communication. community. cognition.
I’d like to thank all of you, my loyal readers, for making this possible:
I know it’s really all downhill from here, but when I launched this humble online thinkspace in January, I never dreamed I would have become the #1 blog in the world!
Of course, I share that #1 billing with some pretty fine company: [Read more...]
(tip of the hat to Ariel Waldman, from Shake Well Before Use.)
This is literally the last post I will write. Until the next one. Literally.
For years, I have joked about the broadcast news definition of “literally.” When you hear that word, what the reporter or anchor is really communicating is:
“Hello, we thank you for listening and paying attention, but for the benefit of all our other audience members who might not take the time to key in on important details, we’d like to offer the following reminder: before the last sentence or so disappears forever out the sieve of your short-term memory, please reflect upon the care and craft of said sentence construction. You may have noticed a subtle inflection that appeared out of place, and here is the explanation.
You see, language is a difficult proposition. Words that appear to have one inherent meaning might also carry a completely different thought or essence once placed in a parallel context. Upon those occasions where the aforementioned word might fulfill the necessary requirements for meaning upon different planes of context, we reserve the right to note that occurrence. While some of these double-meanings are strictly accidental, or the result of some regional differences in casual language, others are given a “Freudian” implication, as though there were subconscious desire attempting to surface from suppression.
If the resulting realization of our attempt at cleverness results in your greater appreciation for our skills as communications professionals, then consider yourself an insider to our great fraternity of brevity and charm. If, however, you view the occasion as nothing more than a trite pun – well, then an intern wrote it. LITERALLY.”
As far as I know, no one is cataloging the vast litany of ‘literal sins’ that are certainly hiding on YouTube or Google Video, but for those of you looking for more mainstream abuses of the word, Ariel says this is the most brilliant weblog she’s seen today.
Literally.
[tags]Ike Pigott, Occam’s RazR, language, broadcast news, television news, Ariel Waldman, communication[/tags]
Here I sit, in Orlando, taking part in a Red Cross communications session. It may be my last visit for awhile.
I was looking forward to sharing many of the projects we’ve been working on at the BlogOrlando conference, but my participation is looking rather shaky for now. I’m leaving up the badge for now, but given the uncertainty of the Atlantic hurricane season, and the certainty of a tighter travel budget, I don’t want to make any promises.
Let’s root for the unexpected, and see if I can find my way somehow.
[tags]Ike Pigott, Occam’s RazR, BlogOrlando[/tags]
I recently wrote about Net Debris – the little unfinished droppings and leavings we scatter across the internet. Recently, I got an e-mail from a young man named Colin McAvoy, reminding me of a piece I wrote years ago:
Dear Ike:
Thank you for contributing this article to TV Jobs. I’m not a member, but I do have the site bookmarked so I can come back and read the advice of broadcast veterans such as yourself. I myself am trying to break into the industry and will take all the good advice I can get. I hope you can contribute more articles to TV Jobs for youngsters like me to read and to better prepare ourselves for what awaits us out there…if we happen to break in, of course. Thanks again. It was a fun read.
I used to get several comments a week from college students, and over time that waned. (Over time, my e-mail address has changed, and somehow has now been fixed in the link at the header of the article.) I hadn’t thought about that article in months, but out nowhere I get a polite reply.
I’d like to think there are many others out there finding benefit in things I’ve written and subsequently forgotten about. I’d rather not think about the impressions they are making about my character, based on the things I’ve written and tried to forget about.
The hidden danger here is we all have so little control over our online oeuvre. Most of us didn’t start on webspace we own – it’s usually someone else’s hosted forum that we couldn’t delete if we tried. Never mind Google’s cache or the Internet Archive.
Maybe I need to take Occam’s RazR “off the grid.” Let it hide from the robots, and be a secret destination for the initiated. What kind of event would it take to make web-publishers so paranoid that they kicked the crawlers away, and refused to add to their Net Debris? Has anyone even thought of that? What would happen to Google’s value if enough people with real content started hiding?
It’ll never happen. That’s what they always say before it does.
[tags]Ike Pigott, Occam’s RazR, internet, blogging, communications, email, Google, websearch[/tags]
