meaning

I’m reading Seth Godin’s most recent book, Linchpin, and I was thinking today about how he writes. In this book, his style is a bit different than in the past, though if you’ve read some of his other books you can see how he has evolved into this style.

In Linchpin, the style is more direct, more emphatic and more personal than in the past. The key word in that sentence is “more” because it isn’t as if he hasn’t written that way previously. It is simply more.

Other people also write in this way and there is a good reason for doing so. I see it best illustrated by setting it against my own writing in blog posts.

I have a bad habit of equivocating. That isn’t an issue in Linchpin. Godin is direct and doesn’t fudge his statements. That makes for greater impact and thus effectiveness.

I think there are a few reasons why I equivocate. The first is the really bad reason. I don’t want to make a firm commitment to a statement I’m making. That is so very bad. I hope I don’t do that too often.

Another reason is a good one, but done to excess becomes a problem. I want what I write to be conversational. I don’t want my writing to come across as academic or formal. I want it to read in a way that you can “hear” someone speaking it in conversation. So I put in the odd conversational phrase, more or less, kind of … Like that, at least every so often. It’s okay occasionally, but done too much it undercuts what has been written. (Those italicized words are an example of what I do.)

The last reason is because I want to remain open to other perspectives. I don’t want to be dogmatic. This may be a well-meaning reason but it undermines the writing, makes it come across as non-committal and just reads as namby pamby. You can’t be all things to all people all the time. Take a position and live with it.

Godin does this in Linchpin and the book benefits. It is effective and engaging – partly for what it is about and partly for how it goes about it. It is direct and doesn’t equivocate.

If you’re writing, don’t be like me. Be like Seth.

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I began this list last Thursday. I finished it off Saturday morning. Surprisingly, on Saturday I also came across Ten rules for writing fiction. It seems I wasn’t alone in putting together a list. (Those writers, by the way, are much better than I am so their lists should carry a good deal more weight than mine.) There is no order to my list. They are “off-the-cuff,” jotted down as they popped into my head. They read as follows:

#1 If you’re the kind of writer so very good that only modesty withholds the modifier “great,” you can ignore rules. By the way, if you’re that kind of writer you’re probably dead and have been for some time.

#2 Writing correctly is not the same as writing well. A sentence can be perfectly grammatical yet fail to communicate its message. Some sentences are ungrammatical yet communicate their meaning immediately and clearly.

#3 Writing isn’t about words, it is about communicating. Words are just the tool. Don’t fall in love with language.

#4 Few things are as discouraging to readers as very long paragraphs. Break it up. Better still, brutally look at what you’ve written and ask if it is really necessary. The answer is usually no.

#5 Get to the point. Immediately. Don’t write long paragraphs to set things up (referred to as exposition or back story). If that material is truly necessary, you can toss it in later (however, see rule #8).

#6 Read everything you write out loud. If you can’t read it out loud easily and fluidly, something is wrong with it. Rewrite it or drop it. (Additionally, read material that is not your own out loud. It will help convey to you how things should read and sound – or the opposite.)

#7 Listen. Everyone has their own way of speaking. They use particular words, phrasing and syntax. By listening, you’ll find new ways of constructing sentences and hear how language can communicate character (among other things). You’ll also notice that people rarely use long, clause-filled sentences.

#8 Edit. Rewrite. Edit. Rewrite. Edit. Rewrite. Repeat until doctors start suggesting Prozac.

#9 Your favourite writing is usually your worst, pretty as it may be. It’s the stuff that needs to be junked. It’s sad but true. On the other hand, it’s a great way to flag material that should be dropped. If you love it, that’s a sign something is wrong.

#10 Getting paid beats compliments every time.

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It’s good to repeat yourself. By default I think we believe to repeat ourselves is a bad thing. However, if we’re trying to communicate it’s through repetition that it gets across. The trick is to do this without becoming redundant  — in other words, knowing when enough is enough.

The other trick is to repeat ourselves but not in exactly the same way. While this post’s headline may not be the best example, it is an example of sorts. Put a better, more lengthy way, we might answer a question with, “Repetition is good. When we say something once only, it is easy for its essence to be lost in all the other communication that goes on between people. Thus, to say it two or three times helps to break through the clutter and make it more memorable. The lesson, then, is that it is good to repeat ourselves.”

Okay. That may be a bit too long, too wordy and too tedious but I think you get the idea.

Repetition is one of the ways we remember. Why do football teams in practice run the same play over and over? It’s to work out the weaknesses, get everyone on the same page and also to ensure every knows it, learns it and understands what to do almost without thinking when the play is called in a game situation.

