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.
31 December 2012
The Hedonist Revealed
I practice linguistic hedonism - I talk for my own benefit. I have
discovered this through years of saying clever things & then having
to explain myself. I never learn from my experience that people are
nowhere near as clever as I give them credit - perish the thought that I
am too obtuse for them to receive benefit from my innate wisdom.
Sometimes, I take joy from the confused look on someone’s face in my personal & secret game of one-up-manship. Each quizzical stare lowers their status in my perception & raises mine in ways they can never understand. Of course, I’m really trying to prove myself worthy of their respect, but I have a strange way of achieving it. The game has been going on for so long that the rules have changed over time & I can no longer remember what the point of playing actually is, or if there is a winner or loser, or how either is determined.
When I’m feeling really superior, I use even more complicated terms to explain what wasn’t understood the first time around, just to show that there’s no way to dumb down the concepts essential to the conversation. On rare occasions, I invent words or acronyms or slang just to add some spice to what is already unpalatable communication.
At some point, I will push my boundaries so far that I will undoubtedly explode in a cloud of incomprehensible guff, leaving a complete lack of substance from behind a spectacular effusion of colourfully flowering verbiage …
Sometimes, I take joy from the confused look on someone’s face in my personal & secret game of one-up-manship. Each quizzical stare lowers their status in my perception & raises mine in ways they can never understand. Of course, I’m really trying to prove myself worthy of their respect, but I have a strange way of achieving it. The game has been going on for so long that the rules have changed over time & I can no longer remember what the point of playing actually is, or if there is a winner or loser, or how either is determined.
When I’m feeling really superior, I use even more complicated terms to explain what wasn’t understood the first time around, just to show that there’s no way to dumb down the concepts essential to the conversation. On rare occasions, I invent words or acronyms or slang just to add some spice to what is already unpalatable communication.
At some point, I will push my boundaries so far that I will undoubtedly explode in a cloud of incomprehensible guff, leaving a complete lack of substance from behind a spectacular effusion of colourfully flowering verbiage …
The Fridge is Moving
When I was making my coffee in the office kitchenette, I was told
that the fridge is moving. I tried valiantly to hold back a smart
comment, but it came out anyway. The fridge itself has no say in the
matter, & although it is truthful to say that there will be a fridge
in motion, the statement does not accurately express the scenario where
the poor thing is being tied down on a trolley & whisked away
against its will. Fridges, it should be mentioned, must be sentient,
because they always know when to turn the light on for you.
As dramatic as that may sound, it shows one of those imprecisions of the English language that Bourland & Korzybski tried to iron out. Generally, the problem is stated that the Shakespearean “to be” should be frowned upon, but due to the quirks of English, this extends to “am”, “is”, “are”, & various other little words that most people don’t see as being related. Essentially, to say that something “is” something else shows a definition, & should never be used otherwise.
“The fridge is white” is wrong - white is a colour, the fridge is a large appliance; the two are not the same. “The fridge is white in colour (or coloured white)” is much better. This is not nitpicking. This is one of those things where a double meaning for “white” could be clarified. In some places (heaven forbid) “white” means civilised or cultured. The fridge is not these things (& ironically, neither is anyone using the term thus).
The fridge is not moving. The fridge is being moved. The fridge is in a state of motion brought on by outside forces (such as heavy lifting & pushing). The fridge is an inanimate object … & that shows just how hard it is to keep on track. Is that last sentence even true? It certainly seems to be inanimate by the general definition, but there are lots of things “in” it which are quite animate, but let’s not dwell on what grows inside your fridge.
About now, you’re saying “but everyone knows what you mean”, to which I can respond smugly “mostly”. It’s the kind of smugness you might want to plant your fist into, but I stand by it.
People you grew up with or have known for a long time will know what you mean. People who you’ve never met (or never will), or who come from a different culture (English speaking or not) can get very confused when you use the kind of short-hand that has a fridge growing legs & wandering along the corridor in search of a spare power point with a better view. My apologies to Terry Pratchett’s excellent description of luggage with this capability.
