Words for Nerds (part one)

Some thoughts on a few words that have different or additional meanings in the early 21st century. I have included the Macquarie Dictionary’s ‘common’ definition of these words for comparison. Where more than one definition exists I have tried to list the one that seems most appropriate to the online/digital/new/additional definition.

stalk – v. ‘to pursue or approach game, etc.’ Derived from the Old English stealcian – to move stealthily. Stalk generally has perverse AFK connotations but has become almost acceptable online in the modern era. To stalk someone (esp. on Facebook) can, these days, often be a legitimate forerunner to in-person contact. In this sense, modern usage of stalk seems to have regressed closer to the original meaning of the word: an AFK stalker often isn’t necessarily ‘stealthy’, because they make their presence known through letters, calling, following closely etc., whereas stalking online indeed retains its surreptitious element. Of course the online stalker often feels the need to make a confession of their activity to a close friend, perhaps as a way to relieve a guilty conscience.

friend – n. ‘Someone attached to another by feelings of affection or personal regard.’ The Macquarie lists ‘friend’ as a noun but in contemporary reality (esp. since the days of Myspace) it can also be used as a social media verb, as in: ‘I friended them’. Although English already has a verb for this (to befriend) it seems needlessly formal and unsuitable for the fleeting and/or typically nominal nature of Facebook friendship. Also note the addition of a new verb; unfriend, officially used by Facebook (and not listed by the Macq.). It’s worth mentioning that Facebook uses the terminology ‘add as friend’, that is, the ability to perform an action and add someone to the stock of your friendship pools. Friendship thus is robbed of the often gradual relationship construction that occurs in real life; there are no grey-area ‘I know of them’ acquaintances on Facebook. The distinction is binary: you’re either friends or you’re not.

follow – v. ‘to watch the movements, progress, or course of.’ Macq. doesn’t provide the online version of follow in its Twitter sense, that is, to subscribe to somebody’s feed. In terms of social media, following exists somewhere between stalking and friendship. Follow and friend have similar uses as a verb but different connotations: ‘following’ somebody is much less intimate and professes no personal relationship with that person, but to follow someone is a much more transparent act than stalking them. Also, like Facebook, Twitter has introduced ‘unfollow’ into the vocabulary.

cloud – n. ‘a visible collection of particles of water or ice suspended in the air, usually at an elevation above the earth's surface ... [or] any similar mass’. In the 21st century the word refers to the cloud, the mass of data particles accessible by users, a great cloud hovering above, at any time threatening to rain bits and bytes upon us. Just like its meteorological cousin, the cloud appears to exist and is technically definable but cannot be physically grasped. However, unlike meteorological clouds, the user (i.e. us) performs an important part of cloud formation by sending particles up instead of passively receiving precipitation. The printed Macq. doesn’t define cloud in its computer sense, but does note the phrase ‘to have one’s head in the clouds’ as being ‘divorced from reality; be in a dreamlike state’ which, when considering the 1000-yard stare of smartphone and tablet users on public transport, arguably comes close.

search – v. ‘to go or look through carefully in seeking to find something’. It’s a well-known observation that the term ‘google’ (no caps, generic trademark rules apply) is used interchangeably with ‘search’ these days, but I don’t think they are truly synonymous. To google something seems almost fleeting, an act of speed. ‘I’ll google it,’ means to find a quick answer to binary questions, such as ‘Where is the bar?’ or ‘Who is the President of Guatemala?’ To my mind, ‘searching’ implies more in-depth techniques to resolve questions which may ultimately be unanswerable or have multiple answers: one googles the address of a particular bar but searches for a place that serves half-price Martinis on a Wednesday night.

stream – n. ‘a body of water flowing in a channel or bed, as a river rivulet or brook’ or ‘a continuous flow or succession of anything.’ Part of the beauty of a natural stream is the tension of knowing that it is potentially finite; the data stream, however, seems assured, continuous, unending—there is no beauty, mystery or tension. These days online streams seem to have been replaced by deluges, e.g. check your Twitter deluge. Stream can also be used as a verb in the internet sense, as in to tap into data, to take (usually for free) and redirect it for your own personal gains, à la AFK practices of damming or redirecting natural streams for energy/moneymaking purposes.

window – n. ‘an opening in the wall or roof ... commonly fitted with a frame in which are set movable sashes containing panes of glass.’ The act of using the computer is itself looking through the window of the screen, which is then (even on a Mac) divided into further windows which can also be looked through. We are in effect looking through a window to see more windows, and while the screen is generally inert and inflexible the windows in the window are moveable, resizeable—able to be opened and closed at whim to let through information/data/thoughts/feelings. These windows are easy enough to open but can be difficult to shut.

