Context is everything

Usually you go through your day thinking that you are living in some sort of objective reality. Things are the way they are because that’s just the way the world is. All perfectly logical.

But every once in a while something happens that causes that comforting curtain to get pulled back just a little, and you realize that your day to day life is a social construct, a consensual illusion.

I recently got a small reminder of this. In my world — computer science — when you see the initials “ACM” you immediately think “Association for Computing Machinery”. It is, after all, the parent organization for nearly all computer science conferences, including the largest of all computer science conferences, the annual conference in computer graphics known as ACM/SIGGRAPH (which stands for Special Interest Group in Graphics, if you must know).

Earlier this week I was at a meeting at NYU that focused on a very different topic indeed — how to stop the roof from leaking in our building. After all, you’re not going to get much computer science done if your fancy computers end up getting rained on.

One of the building people, when discussing our plaster ceiling, kept talking about the ACM, and I was having a difficult time following. What conference was he referring to? Was there some algorithm involved in this roof fixing business that I had overlooked? Other people seemed to understand just fine, nodded their heads knowingly every time he said “ACM”.

I felt a little shy about announcing to everyone that I had no idea what this man was talking about. So I cheated: I opened up my notebook computer and surfed the web for “ACM”. And then, bingo!

It turns out that “ACM” also stands for “Asbestos Contaminated Material”. Supposedly all the asbestos was removed from NYU buildings years ago, but in some of the older floors there are still trace amounts, often under layers of old paint or plaster. Hence the worry about “ACM”s.

And I realized just how much this man, sitting right across the table from me, lived in a completely different world. And I was reminded just how much our reality — social, technological, existential — is a matter of context. And context is everything.