Stuff that Matters

For an information worker, physical objects become superfluous. Some of them are tools with which we manipulate the concepts & ideas that form the bulk of our work - playing with information - but whether it’s a computer or pen & paper, these tools are not the work itself. Interestingly, though, we have good words to describe the tools, but English is falling behind in trying to describe the things that information workers actually do.

Let me give you a few examples. This thing that I am writing (you are reading) is a blog, which comes from “web log”, which means that it’s a chronoLOGical record of thoughts & events left on the WEB. We have no problem with “log”, because sailing ships had them, armies had them, etc. What’s the web? Well, you know, it’s the internet, where all the information is, how we connect, all the computers & networks & stuff …
Now try telling that to a five-year-old. Is it too big a concept for the five-year-old to handle? Maybe; but we happily try to instill in five-year-olds some faith in a God that is a far more complex concept. I’m not suggesting we do a very good job of that, either, but we do try.

Teach a five-year-old about water, or radio, or happiness, & everyone gets it very quickly. But what is the internet? What is information? Do we lack the language to better describe these things, or the personal inability to relate these concepts with other terms? Can you describe a platypus without showing a picture (& without people thinking it’s a big joke)?

I’ve gone off on a tangent (which may surprise the regular reader), when I’d actually wanted to discuss the unwieldiness of these big concepts in our language, or, if you like, the immaturity of the language constructs to handle the words that are becoming increasingly central to our conversations. This does not just apply to information workers.

I originally got stuck when I was trying to come up with a simple term for all of the things that you might be interested in when you’re on the web - all of the blog feeds you get delivered, your microblogs, emails, instant messages, favourite news sites, etc. It’s your stuff. It’s what interests you. It’s stuff that matters. Surely there’s a better term for it - a way to group these things together & say “this is my collection of stuff I access online because I care about the content - because it matters to me”.

You can then add to that things that you find & are interesting - search results, new things that happen or that other people are the source of, even things that you create yourself. I don’t even want to organise it all, I just want to call it something. I want a word or term that can succinctly say “all of the little bits of information that matter to me”.

The English language throws its hands up in surrender at this point. We’ve already discussed how the French would approach it. They won’t approve a word until someone tries to use one they don’t like (thus the demise of “jog”). The world had to turn to mock-German to achieve “infobahn” to shorten “the information superhighway” - although what that is exactly, I’m no longer sure.

But I had to turn to Esperanto - mostly because it has a way of constructing words that allow for subtleties & manipulation easily. However, the best I could come up with was “scieteroj” - little pieces of knowledge. The chief problem with this is the pronunciation, as many readers would not get this at first: the “c” is like the English “ts”, which makes for “sts” at the beginning of the word, which is unwieldy. The vowels are all pronounced, & the ending rhymes with the English “joy”. The end result, sounding it out, is like “st-see-et-air-oi” - but with only four syllables.

Esperanto also has the advantage of being a very modern language, so its adaptability is in-built. I’m not suggesting that the Esperanto-speaking community is going to adopt this word immediately & force it down the throats of others, because there’s barely enough of them to blow out the candles on Zamenhof’s birthday cake, but it’s a thought.

The more we become an information-based economy, & more of us become information workers, the more problems we will have in defining new terms that mean new things that don’t relate to what we already have in the language, & the harder it will be to come up with metaphors (like email) or new concepts (like whuffie) that meaningfully encapsulate what we intend. It’s hard because the things that we’re referring to don’t exist, have no defined shape, & don’t even mean the same thing to any two people reading this - if you allow me to potentially double my expected audience.

Therefore, rather than scieteroj, I propose a new metric unit (which of course will have to be approved by the French) to encompass “a single unit of information, data or knowledge that matters to someone”. I humbly put forward my own moniker in naming this entity, & hope that this particular blog matters to someone (aside from myself) & becomes the very first instance of a Gibb-worth of stuff.