I went off on this topic after reading Why Twitter was inevitable? over on Julien Smith’s blog. He begins by talking about recalling things he had forgotten about radio culture, such as the necessity to, “… constantly repeat the thing we’re talking about …”

I worked in radio as well, years ago. It was in commercial radio. I remember coming up with my own rule about ads which was, if you’re forced to choose between creativity and frequency, always go with frequency.

Ideally, you wouldn’t have to make this choice. You could have a creative ad plus frequency – meaning it got played a lot, hopefully throughout the day, particularly at the high listening periods (morning and drive). One of the reasons you hear and remember those awful local car dealership ads is because they forego creativity (well, maybe they think their ads are creative) and go with frequency – ads that are run a lot, often concentrated toward the end of the week and weekends when it was assumed anyone buying a car might be out shopping for one.

The theory was simple and, I think, true: an ad heard once would not be remembered, no matter how good it was. There is simply too much noise to break through. Our minds recall the things we hear, see and do frequently.

Repetition is how we learn and that is because it is how we remember. That is what makes repetition a good thing. It requires some skill to avoid becoming obvious and annoying but the bottom line remains: it’s good to repeat yourself.

Roll credits …

I went off on this topic by reading an interview with Julien Smith over on Mark Dykeman’s blog (Broadcasting Brain). That lead me to Julien’s blog and the post I referred to above.

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I was excited when I first picked up Douglas Rushkoff’s book, Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back. I confess I expected it to articulate ideas and feelings I had, hopefully better than I could, and also flesh them out so they were more substantial. Yes, I was doing something I complain others do: looking for opinions that affirm my own rather than challenge them.

In many ways, the book does all that. I also think it’s an important book, at least its thesis is important: that corporatism has so ingrained itself in our lives, in our very thinking and seeing, that we’ve become corporations ourselves. At least, we see the world through corporate defined eyes. Whether others agreed with this idea or not was irrelevant, in a sense. I thought it important to see the world from this perspective because we seldom stop and think about why we live and think as we do and what its meaning might be.

But the book’s tone undermines all that. As Publishers Weekly puts it, “An engaging history of commerce and corporatism devolves into an extended philippic on how increasing personal wealth and the rise of nuclear families constituted a failure of community—whose services are now provided by products and professionals.”

Each chapter starts well, but a strident, proselytizing tone soon creeps in and it is off-putting, to put it mildly. I also found myself questioning some of the interpretations and conclusions. If the book were a Wikipedia entry, I think there would be a number of places where the note, “citation needed” would appear. In some cases, there were supportive footnotes but in others, no – they were just conclusions Mr. Rushkoff drew having interpreted information a particular way.

Overall, the book is pretty humourless and annoyingly earnest. And that means the book’s good points – its research, the information it provides, its fundamental argument – all get lost in its obvious politics.

I’ve not completed the book – I’m probably three quarters of the way through – but I’ve not seen (as I can recall) alternative explanations or, if something not supportive of the argument appears it is quickly dismantled and dismissed. Or it’s turned inside out and offered as an example of how something that appears one way is actually the opposite. There is a paranoiac quality to it all, a bit like those people who find passages in the Bible to justify anything.

There is also Mr. Rushkoff’s fundamental argument about the focus on the individual moving us away from the idea of community. It appears reasonable except when it’s put almost exclusively in terms of a kind of a corporate conspiracy to separate us and transform us. Are there no other possible reasons for the individual focus? For the disappearance of community? Have we lost the notion of community or is the idea of community a much broader one? I know many people who would find the elimination of communities a dubious assertion. And I’d question the example of unions as community (some seem pretty corporate to me). I think Mr. Rushkoff’s definition of community is a very limited one.

I suppose I’m saying there is an imbalance in the book. There is also the unstated belief in some kind of golden age when we had it right, whatever “it” is. It feels as if the argument was decided upon then material was gathered to confirm it, rather than explore whether or not it held water. The book becomes more polemic than anything else.

My biggest frustration, however, is in the feeling that what is of value in the book is lost by the tone and approach. When young people (or anyone) worry about personal brands, when corporations and everyday schmoes are involved in charities as ways to support their brand or when (to use Mr. Rushkoff’s example) we’re more concerned about our property value than our personal safety … surely something ain’t right?

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I’m not sure whether I should thank David Campbell or curse him. A week or so late I came across his post Literacy and have been preoccupied by the topic ever since. Here’s what I put on Twitter and it encapsulates what my thinking has been:

If you are not literate, you cede control over your life to those who are. If that’s not an argument for literacy, I don’t know what is.