Thus we reach a nice segue-way into how comedians thrive on just this kind of linguistic trickery to make you believe you know exactly what they mean, & then shoot off in an entirely different direction with a context switch that leaves your brain feeling like a five-year-old left behind at the ice cream factory on a school excursion, with the sudden realisation that there is definitely a funny side to the situation (thus you laugh).
I do not want to put comedians out of work, so I’ll magnanimously allow the language to stand with its imprecisions. There are many comedians I don’t like to encourage, but in a way they are all doing exactly what I do - pointing out the limitations of our everyday way of thinking, through the use of satire & verbal prestidigitation, to give us moments of clarity & self-awareness that shock the brain into seeing the world in a different way. The world is not necessarily better after this transformation, but it makes us look at things again in case we missed something the first few hundred times.
Personally, I have to go looking for the milk, because apparently the fridge is moving.
As dramatic as that may sound, it shows one of those imprecisions of the English language that Bourland & Korzybski tried to iron out. Generally, the problem is stated that the Shakespearean “to be” should be frowned upon, but due to the quirks of English, this extends to “am”, “is”, “are”, & various other little words that most people don’t see as being related. Essentially, to say that something “is” something else shows a definition, & should never be used otherwise.
“The fridge is white” is wrong - white is a colour, the fridge is a large appliance; the two are not the same. “The fridge is white in colour (or coloured white)” is much better. This is not nitpicking. This is one of those things where a double meaning for “white” could be clarified. In some places (heaven forbid) “white” means civilised or cultured. The fridge is not these things (& ironically, neither is anyone using the term thus).
The fridge is not moving. The fridge is being moved. The fridge is in a state of motion brought on by outside forces (such as heavy lifting & pushing). The fridge is an inanimate object … & that shows just how hard it is to keep on track. Is that last sentence even true? It certainly seems to be inanimate by the general definition, but there are lots of things “in” it which are quite animate, but let’s not dwell on what grows inside your fridge.
About now, you’re saying “but everyone knows what you mean”, to which I can respond smugly “mostly”. It’s the kind of smugness you might want to plant your fist into, but I stand by it.
People you grew up with or have known for a long time will know what you mean. People who you’ve never met (or never will), or who come from a different culture (English speaking or not) can get very confused when you use the kind of short-hand that has a fridge growing legs & wandering along the corridor in search of a spare power point with a better view. My apologies to Terry Pratchett’s excellent description of luggage with this capability.
Thus we reach a nice segue-way into how comedians thrive on just this kind of linguistic trickery to make you believe you know exactly what they mean, & then shoot off in an entirely different direction with a context switch that leaves your brain feeling like a five-year-old left behind at the ice cream factory on a school excursion, with the sudden realisation that there is definitely a funny side to the situation (thus you laugh).
I do not want to put comedians out of work, so I’ll magnanimously allow the language to stand with its imprecisions. There are many comedians I don’t like to encourage, but in a way they are all doing exactly what I do - pointing out the limitations of our everyday way of thinking, through the use of satire & verbal prestidigitation, to give us moments of clarity & self-awareness that shock the brain into seeing the world in a different way. The world is not necessarily better after this transformation, but it makes us look at things again in case we missed something the first few hundred times.
Personally, I have to go looking for the milk, because apparently the fridge is moving.
Who Cares?
With the rise of reputation as online concurrency, & becoming
more than cach’e, the question is asked how exactly the exchange rate
works, & whether futures trading has any relevance for the Whuffie.
If you are now lost, then you’re not a part of the future economy. You may not even care about it, even if you could become aware of it. That’s OK, we’re all slowly catching up with what’s been happening in that other world - the online world - where some things that don’t seem to be more than figments of the imaginations of nerdy people are getting their own reality.
Many people are building an online reputation as if it ‘means something’, to which you could rightly respond “who cares?” - or else, you’re wondering if you’re being left behind. If the former, then you have nothing to fear - go back to TV. If the latter, then you may have been sucked in like a newbie getting a poorly-written hard luck story from Nigeria offering a small fortune in exchange for some simple bank account details.
People who do something well, know more than others, have lots of friends, or simply are arrogant enough to believe their own amateur publicity, are building a name for themselves, building themselves up, selling their soul, however you like to describe it, in that big red light district that is the internet. Yes, I use that metaphor advisedly because as often as not people put themselves out there on display with no idea of their actual worth, often out of low self-esteem, hoping to get enough currency to live off for a short while & forget about their mundane existence until they go back out on the web & do it all again - & it’s all legal. The internet is Amsterdam.