Fragment (consider revising)

I’m not very intimidating. I’m slightly underweight, bespectacled, and have a red beard which generally induces furtive giggles rather than horrified screams. But there is one sphere of my life in which people seem to be daunted by my presence, so much so that they cower before me and beg forgiveness.

Earlier this year I started an editing course at Uni, and I’ve noticed that people have become increasingly self-conscious of the things they send to me via email, text or Facebook. I’ll often receive a message and then have it followed up by apologies for bad grammar, spelling or questionable word usage.

I suppose people think that because I’m considering a career in editing that I’m ‘always on’, seeking any and all syntactical errors in order to flex my editorial muscles. It’s like when people are scared to talk to psychologists because they assume they’re constantly analysing everything they say.

I don’t mind this newfound power. I like to imagine people in front of their keyboards, trembling as they type, hoping that they don’t mess up this most important of messages. They must think that I’m sitting, eyes closed, waiting for the message tone of their ill-fated communiqué. As soon as I hear it, my eyes fling open, I brandish my (digital) red pen like a sword and annihilate their feeble attempt at the written word. Like a warrior in a B-grade gladiator movie, I yell maniacally as I cut swathes through shoddily constructed sentences. ‘Passive voice! Pronoun without antecedent! COMMA SPLIIIIIICE!’

My secret shame, which isn’t really a secret at all once you’ve received a few replies from me, is that I’m guilty of being as sloppy as anybody when it comes to constructing messages. I’m a big believer in the formula that, when it comes to online communication, the hierarchy goes something like clarity > speed > grammatical correctness. There are instances when proper grammar is necessary (even beautiful), but the majority of text messages and emails don’t fall into this category, especially if time is of the essence. If I need to meet you under the big tree in two minutes, I’ll happily bash out something like ‘meat big tree 2 min’ and assume that, despite the horrific nature of that sentence, you’ll know what I mean.

Ninety per cent of the time I don’t even notice other people’s errors until they send a follow up email two seconds later, apologising for their use of ‘toward’ when they think perhaps it should have been ‘towards’, and then implore me not to think that they’re an idiot. But once a person has drawn my attention to their poor grammar or spelling, I can’t help but judge them for it, in spite of all my own shortcomings. I’m as petty as they come in that regard, and as soon as I think I’ve got an advantage over you, I’ll exploit it. Your best bet is to proofread your messages very carefully before you send them to me, and pray that I don’t notice all your misplaced clauses, lest I lower my estimation of you.  

The Lost Art of Sending an Email

Hi there,

Want to know what I find beautiful? Well formatted emails.

You know what I mean. There's nothing worse than opening an email and seeing a huge slab of text, forcing you to do some heavy lifting to find out exactly what the sender is trying to say. 

Conversely, the best emails start with a nice little greeting, then a bit of an introductory sentence, followed by a couple of meatier lines or paragraphs. Yet the way these emails are written, you don't have to work hard to find meaning. Your eye is guided through nicely. 

They even look good from a distance, possessing a nice symmetry as they go from short to long to short again. I'd hope that if people saw my emails from afar they'd be able to tell that I was a good emailer without reading the actual words.

There might be a little one line joke or something to finish off the email and reward the recipient for reading.

All that's left is the sign off,

and it's done.

Gonna Browse Like it's 1999

Your mission this week is to watch this video:

Did you pick the surprise ending? You probably did, firstly because there are only a handful of companies in the world that are presumptuous enough to attempt to link an entire generation with their product (Coca-Cola and Microsoft among them) and secondly because the product name is right there in the video title.