I don’t think people are really aware of how much of their every day life depends on what is written. Contracts, for one. If you can’t read, you have to trust someone else to explain what is in it. Laws, electoral platforms and so on – same thing. If the world is inclined to move toward something like video, how do you know what to say and shoot next on that video podcast without a script? Movies and TV use storyboards but what are they if not language?

Letters are signs. Letters in a certain sequence are words, which are signs.

Except for the hardware, everything on our computers is language: the text content we read but also all the coding we usually don’t see. That’s why they refer to programming “languages.”

There are manuals. Business plans. Emails. Licenses. And there is the proverbial “fine print.”

No, we don’t read all these things. But depending on our lives, there are times they become vitally important and it is necessary to understand exactly what is meant. (Lawyers spend their lives niggling over the meaning of laws and a simple phrase, depending on the wording, can change lives.)

And of course, there is written fiction and journalism.

If you are not literate and literate to a certain level, you are not independent. You have to cross your fingers and hope that what someone else is telling you the words mean is what they actually mean. You are dependent.

If people need a reason to learn to read, I think it should be explained to them how much control over their own lives they give up by not being able to read.

My one question regarding Canada’s literacy rates (between provinces) is to what degree are they affected by worker migration? Would provinces like BC and Alberta appear to be performing better on the literacy front due to literate workers from out of province moving to them? And would NB appear worse due to losing skilled workers to other provinces thus making the degree of illiteracy higher? I’m sure, to a degree, it must though I don’t think it would sufficiently to erase the embarrassing rate we have.

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I saw some tweets to a post, The Trouble With Twitter (Melissa Hart, The Chronicle review), and something occurred to me. The essay is another of the many Twitter critiques that, personally, I’m finding a bit tiresome. After reading it, I thought that what it amounted to was, “I don’t want to change.”

That’s fine. No one needs to. At the same time, those who do want to are free to do so.

In some ways the essay is critical of the 140 character length imposed by Twitter and almost seems to confuse a headline with a story or, as I’ve put it before, a postcard with a letter. It doesn’t quite get to that point, however. The essay seems to be more focused on the time element involved with Twitter and the idea that it takes time to fact check, absorb and understand, and then write the story. And I agree. However …

In the case of the Twitter streams I follow, that’s what happens. Tweets are more about: “This has happened,” and “Something appears to be developing here,” and “Trying to confirm a report …”

In other words, they are often about the progression of the story, not the end piece. They are about keeping followers involved in the development of a story. And eventually, when all is said and done, the story itself – a link to the full piece.

What is often overlooked in all the pro and con debates about tools like Twitter is the responsibility of a reader. It’s not just the journalist, or blogger, or whoever is doing the tweeting that has a responsibility. Readers have a responsibility to question what they are reading and consider its merits and to understand its intent, meaning and so on. If a story is unconfirmed, it is unconfirmed. That means it could be true but could just as easily be false. And anyone who has done any reading at all of news stories knows that what you read today can very easily change tomorrow because journalism has to wade through facts, PR spin and rumour to find out what exactly is true and many stories are ongoing.

The essay mentioned above is entirely from a particular journalist’s perspective. It is about how she wants to research, understand and present a story, and that doesn’t include a desire to keep readers informed of her progress as she does this. Again, that’s fine if that’s how you like to do things.

The problem, however, is that as a reader, I don’t want to wait.

I don’t want to wait till all is said and done and everything can be put in context before I find out what is or has been happening in my world. It is happening now and I want some information, even if incomplete, about what is going on. I want to know it’s being investigated. I want a heads-up that a complete assessment is in the works and headed my way.

And I understand that, as a reader, I have a responsibility to give a tweet or post the appropriate credence and to see it for what it is.

Journalism is a two-way street. I know that. Give me some credit for being able to assess and judge the merits of something.

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If you follow discussions about social media, journalism, “Web 2.0″ and all that other related “stuff,” a number of terms pop up over and over. Content. Value. Monetization.

There is also a lot of “what if” that goes on. I kind of like that sort of thing. It’s fun to imagine how change will be manifest. (I grew up reading, and loving, science fiction and that’s all about “what if.”)

But as with all things, sometimes you want to call a timeout because it becomes excessive. Sometimes you get so caught up in imagining and speculating about one thing, you forget to think about another. In this case, I think the thing that’s missed is meaning.

