The impact of connotations in tech (an Indian pov)

Be honest.

How many semi-urban millennials like me from India, would be aware of where this line came from, at first glance?

This came from the movie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy .

The movie’s treatment of declining critical thinking is sometimes referenced to comment on the current AI trends nowadays.

Another one, searching for the mythical "Any" key. (from the Simpsons)

It was a running joke to comment on the confusion in early computer days, where people literally thought 'Any' could be the key the program expects!

This is context, that implicitly conveys meaning to those who share it.

When engineers/SMEs try to bring in some common cultural connotations in their conferences/discussions, it is to relate to the audience, to provide an idea where they are coming from on the topic/opinion at hand.

Where am I coming from?

The notion of conferences, tech meet-ups, communities, podcasts, learning in public etc is largely spearheaded by western experts and groups around US/Europe, since they engage proactively in these spaces, right from academia to industry and lead innovation in many domains.

There is an active culture of research, learning and sharing novelty, and they create or mature platforms for it.

Indian spaces are starkly different.

Consider a conference conducted by an Indian technical university. It can rank high in terms of capability & knowledge like any other premier Indian institution.

However there will be referring to seniors as 'Aravind Sir/ Shanti Ma'am', felicitations with shawls or bouquets, and a general teacher student dynamic and likewise decorum, where a cultural emphasis on community recognition/reverence takes centre stage and not the core content or interactions to promote exchange of ideas.

It's rarely a matter of concern how much reach we are able to provide for such content, it's not even broadcasted well enough.
We don't see followups or initiatives to evaluate whether it creates lasting, tangible impact for learners and tinkerers in the long run.

How words drive technicality

The western counterparts create ecosystems with tools/processes on how to engage, learn and collaborate to build and enrich the community. There are SIGs and forums where scientific and innovation driven culture make it easier to formalise/structure one's ideas via collaboration and regular exploration.

A whole gamut of nuances, connotations and such, drive engineering communication (think enshittification, cloud, side effects, client/server). A plethora of common terms used in science are derived from certain nomenclature and terminologies/culture that is commonly aligned to western societies and vocabulary. (think tactile, entanglement, theorize, axioms)

Consider "C-Tactile Afferent", "screening", "public key infrastructure", "distributed consensus", "firewalls", "repository", "kernel" and a zillion other terms commonly used in science/engineering, and think how they relate to Indian context or experiences in general life (if at all).

Now think what they translate to in system definitions or creating mental models.

f.seek(0)

file handler calls a function 'seek' to move pointer to the beginning 0th byte. Seek has a meaning.

Option monad signifies a computation that may return a value or nothing, hence the same in type signature

enum Option<T> {
Some(T),
None,
}

SSL/TLS mutual authentication is connotative of a handshake.

An array of variable length of string items, needs a memory allocator, which allocates memory explicitly.

var list = std.ArrayList([]const u8).init(allocator);

They are fused into the fabric of daily interactions where these terms are defined in a strictly engineering/science specific context and used to relay meaning to components of systems and interactions when they try to model it. And it fits.

Thinking in systems, and using language that augments understanding and relates to the people.

We in India are primarily trying to catch up to the concepts after they have been published, created and shared. And that too in the English language (with scientific formalisations in certain cases) which is an abstraction on top of how we communicate in daily life.

[[ Engineering / Scientific Concept ]]
|
V
[[ further structured enrichment
via collaboration/research ]]
|
V
[[ shared / distilled in
blogs/papers/conferences/communities ]]
|
V
[[ Indian enthusiasts join to absorb knowledge ]]
|
V
[[ Indian enthusiasts contextualize
with their comprehension of fundamentals ]]
|
V
[[ Try to apply in scenarios ]]
|
V
[[ END, rarely branch out to consider an Indian pov/enrichment ]]

Now I am not saying this is always the case.

Sure, IISc,some IITs and other institutes would have indigenous research and capability building on top of some western systems/concepts.
However the way we learn, understand and produce artefacts rarely has an Indian transformation or enrichment. And there are not enough broad ecosystems for the research / learning to seep into communities and affect daily life/experience (which can create common parlance).

If you know software engineers from Poland, Ukraine, Russia, China, Israel, Japan etc, you might get to see that their primary programming communication is built along their languages to a variable degree.

They have their own terms to symbolise engineering concepts, equivalents to the English counterparts.

In Polish, Pamięć is memory, Zmienna is variable.

In Japanese, Hairetsu (配列) is array, Shin-gi-chi (真偽値) is boolean.

In Hebrew, Lula'at "avur" (לולאת "עבור") is for loop, Mimshak (ממשק) is for Interface.

In Chinese, Jǔzhèn(矩阵) is matrix, Suànfǎ (算法) is algorithm, and so on.

You get the point..

(Take them with a pinch of salt [again a English saying], LLM produced translations after all)

In India, we have a Indlish reality. Use English words since we don't have an alternative vocabulary that's precise enough or common enough to reach consensus and relate to people. (Hindi is not the be all, end all of Indian languages). You just don't call database anything other than a 'database', a network/function call is same and so on.

What are our core SOPs, approach to solving problems in general?

Can we articulate for example, sovereign infrastructure in terms that are relatable to Indian general public, heck just even Indian students?

What do scientific/engineering action plans and collaboration look like beyond think tank groups?

Example, this is from Digital India, covering a session at AI Summit

Can anyone tell me what does the implementation, processes exactly look like? (that is if anyone can figure out whatever was being said for majority of the video, since the quality makes it indecipherable)

Can common citizens make sense of what is being talked about here, and how/why it matters? Are they incentivised to? Is there enough shared context?

All this just creates isolated pockets of well meaning SMEs (perhaps) who had the privilege of advanced knowledge/education/discourse.

But we rarely form robust avenues/channels to distill it in a meaningful way to engage and bring on Indian minds/enthusiasts to collaborate and structure far reaching conversations for technological and public good.

This is the crux of technological dependency and dominance. Heavy research, innovation and broadcast/supply from other countries make things part of daily lives all over the world.
While in India we lack basic support and implementation, since we don't have enough impactful communities, or localised understanding (or even intent from most citizens).

I get it, in a country as diverse as India, it's extremely difficult to have common indigenous codification for scientific (or any structured) communication/initiatives. We simply have to adopt concept languages developed in other parts of the world as they already provide foundation for others to build further.

But we can do a much better job of creating local communities that enable science and tech to be more approachable at grassroots levels and make them common aspects (like UPI did at a national level).

If we create enough shared constructive motivations for engagement, perhaps some day our language and experiences may also find a way to embed in the tech fabric, at least for our local contexts.

That itself, will be no small feat.