Eugene Eric Kim picks up on an interview with GeorgeLakoff, professor of linguistics and cognitive sciences at U.C. Berkeley: George Lakoff on Shared Language and the Rockridge Institute.

Lakoff's aim for the new Rockridge Institute is to become an influential progressive thinktank in the United States that can "reframe public debate, to create balance from a progressive perspective" in response to what he describes as a concerted effort in the 1970's by conservatives to "frame" the language used to describe issues, citing the widely accepted term "tax relief" (implying that tax is itself an affliction rather than a means of funding shared infrastructure) as an example.

As EEK poin ts out, the way that we create shared language, and the way this language frames our debates and decisions, has a profound effect on the behaviour of online and offline communities:

"Developing SharedLanguage is a fundamental prerequisite for effective collaboration ... One of my aha moments while working with DougEngelbart on BootstrapAlliance was that there were many, many people out there working on essentially the same thing. Most of these folks were blissfully unaware of others, but when they learned of each other's existence, nothing would happen. They couldn't figure out how to work with each other. The problems were that there was no SharedLanguage to begin with, and that there was no motivation to develop that SharedLanguage. Lakoff touches upon the reason for the latter: People simply don't appreciate the importance of SharedLanguage."