The new currency is the Whuffie - online reputation, social capital, the size of your facebook friends list, your linked-in network, your twitter followers, your reach, your pull. It’s like a measure of celebrity, but a little more useful to you & a little more direct & personal.
Celebrity is still a currency in the real world, & it can translate into hard cash currency sometimes (box office or television audiences turn into direct sales or advertising income or endorsement contracts, turning into a pay packet). Whuffie can work like this, sometimes - reach becomes traffic becomes eyeballs on monetisable real estate becomes click-through on ad placements turning into cash-flow for the online publisher, which is hopefully you.
But Whuffie is more about the possibility of gaining benefit, rather than the benefit received, which is a whole futures market, not an exchange rate. People are measured by their earning potential, not the actual income.
This whole scenario is only relevant to the information rich. It is only those who have access to the net & spend time being social who are even vaguely aware of the possibility of someone having an online reputation (as opposed offline, that is, through print & broadcast media). The likelihood of someone whose computer skills don’t go beyond sending an email in upper case caring two hoots about someone’s online reputation is equivalent to the success rate of the afore-mentioned Nigerian scammer.
People who don’t watch TV or go to the cinema have no idea about current celebrities. People who don’t use google to find things don’t need to know about Whuffie. People get by without TV, but it’s getting harder to ‘live’ in the offline world without online access. That constant source of often factual information is such a necessity for ‘real life’ that it is becoming harder to escape that need to be connected to the information superhighway. This means it’s going to get even harder to avoid being known when you’re on it, or to avoid getting an awareness of how unknown you are in the big connected world that the web is. This means you are only one short step away from cadging your first inkling of social currency, like some country hick arriving in the big city without a coin in your pocket.
The information poor will get by somehow. They will integrate into a broader society that has a place for all. They will be marked by how they speak, what they wear, & where they live, as they always have been in the offline world. They will try to fit in, try to improve themselves, try to get on, build a future, leave a legacy for their children. They will need to earn their way, & do it in Whuffie.
One day, there will be charities on the internet who will dispense reputation like food parcels. They will sit down & read people’s blogs & leave nice comments. They will provide shelter for those so poor that they don’t have a home page to go to.
That’s when you know that someone really cares.
If you are now lost, then you’re not a part of the future economy. You may not even care about it, even if you could become aware of it. That’s OK, we’re all slowly catching up with what’s been happening in that other world - the online world - where some things that don’t seem to be more than figments of the imaginations of nerdy people are getting their own reality.
Many people are building an online reputation as if it ‘means something’, to which you could rightly respond “who cares?” - or else, you’re wondering if you’re being left behind. If the former, then you have nothing to fear - go back to TV. If the latter, then you may have been sucked in like a newbie getting a poorly-written hard luck story from Nigeria offering a small fortune in exchange for some simple bank account details.
People who do something well, know more than others, have lots of friends, or simply are arrogant enough to believe their own amateur publicity, are building a name for themselves, building themselves up, selling their soul, however you like to describe it, in that big red light district that is the internet. Yes, I use that metaphor advisedly because as often as not people put themselves out there on display with no idea of their actual worth, often out of low self-esteem, hoping to get enough currency to live off for a short while & forget about their mundane existence until they go back out on the web & do it all again - & it’s all legal. The internet is Amsterdam.
The new currency is the Whuffie - online reputation, social capital, the size of your facebook friends list, your linked-in network, your twitter followers, your reach, your pull. It’s like a measure of celebrity, but a little more useful to you & a little more direct & personal.
Celebrity is still a currency in the real world, & it can translate into hard cash currency sometimes (box office or television audiences turn into direct sales or advertising income or endorsement contracts, turning into a pay packet). Whuffie can work like this, sometimes - reach becomes traffic becomes eyeballs on monetisable real estate becomes click-through on ad placements turning into cash-flow for the online publisher, which is hopefully you.
But Whuffie is more about the possibility of gaining benefit, rather than the benefit received, which is a whole futures market, not an exchange rate. People are measured by their earning potential, not the actual income.
