CuppaGemma

This is the link to the DesMoines Register, that has extensive coverage of the flooding. This morning the image shown on the homepage was of a man in a sandbagged and waterlogged supermarket. Meanwhile, in India floods have left over 300,000 people homeless according to this Reuters report.

Shucks, I have likely already lost your attention. We skim and browse and our eyes go to the sweet spot with something shiny. Content be damned. No long stories online, give us lists, give us doodads. Really?

Is that what our online world will become, one wholly lost of grace and politeness (Do not waste time with “Dear ” or “Good morning” just what we need to know. Just mishmash aggregations seasoned with widgets, spiced with snark and mixed with advertising?

Slate had a piece on how to get your attention apparently the kind of instructions I would like to find for programming my alarm clock (a short list of points) is the kind of thing people seem willing to engage their attention with online. And the New York Times had an elegy for copy editors in their Op ed pages this week, since clearly no one will notice wickedly awkward grammar constructions anymore.

Does that make you feel a bit drenched in the wrong kind of rain? Isn’t there a value in a longer piece that doesn’t try to give the hard hot sell but actually creates a place for you?

What would happen to Gay Talese’s piece Frank Sinatra has a cold if we reduced it all to bullet points? But true it is the sort of reading that is preferable on paper rather than online.

How we experience words and what we expect to be able to do with them are quite different when we hold a magazine or have seven different windows open in Firefox. But is the online medium confined to be just quick shots that have to have pizazz and link capabilities or can it be the touchstone that still holds our eyes? What does it mean when we choose to print out stories or share them, via email or Web sites with friends?

In 2002 Patricia O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman had a piece in the New York Times called, “Virtual e-mail.” They said, “And the purpose of writing — whether with a pen, a typewriter or a laptop — is to connect with others. When people write well, they connect. When they write badly, they don’t. ”

Tell me how it is please, that bullets connect us? If the medium is abrupt so too is our attention.

Seth Godin is a marketing expert, but I prefer to think of him a man with ideas who knows how to write for the Web. He makes this point in his blog today: “The object isn’t to be perfect. The goal isn’t to hold back until you’ve created something beyond reproach. I believe the opposite is true. Our birthright is to fail and to fail often, but to fail in search of something bigger than we can imagine. To do anything else is to waste it all.”

Perspective is what defines us. There are many people who would prefer complacency than the risk of losing face or not being quite as successful on the first , second or third go around. I think that when you want something, really want it the desire to try and fail has a louder voice than the fear of rejection. So what, fail better next time. So what, continue and be dogged. And so what to anyone who says you shouldn’t. The only person you have to wake up with in the morning, every morning is yourself.

The BBC posted this collection of office speak terms. Jargon we may know and dislike, but somehow has crept or has wedged itself into our conversations. Idea showers- I was hoping more for shampoo and frizz free conditioner. Going forward, well shucks are we supposed to stand still, dance in circles or plummet off of precipes?

It makes you wonder though, what is this thing called communication? To quote Emily Post, “Ideal conversation is an exchange of thought and not necessarily an eloquent exhibition of wit or oratory.” I rather happen to like her quote from the 1922 edition, “The cleverest woman is she who, in talking to a man makes him seem clever.”

She has a point communication establishes relationships and our own private hierarchies. Business speak at times gives the aura of importance to a person or project which may or may not be merited. There is a time and a place of course for our big square voices to command attention. Personally I prefer plain dealing and remembering that we are all just people who tie our shoes and have plenty to think about after that 3 o’clock meeting.