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Last Thursday, as I went about my normal reading of things on the internet, I was stopped by the phrase “quantitative social scientists” in a post on boingboing.net. It stopped me because just the day before, Cat and I had been talking about how sociology is portrayed by the media. (She and Kate are engaged in an informal research project about how sociology is represented specifically by the AP. Their results so far show that when the AP quotes a sociologist, that sociologist is more often than not foreign, and when not foreign, from an east coast, Ivy League school) Boingboing.net does produce some of its own content, but is mostly just a funnel/filter of the internet as a whole, and provides links (connections) to other things. So I followed the link provided by the good folks at boingboing to the original story, and was lead to a blog by Danah Boyd called “apophenia.”

Next to the title of the blog was a definition: apophenia: making connections where none previously existed

Those of you who know me know that the above definition has more or less been my working definition for the word paranoia since 1995, and is mostly based on the following quotation from Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (I first read the quotation as a epigraph to “Rivkala’s Ring” by Spalding Gray, a monologue I performed my junior year of college):

If there is something comforting—religious, if you want—about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.

This “new” word, apophenia, which is better defined as “the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness of unrelated phenomena” (K. Conrad, 1958), might appear to pose a serious problem to both my long-held definition of paranoia and my mostly tongue-in-cheek theory about the place of paranoia in liberal arts education, however, some further reading over at languagehat.com mitigates that threat.

The main argument at languagehat (or at least the one that appealed to me and my interests most directly) is paraphrased thusly:

-If the base definition of paranoia is the finding of connections where none necessarily exist, why do we need this word?
-Well, since most people hear the word paranoia and automatically think “a psychosis characterized by systematized delusions of persecution or grandeur,” then we need this word to differentiate between paranoia as defined by most people, and paranoia as defined by people who think they understand the inner- or under-machinations of a mental disorder better than most people.
-Okay, cool.

So, let me please herewith say that I am retaining the definition, but changing the word. My mostly tongue-in-cheek theory becomes one about the place of apophenia in liberal arts education. Our lives continue unabated as though absolutely nothing of any consequence has happened.

I end with a bit of apophenia for you to chew:

A little over three years ago, I wrote a series of memos (nos. 180-184) (within the larger series of memos) about Spalding Gray, paranoia, and quitting smoking. That memos 180, 181, 182, 183, and 184 should also deal with the cessation of smoking is interesting in today’s case because Cat has spent the last five years studying that very thing and how it is portrayed in the media.

the following are all from a website I love, Post Secret:

—–Email Message—–
Sent: Sunday, June 17, 2007 5:12 AM

My dad used to say that inside of the car’s air-bags was uncooked popcorn. When you wrecked the popcorn would pop and you would have a snack until help came.

—–Email Message—–
Sent: Sunday, June 17, 2007 6:13 AM

When I was little, my dad told me ATMs worked by having little monkeys inside them. I believed that for years. Now I work in a bank, and wish it were true!

—–Email Message—–
Sent: Sunday, June 17, 2007 6:55 AM

My dad told me the worst swear word you could possibly say was “Bostonian”. It meant “someone who has no private parts.” My brother and I used the word until we were teenagers and my father giggled every time we said it, right before he sent us to our rooms.

—–Email Message—–
Sent: Sunday, June 17, 2007 8:29 PM

when i was little my dad told me that polyester was a small animal in australia & they would kill it to make clothes. that night i sat in my room reading the labels on my clothes for hours & threw all of the polyester ones away.

—–Email Message—–
Sent: Sunday, June 17, 2007 10:06 PM

When I was little my Dad told me that the tune played by the ice-cream van was the ice-cream man letting everyone know that he’d run out of ice-cream.

—–Email Message—–
Sent: Sunday, June 17, 2007 9:56 AM

When we’d approach exits or toll booths, my father told me the sound the car made when it went over the rumble strips was the car getting angry because I had been bad. I still sit up a little straighter when I hit a rumble strip.

I’m sure my father told me some creative and wonderful lies when I was growing up. Thankfully, “I love you” was not one of them.

Thanks Dad.

Nazi-released raccoons continued to wreak havoc from the Baltic Sea to the Alps. . . . “We like the United States of America,” said retired German orthodontist Dieter Hoffmann, “but we do not like your Waschbaeren!”

(more here)

(thanks to Ryan W.!)