Calling by Name

After graduating from college, when I joined the IT sector, it came as a culture shock to find that everyone called everyone else by first name. No Sir’s or M’am’s. Not only that, they disliked it if you didn’t do the same! Contrast that with how school and college life had been. It took me a while to get why that was the practice: can you really disagree with someone or have a no holds barred debate with someone you have to address as Sir or M’am? (Sir, you missed that aspect altogether. M’am, your plan didn’t have any buffers at all.)

Now I notice that the same habit is being inculcated in many kids. Many neighbours ask kids to call them by name, not as Uncle or Aunty. Of course, the reasons there are entirely different: being called Uncle and Aunty makes them feel so old!

When I was telling this to one of my friends at work, he said the problem with kids being that way is that they may get into the habit of calling all elders by name, including the ones who don’t subscribe to this view and worse, consider it disrespectful.

And so we seem to have the usual problem: having to learn/teach when (with whom) to apply which practices. It’s hard enough for adults to walk through such minefields; forget kids learning the rules. Worse, kids will deliberately do more of whatever they perceive is wrong just for kicks or to provoke others!

At least among “knowledge workers”, we know that the hierarchical structure is bad. Let investor Paul Graham explain why. From his 2004 anthology Hackers and Painters (it’s about ideas from the Computer Age):

“Those in authority tend to be annoyed by hackers’ general attitude of disobedience. But that disobedience is a byproduct of the qualities that make them good programmers. They may laugh at the CEO when he talks in generic corporate newspeech, but they also laugh at someone who tells them a certain problem can’t be solved. Suppress one, and you suppress the other.”

As Graham says, knowledge workers are still in the “intellectual wild west”. Forcing the Old World rules on them doesn’t just make sense; it is actually detrimental to the improvements they could bring about.