This whole scenario is only relevant to the information rich. It is only those who have access to the net & spend time being social who are even vaguely aware of the possibility of someone having an online reputation (as opposed offline, that is, through print & broadcast media). The likelihood of someone whose computer skills don’t go beyond sending an email in upper case caring two hoots about someone’s online reputation is equivalent to the success rate of the afore-mentioned Nigerian scammer.
People who don’t watch TV or go to the cinema have no idea about current celebrities. People who don’t use google to find things don’t need to know about Whuffie. People get by without TV, but it’s getting harder to ‘live’ in the offline world without online access. That constant source of often factual information is such a necessity for ‘real life’ that it is becoming harder to escape that need to be connected to the information superhighway. This means it’s going to get even harder to avoid being known when you’re on it, or to avoid getting an awareness of how unknown you are in the big connected world that the web is. This means you are only one short step away from cadging your first inkling of social currency, like some country hick arriving in the big city without a coin in your pocket.
The information poor will get by somehow. They will integrate into a broader society that has a place for all. They will be marked by how they speak, what they wear, & where they live, as they always have been in the offline world. They will try to fit in, try to improve themselves, try to get on, build a future, leave a legacy for their children. They will need to earn their way, & do it in Whuffie.
One day, there will be charities on the internet who will dispense reputation like food parcels. They will sit down & read people’s blogs & leave nice comments. They will provide shelter for those so poor that they don’t have a home page to go to.
That’s when you know that someone really cares.
Enhanced Language :)
Wouldn’t it be great if everyone used emoticons in everyday speech?
For those who don’t know what they are (& missed my example in the
title), I pity you, because you’ve missed out on a large part of the
enhanced language represented on the internet. Why are you reading this
online if you don’t know about emoticons, anyway? They are the greatest
contribution to communication that the computer has made. I kid you not.
I have good reason for saying this. First some potted history.
Communication developed as an interpersonal skill - face to face (“You have a bug on your nose”, “I’m hungry”) - from what was probably more of a sight-unseen method of communicating (“I’m over here”, “Danger coming”). As we developed from speech into writing & other forms of not-here communication, we added formalisms that made meaning ‘plainer’ when tone & expression weren’t available, but also took away the personality because the communication became one way.
We had developed a form of communication from the empowered to the un-empowered - from the skilled writer to the reading masses, or from the wealthy broadcaster to the listening/watching masses. The telephone was a technology that joined people personally, because it was easy enough to suspend belief & pretend that the other person was in the next room - you could hear them & interact with them, interpret their mood, express yourself, & be fundamentally human - not too dissimilar to the life of a blind person.
What computers & the internet did was allow for peers to communicate without personal contact or sensory input, over wider distances & networks - potentially without meeting each other (ever). It meant that you didn’t know the person at the other end - or even if it was a person (thank you Alan Turing). This was a boon for expanding your social & professional network, but a nightmare for good communication.
The inherent transience (or banality) of the content being communicated led to a dropping of formalisms (poor language skills) as employed by people whose core skill-set did not include communication skills (that is, geeks & academics). I won’t get into ASCII art, because that was merely a consequence of the medium’s limitations, but the medium - text messages - led to a lack of sensory indicators that enhance communication. This gave birth to emoticons - ways of expressing emotion through symbols that are learnt quickly enough & have now become as much of the vocabulary of net-speak as the acronyms commonly used. This then developed into SMS-speak, where a short-hand became an imperative for that size-poor medium.
Enough history. People are now getting so used to (bad) writing as a form of communication, that the interpersonal skills are going downhill fast. It’s ‘easier’ to communicate by message - one-way, short, easy to misinterpret or excuse. People hook-up, break-up, marry, divorce, & carry on a large portion of their business & personal lives through simple, unstructured messages.
The only way to express emotions, without resorting to the old formulaic words for them, is through emoticons. The only way to express tone, such as in the use of sarcasm, is through emoticons. You can safely say something & then mean the opposite by adding two or three extra characters. People who are information workers are beginning to think in terms of emoticons, adding smileys to (offline) birthday cards. That’s the way they express themselves every day.
