Internet, and it reflects to me a fundamental evolutionary transformation that has taken place (is taking place) on the human knowledge landscape.

These issues really seem to come to a focus in reference to domain names, and in relation to the great scramble competition that is out there in regard to the registration, possession and transfer of domain names. The right domain name is prototypically short, to the point, embodying the spirit or essence of what one's domain is supposed to be all about, at least, and well recognized by anyone who hears it. When one in the US at least, and probably most of the rest of the world these days, mentions "Amazon" one thinks first of the successful Internet company that sells almost anything, rather than the Great River that goes by the same name. Amazon.com obviously borrowed some of the symbolic mass that was carried conventionally by the River's name, and in a sense usurped the position of the River on the human knowledge landscape of the collective human imagination, if not in real geographic terms. And there is momentum, force, in this usurpation realized through the mobilization of human resources.

Of course, what is prototypical in the ideal world is not necessarily what is typical in the real world and if one wants a good domain name these days, one is liable to come up disappointed with second best leftovers, hyphenated wanabe's, multi-syllabic monstrosities, or bastardized "clones" of already successful names.

There seems to be a lot riding on a domain name these days, but there also seems to be a lot ado about a little bit. Usually, I suspect, the first thing anyone does in setting up a home-based e-commerce business is to register a domain name that would be representative of the interests/lines as well as the identity of the owner, etc., and perhaps, most importantly, to be attractive to potential customers and occasional surfers.

Undoubtedly, a plethora of new names have been introduced within the last decade upon the global human knowledge landscape, and there has occurred as a consequence both a stratification of this epigenetic landscape on new levels, and a reconfiguration of this landscape in new convolutions and stratigraphy. It has been surging exponentially with each passing year, and many forms of old knowledge have suddenly turned anachronistic, old-fashioned, obsolete, buried beneath the surface like old artifacts, or dusty, unused books in library basements, something like old vinyl records compared to current CD's/DVD's. 

What is "reification?" It is a term technically applied in the theory of the construction of reality that refers primarily to the informal or practical fallacy in logic known also as "the fallacy of misplaced concreteness" or the "fallacy of misplaced concretization."(i.e., making seem real, solid, and substantial in form what is really just a fiction, a fabrication, a construction) It is also related the fallacy of naturalization, making seem natural and therefore more solidly real, what is in fact artificial and arbitrary. In a sense, the entire virtual knowledge landscape can be thought of as a reification of the knowledge that exists in hardcopy or some other concretized form, because virtual knowledge exists only virtually, and only really points somewhat symbolically to real forms in the real world. The distinction between "virtual" and "real" suddenly becomes more palpable and relevant in relation to an information economy versus the pre-digital age of conventional literacy--then reification took more the form of paper worlds and paper words than now, and fiction took longer to formulate, publish and propagate than nowadays. Newspapers, not news portals, carried the persuasive, cutting edge of quasi-fictional landscapes in the heyday of the popular world of conventional literacy. They held sway over the imaginations and motivations of the voting populations of the nation-state economies, and could rally entire nations to war or peace.

But more to the point in this short digression, domain names represent special little reifications of a new form of knowledge, new kinds of symbolic representations of reality, that in turn define little marker flags on a new kind of virtual knowledge scape. Those that are connected to e-commerce are especially relevant in this regard, as they sometimes test our notions of credibility/legitimacy where it counts the most--in our pocket-books. To put it another, non-Japanese way, the right domain name can make any pig look good, and no one on the other end of the client-server chain would be able to tell the difference between a real pig and a real person, or between a real business entity and a fictitious business front.

Scam artists abound who want to exploit and take full advantage of this fact, and it has given e-commerce a bad name from the start, making otherwise faithful customers unwilling to openly deal with even trustworthy and established Internet names. And the game goes one. A common prejudice has surfaced that all Internet business is bad business and cannot be trusted in a fundamental sense, and that all e-commerce is not real commerce. As an example a recent scam tried to steal a little bit of Pay-Pal's thunder to trick people into spending money unwisely. Even digital seals and certificates, expensive and sometimes questionable in their own right, become part of the larger game as it goes on the Internet.

We can call the entire process one of digital "euphemization" that continually tries to chase bad meaning out by good meaning. Thus, .com, to avoid being identified as .bomb, must continuously reinvent itself anew. New names and new associations to old names must be invented almost on a daily basis to drive out a history of bad relations and misplaced connotations.

The web world becomes therefore a very dynamic landscape, one that never remains the same for very long for fear of quickly becoming obsolete and boring. It is also a hall, a maze, of mirrors, in which it is difficult to always keep track of one's true image upon it. One can expect only that little that is of lasting or true value will remain the same for very long on the world wide web, and this becomes its own contradiction, somewhat like the Liar's Dilemma (The man from Crete said all Cretan's are liars), in which one lie must then be chased by another lie to maintain a sense of legitimacy and credibility.

Where then do we draw our bottom-line? Where do we stop the never ending virtual buck? How do we go about restoring virtual credibility once it has been destroyed in the mind's eye of a trusting consumer in a virtual landscape that seems fundamentally groundless anyway?

General Systems Essays, Vol. I