Clinamen

This is a term I learned recently: Pajamahadeen. Wikipedia gives a cursory explanation, and they have some good links. Apparently the American Dialect Society voted it the most creative word of 2004 - I am way behind on this.

This word is going to play into a chapter I'm beginning to write on how Wikipedia (or, maybe, any electronic text) deals with agency and responsibility. Terms like pajamahadeen attempt to provide an image of the blogger/Wikipedian/internet troll under one neat umbrella. As former CBS News executive vice president put it:

"You couldn't have a starker contrast between the multiple layers of check and balances (at CBS), and a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing."

Bloggers (mockingly, of course) took this and ran with it, creating the term pajamahadeen. Still, it is this circulating image of "a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing" that I'm most interested in. Wal-Mart employees have edited the Wal-Mart Wikipedia article, and their not the only ones. Wikiscanner - a tool that traces IP addresses on Wikipedia edits - has shown us that it's not just the pajamahadeen editing Wikipedia (or blogging). This should be evidence enough that the blogosphere and Wikipedia are not controlled by the pajamahadeen.

But the image of "pajama guy/girl" continues to circulate, and its a way of bringing the complex process of digital composition under control. And it's not just Wal-Mart whitewashing that makes the pajama image a myth. Even the guy/girl in his/her pajamas is part of a complex Web of texts. S/he pulls together links, images, audio, and video in a messy process of composition. So, tracing the origins of a blog post are extremely difficult. In the face of complexity, we have created a scapegoat - the pajamahadeen.