Way back when Ellen DeGeneres had a sitcom rather than a talk show, there was an episode where her co-worker would hold up a sign to indicate when he was being sarcastic. That’s what emoticons do - they enhance the language with a layer of intent. It shouldn’t be necessary, but the (written) language without emoticons is painfully devoid of any other (subtle) mechanism for indicating tone or expression.
Thus I say with hand on heart that the greatest thing the internet has done to improve communication is through enhancing the language. One day, an offline dictionary will reflect this appropriately. I’m just not sure where “:)” will come in the alphabetised listings - perhaps we need to enhanced the alphabet to include the full ASCII character set - or maybe talk in terms of UTF-8…
I have good reason for saying this. First some potted history.
Communication developed as an interpersonal skill - face to face (“You have a bug on your nose”, “I’m hungry”) - from what was probably more of a sight-unseen method of communicating (“I’m over here”, “Danger coming”). As we developed from speech into writing & other forms of not-here communication, we added formalisms that made meaning ‘plainer’ when tone & expression weren’t available, but also took away the personality because the communication became one way.
We had developed a form of communication from the empowered to the un-empowered - from the skilled writer to the reading masses, or from the wealthy broadcaster to the listening/watching masses. The telephone was a technology that joined people personally, because it was easy enough to suspend belief & pretend that the other person was in the next room - you could hear them & interact with them, interpret their mood, express yourself, & be fundamentally human - not too dissimilar to the life of a blind person.
What computers & the internet did was allow for peers to communicate without personal contact or sensory input, over wider distances & networks - potentially without meeting each other (ever). It meant that you didn’t know the person at the other end - or even if it was a person (thank you Alan Turing). This was a boon for expanding your social & professional network, but a nightmare for good communication.
The inherent transience (or banality) of the content being communicated led to a dropping of formalisms (poor language skills) as employed by people whose core skill-set did not include communication skills (that is, geeks & academics). I won’t get into ASCII art, because that was merely a consequence of the medium’s limitations, but the medium - text messages - led to a lack of sensory indicators that enhance communication. This gave birth to emoticons - ways of expressing emotion through symbols that are learnt quickly enough & have now become as much of the vocabulary of net-speak as the acronyms commonly used. This then developed into SMS-speak, where a short-hand became an imperative for that size-poor medium.
Enough history. People are now getting so used to (bad) writing as a form of communication, that the interpersonal skills are going downhill fast. It’s ‘easier’ to communicate by message - one-way, short, easy to misinterpret or excuse. People hook-up, break-up, marry, divorce, & carry on a large portion of their business & personal lives through simple, unstructured messages.
The only way to express emotions, without resorting to the old formulaic words for them, is through emoticons. The only way to express tone, such as in the use of sarcasm, is through emoticons. You can safely say something & then mean the opposite by adding two or three extra characters. People who are information workers are beginning to think in terms of emoticons, adding smileys to (offline) birthday cards. That’s the way they express themselves every day.
Way back when Ellen DeGeneres had a sitcom rather than a talk show, there was an episode where her co-worker would hold up a sign to indicate when he was being sarcastic. That’s what emoticons do - they enhance the language with a layer of intent. It shouldn’t be necessary, but the (written) language without emoticons is painfully devoid of any other (subtle) mechanism for indicating tone or expression.
Thus I say with hand on heart that the greatest thing the internet has done to improve communication is through enhancing the language. One day, an offline dictionary will reflect this appropriately. I’m just not sure where “:)” will come in the alphabetised listings - perhaps we need to enhanced the alphabet to include the full ASCII character set - or maybe talk in terms of UTF-8…
Choose Your Next Words Carefully
Increasingly, I’ve meandered away from discussing ‘correct’ English
to ‘better’ communication. A part of this is an understanding of a
complete lack of absolutes, & the realisation that everything is
relative. Not only that, but everything is related. It’s not just your
perspective, but that of your audience, & if you don’t relate the
two, then you end up with a classic miscommunication.
Even relating concepts in successive sentences can be a useful activity to keep the flow of communication less choppy, more navigable. Conversation is like a series of locks in a canal, raising someone’s awareness from a base level of knowing nothing about what you want to talk about, up to the point where you can sail off into the sunset together, pulling in the same direction, on your journey of understanding. At each lock - a sentence, or a paragraph - you slowly float someone’s boat until they’re at the next level. You never let the lock overflow with too much, & you never leave them stranded with a bucket in hand, expecting them to do it for themselves.
