A soft-spoken authoritarianism prevails, disguised as widespread voluntary compliance to a consensus that has been freely arrived at. Although the Cold War is over, the pretentious Soviet term �informatics� (from the Russian �infomatika�) lingers on--and has even become more popular on campus than it was during the Cold War.
Informatics is pretentious because there's a subject called "mathematics" and informatics, in its various supposed forms, doesn't really draw on mathematics. Why is that so? Years ago, or so I imagine, certain people, who are now mostly gone, informed Comrade Joseph Stalin that there were important things they knew with mathematical certainty. When that turned out not to be the case, as probably often happened, the vendors of "informatics" were likely tossed out on the street--if they were lucky. Many may have gone to a premature grave.
But Russian words have a certain authority. And when translated into English, "informatics" had the same false implication of greater exactitude.
That, speaking roughly, seems to be why the word is still in vogue today.
CONTINUE