The first time I saw the ad I was at an advantage because I had no idea what it was for. In fact I was quite enjoying the video until the last seconds when the infamous ‘e’ was revealed and I frantically tried clean my eyeballs with sandpaper. Ads are frequently turning to the surprise brending (brand + ending = brending) and it’s an especially useful technique when you want to get the consumer on board before they realise what a horrible thing it is you’re trying to sell.

Column Five, the advertising agency responsible for the ad, have uploaded on their blog an interesting dissection of their creative process. It’s interesting not only because it gives you an insight into the mechanics of designing a successful ad campaign, but also because it provides priceless examples of advertising jargon such as:

To ensure the video was both newsworthy and shareworthy, our creative team worked closely with our strategic communications team in developing the concept with Internet Explorer.

I love this sort of thing. It is my dream to one day to be a member of a ‘strategic communications team’ whose job it is to develop concepts. In order to showcase my skills to any prospective employers, I’ll demonstrate that I understand advertising by translating the above sentence into English:

We paid some people to make Internet Explorer appear less shit.

If you want to hire me you can leave a comment at the bottom of the blog. My demands are that I work from home and get thirty weeks of paid holiday per year.

Make no mistake, selling the latest version of Internet Explorer in 2013 is a tough gig. Despite the fact that IE still holds a significant market share—mostly due to its widespread use in the corporate world where office computers are preloaded with the software and the user doesn’t get a choice—Explorer is definitely uncool. It has suffered from speed and security issues and has been severely hampered by sleeker and more user-friendly browsers such as Safari, Firefox and Chrome.  It is—as Microsoft have gone to a lot of trouble to point out—an outdated product.

Whether or not the new Internet Explorer 10 actually is an improved product is somewhat beside the point of the campaign. Column Five realised that even if Microsoft had managed to develop a product that was much closer to the level of its competitors, years of brand damage couldn’t be undone by a hard sell along the lines of ‘Internet Explorer 10 is NEW and BETTER and you should try it!’ And so they turned to the tried and true advertising technique of blurring the line between product and consumer emotion. As Greg Foyster notes in his article on advertising, there came a point in the twentieth century when ad companies had realised that instead of selling products based on their inherent features, they could make a lot of money by ‘[linking] the consumption of material goods with non-material needs, which were endless.’ The result is an ad like ‘Child of the Nineties’, in which Column Five and Microsoft aren’t selling you Internet Explorer—they’re selling you nostalgia.

I’m guessing that probably close to eighty per cent of the people reading this blog were born sometime between 1985 and 1995, thereby making us ‘children of the nineties’. For most people, the memory of childhood is pleasant—an innocent, carefree time unburdened by the stress of adult life.  I’m sure there are at least a few objects in that ad that you distinctly remember owning, using, wearing, or playing with. The hyper-realistic images presented in the ad help transport you back to a seemingly less complicated, happier time.

Column Five and Microsoft hope that this nostalgia will get intertwined in your brain with Internet Explorer when you watch the ad, and even if you don’t start using the browser, you hopefully will have started to change your perception of it. As Column Five themselves note, ‘that’s the impact we wanted more than anything: a reframing of IE’s relationship with Gen Y.’ Since the 1980s modern advertising has been as much about selling you a brand as it has been about selling you a product. And in this case the brand is of primary concern anyway, because you don’t actually have to buy IE10—it’s available for free. It is brand perception—not price—that has a major influence on your decision to use the Internet Explorer or not.

To an extent the ad has been successful. It has struck a chord with many tech bloggers and online commentators about Microsoft’s ‘creativity’, and has also given the company a great starting point from which to launch IE into the 21^st century. But I do wonder whether the campaign will achieve its longer term goal of actually getting people to use Internet Explorer. Browsers are such unobtrusive things when they work well and many people only made the switch to other browsers when Explorer became virtually impossible to use. To this end, if you’re happy with your current browser, and the new IE offers a similar experience, why would you bother to switch back? Microsoft have done a good job of attempting to wipe the slate clean and starting again with IE, but if they really want people to embrace the browser in the future they will once again have to become trendsetters and not simply copycats of already successful products. The effectiveness of the nostalgia approach is limited, and somehow I can’t imagine Microsoft waiting another thirteen years before they attempt to make Internet Explorer appear ‘cool’ again.