You can only take water from the next level. This may sound obvious, but I mean that you can’t introduce a concept before its time. You need the audience to have reached a level where they can take in that concept. You need to know that they’re ready to move their boat into the next lock.
You have to be patient. Yes, there are other conversations that could be happening, but everyone will get their chance to take passage through the locks. No-one gets left behind in the long run. Everyone gets slowly closer to their destination - that nirvana of comprehension when there’s just open water out in front & plain sailing.
This probably means that introducing an aside at this point is a distraction kind of like a lock that goes sideways. It doesn’t seem to achieve much in itself, takes as much time to do the work, & doesn’t get you any further along the journey.
But all of this implies that the journey proper is a lifetime’s conversation between two people, & two real people are constantly changing their boats, & therefore their ability to rise through a lock faster without being tipped over. The locks themselves change in nature, & the lock operator has different moods at different times of the day when the locks are required.
A good conversation is always checking the water level, situationally monitoring the audience’s progress through the locks, adjusting accordingly, & always being ready to stop the water level at any point until things have settled down again.
Now for a generalisation. Men seem to have a one-track mind (focus); women seem to be able to juggle several things happening at once through cursory attention. If you’re peering over the edge of the lock, then you’ve worked out where the water’s coming from. Gender-based miscommunication happens when women use parallel locks with teleportation sideways (not like an aside). Men get confused, & forget which direction they’re heading in. Men use a laborious OH&S policy that sometimes over-ensures that the destination level is reached - by putting the last lock above the expected water line. Women get confused when they’re bombarded with useless information.
Don’t even get me started on how different cultures expect a conversation to flow - which I think I can only do pictorially. Suffice to say that where you were brought up dictates whether the water in the locks should be pumped back up from the bottom to feed the top, should flow directly top to bottom, or should be magically transported from random locks in the sequence.
Locks are simply a mechanism for raising someone’s awareness to where you want to communicate further. How those locks work is the basis for individual (& cultural) styles of communication. How effectively they work is up to the participants.
& never ever use an extended metaphor for the whole discussion, because there just has to be a simpler way of saying things if you look closely enough.
Even relating concepts in successive sentences can be a useful activity to keep the flow of communication less choppy, more navigable. Conversation is like a series of locks in a canal, raising someone’s awareness from a base level of knowing nothing about what you want to talk about, up to the point where you can sail off into the sunset together, pulling in the same direction, on your journey of understanding. At each lock - a sentence, or a paragraph - you slowly float someone’s boat until they’re at the next level. You never let the lock overflow with too much, & you never leave them stranded with a bucket in hand, expecting them to do it for themselves.
You can only take water from the next level. This may sound obvious, but I mean that you can’t introduce a concept before its time. You need the audience to have reached a level where they can take in that concept. You need to know that they’re ready to move their boat into the next lock.
You have to be patient. Yes, there are other conversations that could be happening, but everyone will get their chance to take passage through the locks. No-one gets left behind in the long run. Everyone gets slowly closer to their destination - that nirvana of comprehension when there’s just open water out in front & plain sailing.
This probably means that introducing an aside at this point is a distraction kind of like a lock that goes sideways. It doesn’t seem to achieve much in itself, takes as much time to do the work, & doesn’t get you any further along the journey.
But all of this implies that the journey proper is a lifetime’s conversation between two people, & two real people are constantly changing their boats, & therefore their ability to rise through a lock faster without being tipped over. The locks themselves change in nature, & the lock operator has different moods at different times of the day when the locks are required.
A good conversation is always checking the water level, situationally monitoring the audience’s progress through the locks, adjusting accordingly, & always being ready to stop the water level at any point until things have settled down again.
Now for a generalisation. Men seem to have a one-track mind (focus); women seem to be able to juggle several things happening at once through cursory attention. If you’re peering over the edge of the lock, then you’ve worked out where the water’s coming from. Gender-based miscommunication happens when women use parallel locks with teleportation sideways (not like an aside). Men get confused, & forget which direction they’re heading in. Men use a laborious OH&S policy that sometimes over-ensures that the destination level is reached - by putting the last lock above the expected water line. Women get confused when they’re bombarded with useless information.