Content

We refer to content but, when we do, we refer to it as a product. As if it is a number in a column in a spreadsheet that will be in a formula (probably the formula that allows us to determine “value”). While for cost purposes I suppose that’s a good way to look at it, that isn’t what content is. The term “content” is probably not a very good one to use because it is one that is, psychologically and emotionally, divorced from what actually constitutes “content.” As terms go, it is a kind of dispassionate third party.

Content is meaning. Sometimes as a film, sometimes as a song. Sometimes as a news story, sometimes as an image. Be it a painting, movie, song or whatever – even software – content is always meaning. When we like these things, it is because they mean something to us, even if we can’t articulate it. And vice versa. When we don’t like something it can be because of its meaning or maybe the fact that it has no meaning to us. It’s gibberish. Lack of meaning is itself a kind of meaning.

Value

When we refer to value, it usually concerns how much we (or some group) want something. The demand side of the supply and demand scale. Once again, we speak of it as if it’s a number in a column in a spreadsheet waiting to become an input in a formula. (Or maybe it’s the output of a formula.) As with content, we speak of it dispassionately, as if we can separate it from ourselves and consider it objectively. But like content, value is about meaning. It is not itself meaning (that’s content) but it’s the significance of the meaning to us. If something means a lot, it has a high value. If it doesn’t mean much, it has a lower value.

Value is the significance of something’s meaning to us.

Monetization

The third term, monetization, is related to content and value and is also about meaning, though in a somewhat different way. It’s the conversion of meaning into money. In this context, monetization is what we will pay for meaning based on its value to us.

Monetization is meaning as money.

Meaning

A problem I see with all these terms is their dispassion. Content, value, monetization … they all seem to separate us from the core of what they are about, which is meaning. If you’re like me, you probably feel one way when discussing content and quite another when discussing movies or books or journalism. There is an emotional attachment to the latter; there is an emotional disconnect with the former.

At times this is good but there are also times when it is not very good. I think, currently, when I see these many discussions in blogs and Twitter, it’s not very good because we are so focused on that word “monetization” that we forget what we are talking about monetizing. (All things are already monetized – the discussions are really about monetizing “content” differently.)

By discussing content almost exclusively in business and marketing terms we lose sight of meaning and focus almost exclusively on the money.

Questions

It may be true that the value of content, the significance of its meaning to us, has lessened but, if that’s the case, shouldn’t we wonder why and also wonder about the consequences of that? The current discussions often remind me of discussions of style versus substance (meaning). It strikes me that we are currently heavily focused on style, by which I mean we’re caught up in the means of delivering content, almost to the point that we’re indifferent to what that content might be.

And, oddly for a pretty secular world, we seem to have a blind faith in the idea that “things will work themselves out.” It’s the argument that the market will correct itself. That may be true but we say it and believe it as if no other possibility exists, that that’s simply how it is, end of discussion. Blind faith.

Content will always be generated. Human beings have an infinite capacity for it. That has been an idea behind much of the thinking behind Web 2.0, bloggers and evolving media. The generation of items of meaning is endless. But what happens to the monetization aspect when the value goes down because meaning no longer means much to us anymore? When algorithms and findability (ease of locating content) and cost dilute the significance of meaning?

The money aspect aside, what happens if or when the value of meaning approaches zero and we’re largely indifferent to meaning or, perhaps, lose the capacity to distinguish the value of something because it doesn’t matter anymore?

Put in a vernacular way, what happens when content that might have great significance to us is lost in a haystack of meaningless crap?

I’m not suggesting we install some old school custodial approach to managing content, to preserving someone else’s idea of what has value and place it behind some secure, walled city of “preserved meaning.” I think all protectionist approaches to what is occurring are, to put it bluntly, idiotic.

I am saying I believe we need to spend time discussing what is occurring from something more than the delivery/money side. We should revisit the style vs. substance argument and think equally about both (the delivery of content vs. the significance of the content). How something is said (delivery) is as important as what is said (content). Focusing on one without attention to the other risks conclusions that are unbalanced.

(An aside: With the way Internet technology is evolving and particularly with the way we are using it, could it be that content is no longer about depth but about breadth? And if so, what does that mean? What’s gained; what’s lost?)

Maybe the question I’m asking is, how will we value content in a world where there is so much of it? How will we distinguish what is of value to us and what is not? And how will we ease the nagging problem of not knowing what we don’t know, of never having any sense of assurance that what we have found is what we needed or wanted?

And where will art live in all of this?

My own guess is that old professional classes (journalism would be a good example given the current discussions) will be replaced. But replaced doesn’t mean arbiters will be gone. It means we will have new arbiters. Maybe they’ll be Google algorithms. Maybe it will be “the wisdom of crowds” via various social networks.

