It’s not like I’m addicted to Facebook – I’m rarely there – and I’m not even on Twitter. The problem is that the media concept espoused by immediate-gratification written networks is exactly wrong for someone like me.
See, I’m a reader. I inhale four hundred pages in a night. When I worked for TheServerSide.com, I had a thousand entries come through a day, and actually read a few hundred of those.
As a reader, I’m also a writer. I love to read, and as a result, I am a pale imitation of those writers for whom I have admiration. It leads to me saying things precisely, subtly, in some ways elegantly.
Okay, “elegantly” is arguable. But it’s my blog and I’ll use “elegant” if I want to.
Therein lies the problem. Twitter, facebook, even SMS — all want short, concise, easy-to-scan text.
There’s no room for “it’s not like I’m addicted to facebook.” There is room for “i h8 facebookin yawl.” One communicates actual intent. The other gets read.
It’s starting to kill me, actually. I wrote an email to my coworkers today that had this sentence in it: “I have little doubt you’re right,” in reference to a VPN issue being on my end of things and not theirs.
Yet the response was something like “You have a right to your opinion, but here’s how the VPN works, and here’s why we think it’s on your end.”
Yet I was agreeing with the person in the first place. I have a right to my opinion, of course, but why protest when my opinion matches yours? The reason, of course, is that I didn’t say “ur right” but that I did say “I have little doubt you’re right.”
All he read was “I doubt you,” and therefore got the exact opposite of what I’d said and intended him to understand.
Again: killing me professionally. Apparently I’m the one who looks at things, who thinks about how things work, who thinks about how to express things. The one. Everyone else wants 140-character summaries, with more emphasis on succinctness rather than correctness.
I’m doomed.
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