Don’t even get me started on how different cultures expect a conversation to flow - which I think I can only do pictorially. Suffice to say that where you were brought up dictates whether the water in the locks should be pumped back up from the bottom to feed the top, should flow directly top to bottom, or should be magically transported from random locks in the sequence.
Locks are simply a mechanism for raising someone’s awareness to where you want to communicate further. How those locks work is the basis for individual (& cultural) styles of communication. How effectively they work is up to the participants.
& never ever use an extended metaphor for the whole discussion, because there just has to be a simpler way of saying things if you look closely enough.
Unified Language
Language limits thought. Don’t disagree, because you can’t express in
any sensible way a counter argument without coming up against the
barriers of the language that you were intending to use. In general,
language is a very bad tool for expressing thoughts, because languages
have limits in themselves - vocabulary, structure, even the sounds that
can be represented verbally or in writing.
When you hear the Doppler Effect of a motorbike going past, it makes sense to a part of your brain that says “Look out!”, or some such (or perhaps “Look there!”). When I use a bland term like motorbike, I’ve not conveyed that it was the beautiful sound of a hog. If you know nothing about motorbikes, not only would you not find any motorbike sound beautiful, but you may not know what a hog is, let alone what it sounds like. I can’t convey to you the imagination associated with me hearing a hog go past - the intermingling of freedom & rebellion (& gratuitous expenditure), or sweaty clothing that’s been lived in, or comfortable old boots, or pain in the small of the back, or the smile on the face of the rider who just knows that everyone wants to be him.
Which language you speak modifies the way you think. Concepts in some languages are easier to express due to a richer vocabulary or practiced usage. There have been many studies in this area, but usually limited to comparing how people from different cultural backgrounds are relatively limited by their language. Others have run pet experiments on themselves to think in the abstract - in colours or shapes, or simply in abstract terms. Some have tried to concentrate on thinking in emotions or images. Many have tried to convey these ideas in writing (fiction) - but how do you describe the indescribable? That has to be the ultimate literary skills test. If you can describe the alienness of thinking in a new paradigm, but still convey a small taste of what it means to do so, then you have taken the reader beyond their comfort zone - & willingly.
I remember an Asimov short story that talked about how mankind ‘broke beyond’ the ten percent of the brain’s potential we currently use, to discover that a limit had been imposed on us by a superior race. The first to break through the thought barrier died & set off alarm bells across the universe.
That thought barrier is language. Being truly multi-lingual or multi-cultural isn’t enough, because some people can compartmentalise their brains & switch between aspects. Very few people operate seamlessly across cultural paradigms, & they are the most likely to be able to see the limitations of the languages they use & have a slightly richer communication because of it - but only slightly. Language is still the barrier in & of itself.
Language should not be limited in this discussion to speech or writing. There are plenty of other communication forms where the medium limits the message, or at least shapes it. Whether the message is an advertisement on TV (short attention span), radio (aural engagement), billboards (eye-catching), or a presentation in person (with the presenter) or over the web (without interaction), choice of medium is as important as content.
Within the media, there are languages used - aimed at demographics, cultural groups, interests, etc - some of which have assumed knowledge, or else the opposite, limit themselves specifically to not put an audience off-side (use baby-talk - like in political advertising). Each of these choices limits what the message can be. You cannot describe the impacts of environmental change on TV, for example, because the medium doesn’t have the language for it; print media do. You can trumpet higher or lower taxes, because the concepts are ‘simple’ - but you can’t explain how a tax re-structure works in balance (such as the introduction of a GST).
Within a business context, you can use some financial graphs in some meetings - as long as the trend is clearly highlighted - but not where a pattern is sought to justify a long term strategy - except where that is the sole purpose of the meeting. A software development team can use a modelling language to describe their proposed solution in infinite detail, but that doesn’t help when the audience is the CEO, who’s never seen UML before.