Whoever they are, in some quarters there is an assumption they will be better. In other quarters, there is an assumption they will be much worse. Myself, I’m undecided on this. One minute I think one way, the next I think another. While not cynical, I am a skeptic and my worry is best expressed by Pete Towshend:

“Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

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There’s a fascinating book by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience and it helps to explain why the more successful you become in today’s world of work, the more your work becomes a nightmare from which you wonder if you’ll ever wake up.

It relates, in part, to something Seth Godin wrote about a while back in a post called Godin’s Leveraged Effort Curve. His post, and Csikszentmihalyi’s book, are related. In Seth’s post, he says:

Among highly-compensated workers, the amount of work you get paid for actually goes down as you get paid more.

He talks about how as you succeed, becoming more valued by the company, the less you do of the actual work you were hired for. A designer designs less. A programmer programs less. A writer writes less. Why? Because you increasingly spend time on what Seth calls “overhead,” which I take to mean meetings, “processes,” e-mail, PowerPoint presentations and all those other pains that gobble up time like some great, voracious mouth.

You are pulled from the worker fringes of the corporation closer toward the centre where the job seems to be more of a pointless soft-shoe routine than anything else. You do less of the work you enjoy doing and spend much more time managing – which could be enjoyable too if so much of the managing wasn’t concerned with personalities, politics and seemingly irrational processes.

In his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Csikszentmihalyi describes the state people get into when they are working well and happily: “flow,” where all the pistons are firing, one idea spawns another and — well, you just work. He describes autotelic work, jobs and workers (autotelic relating to purpose). He explains the term “autotelic,” saying:

The term “autotelic” derives from two Greek words, auto meaning self, and telos meaning goal. It refers to a self-contained activity, one that is done not with the expectation of some future benefit, but simply because the doing itself is the reward.

He also talks about some of the characteristics of this kind of activity, finding it is closely related to games. For example, some of the characteristics include clear goals, feedback (usually immediate) and increasing complexity.

It strikes me that those characteristics are experienced less the more you succeed. Goals become obscure or contradictory, feedback is vague and hesitant and complexity resides more in the processes and structure of the company than in the ostensible work you were initially hired to do.

While I would never argue that a person should do a job simply for the sake of the job itself — you do need to make a buck — I do think Csikszentmihalyi’s book helps to explain why the longer many of us are in companies, particularly as we succeed, the less satisfying our work becomes and the more frustrated we feel. I think we move further away from the work we enjoy as we are steered into work that offers little satisfaction – no flow. But as Csikszentmihalyi says, “work can either be brutal and boring, or enjoyable and exciting.”

I think Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience is a book well worth reading for anyone who is in a job, especially a job they are doing fairly well in, yet finding themselves discontented. If nothing else, it should help put a few things in perspective.

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I read Ron’s post on language and hip-hop and chat rooms and had to throw in my two cents because I agree, though I’d like to add a few thoughts.

First of all, why would this be an issue? I think we need to say why it’s important to have language we all can understand. And the answer is simple: so we actually can understand each other. People need a common language to communicate.

It also needs to be said that this language need not be English or, if it is, the “Queen’s” English. The emphasis on what we call proper English is only because, traditionally, it is generally more universal than other languages (at least in North America which, yes, is not the centre of the universe).

We tread on dangerous ground though because language is cultural, generational and often, in practice, even racial. Hence, the language of hip-hop and chat rooms. While languages in cases like these help to identify and even bind us culturally and/or racially, they also serve as barriers when we need to communicate with others beyond the group.

Question: when it comes to bridging the gap between a group and the larger community, who is responsible? I suppose it depends on who has the greater need to communicate. I don’t think there is an easy answer to this one other than to say that without a willingness on both sides to make an effort at communication then no matter who makes the move, whatever communication is accomplished stands a good chance of being tainted to some degree by resentment.

Do we need language skills? Experience tells me yes, definitely. In business, I often see e-mails and reports that underline this. The biggest problem? They are unclear about what they mean or, worse, they suggest a meaning that is not what the communicator intended.

What language should these skills be based on? For me, the answer is English. However, I don’t live in China. If I did, there’s a good chance I would have a different answer.

But in terms of English, I think the real problem we face is the way in which it is splintering into variations, very much reflecting how we are subdividing socially along cultural, generational, racial, sexual, economic and other lines. And the problem with that lies in the fact our linguistic variations are increasingly characterized by exclusivity, and that results in an inability to communicate with anyone outside our particular group.

Ironically, language is becoming an increasing barrier to communication.

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