BEFRIENDED IN THE AGE OF FACEBOOK

Silicon Valley has changed the English language in so many ways.

Take the word “friend.” Unless you’re still a teenager (and kudos to you for reading the newspaper, kiddo!), a friend was defined differently when you were young. Friends were people you knew. You hung around with your friends. Sometimes you talked to them on the phone when your parents thought you were asleep. Now your friends are everyone: colleagues, former bosses, your brother’s ex-boyfriend, your aunt, brands, celebrities you’ve never met. You may never talk to them on the phone, but you like all their posts. (More on that later.)

Need one more example? Think about how creepy this phrase might’ve sounded a decade ago: “I know about your engagement because I follow your fiancee.”

“Learning” is another word the valley crowd has redefined. When tech folks say learning, it’s not a verb, it’s a noun. A learning is a lesson or takeaway, not the process by which one absorbs a lesson or takeaway. Got it? That’s your learning.

You often hear it used at the end of a conference call when someone invariably asks, “OK, people, what are the learnings?” Well, that depends, but one of the learnings clearly wasn’t proper usage of learning.

“Learning” is one of those words that’s close enough to proper speech that its speaker may not even realize they’re twisting the English language when using it. With its echo of “machine learning,” the process by which dumb machines eventually graduate to enslaving mankind, learning offers some futuristic razzle-dazzle designed to impress. (Another word that does this among the tech crowd is “architected,” which sounds more technical than the pedestrian “designed” or “built.”) Learning makes you sound like you come from the future, a time when our minds (a piece of hardware, after all) will be optimized to synthesize and analyze data.

The redefinition of these words is deliberate. If you’re creating a parallel society — one that transcends the boundaries of nations and cultures while reaching deep into people’s lives and psyches — you need a language that communicates your values. That’s why in the old days, way back 13 years ago before Facebook was founded, if you said you “liked” something you meant you took pleasure in it or had an affinity for it. Today, when you “like” something, that means you acknowledge its existence. By taking a familiar term and giving it a different meaning, Facebook forever put a hyperlink on the word “like” to send us all back to Facebook.

Learning is similar. Even though it’s one of the basic functions of life, the tech crowd wants to make it theirs. Yes, learning is fundamental, like friendship, like liking things, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be co-opted.

Mostly, though, learning also echoes Silicon Valley’s favorite and most essential word: earning. You’ll need to attend a lot of meetings filled with learnings to get your startup off the ground. You’ll also need to impress a lot of gullible investors with your jargon-y future speak to get those earnings. The quicker you get those learnings, the faster you’ll grab those earnings.