We keep on building new languages to fit purposes, & generally have to start from scratch to do so because of the limits imposed by the current (spoken/written) language, or else to cut across several languages’ limitations. This doesn’t solve a problem, but compounds it, building another Tower of Babel (quite literally, attempting to reach nirvana through adding more structure, only to find ourselves each speaking a different tongue).
What we need is a less structured language mechanism that allows us to convey thoughts more purely, effectively, intimately, accurately, & quickly. It needs to have no barriers inherent, no limitations, no inadequacies that need to be filled in, & yet be universal & ubiquitous.
The only barrier-free form of communication is telepathy. I’m still working on that, but I’m sure I made a dog look up once without calling it.
When you hear the Doppler Effect of a motorbike going past, it makes sense to a part of your brain that says “Look out!”, or some such (or perhaps “Look there!”). When I use a bland term like motorbike, I’ve not conveyed that it was the beautiful sound of a hog. If you know nothing about motorbikes, not only would you not find any motorbike sound beautiful, but you may not know what a hog is, let alone what it sounds like. I can’t convey to you the imagination associated with me hearing a hog go past - the intermingling of freedom & rebellion (& gratuitous expenditure), or sweaty clothing that’s been lived in, or comfortable old boots, or pain in the small of the back, or the smile on the face of the rider who just knows that everyone wants to be him.
Which language you speak modifies the way you think. Concepts in some languages are easier to express due to a richer vocabulary or practiced usage. There have been many studies in this area, but usually limited to comparing how people from different cultural backgrounds are relatively limited by their language. Others have run pet experiments on themselves to think in the abstract - in colours or shapes, or simply in abstract terms. Some have tried to concentrate on thinking in emotions or images. Many have tried to convey these ideas in writing (fiction) - but how do you describe the indescribable? That has to be the ultimate literary skills test. If you can describe the alienness of thinking in a new paradigm, but still convey a small taste of what it means to do so, then you have taken the reader beyond their comfort zone - & willingly.
I remember an Asimov short story that talked about how mankind ‘broke beyond’ the ten percent of the brain’s potential we currently use, to discover that a limit had been imposed on us by a superior race. The first to break through the thought barrier died & set off alarm bells across the universe.
That thought barrier is language. Being truly multi-lingual or multi-cultural isn’t enough, because some people can compartmentalise their brains & switch between aspects. Very few people operate seamlessly across cultural paradigms, & they are the most likely to be able to see the limitations of the languages they use & have a slightly richer communication because of it - but only slightly. Language is still the barrier in & of itself.
Language should not be limited in this discussion to speech or writing. There are plenty of other communication forms where the medium limits the message, or at least shapes it. Whether the message is an advertisement on TV (short attention span), radio (aural engagement), billboards (eye-catching), or a presentation in person (with the presenter) or over the web (without interaction), choice of medium is as important as content.
Within the media, there are languages used - aimed at demographics, cultural groups, interests, etc - some of which have assumed knowledge, or else the opposite, limit themselves specifically to not put an audience off-side (use baby-talk - like in political advertising). Each of these choices limits what the message can be. You cannot describe the impacts of environmental change on TV, for example, because the medium doesn’t have the language for it; print media do. You can trumpet higher or lower taxes, because the concepts are ‘simple’ - but you can’t explain how a tax re-structure works in balance (such as the introduction of a GST).
Within a business context, you can use some financial graphs in some meetings - as long as the trend is clearly highlighted - but not where a pattern is sought to justify a long term strategy - except where that is the sole purpose of the meeting. A software development team can use a modelling language to describe their proposed solution in infinite detail, but that doesn’t help when the audience is the CEO, who’s never seen UML before.
We keep on building new languages to fit purposes, & generally have to start from scratch to do so because of the limits imposed by the current (spoken/written) language, or else to cut across several languages’ limitations. This doesn’t solve a problem, but compounds it, building another Tower of Babel (quite literally, attempting to reach nirvana through adding more structure, only to find ourselves each speaking a different tongue).
What we need is a less structured language mechanism that allows us to convey thoughts more purely, effectively, intimately, accurately, & quickly. It needs to have no barriers inherent, no limitations, no inadequacies that need to be filled in, & yet be universal & ubiquitous.
The only barrier-free form of communication is telepathy. I’m still working on that, but I’m sure I made a dog look up once without calling it.
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