"they tut tut patronisingly and assure me that one day I may understand"
Thinking 'the emperor's new clothes' - Hans Christian Andersen or Sinead
O'Connor version; both are apt.
I don't think this issue is generational as such. The rules (if you will) of
communication are more or less inviolate: if you want to get your message
across it's up to you to use the channels, media and registers of your target
audience effectively. People of any age can and do produce gibberish; they can
also produce communication excellence. I know several people in their twenties
who have produced theses. Each was a masterpiece of well-constructed prose -
propositions supported by well-structured argument. Obviously PhD students are
not representative of the population but it reassures me that people can still
think and write.
Bede
From: austechwriter-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:austechwriter-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Christine Kent
Sent: Monday, 7 November 2016 1:37 PM
To: austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: atw: The challenge of communication in a sound byte world
As most of you probably know, I am largely retired, but do still write a few
training materials from time to time and I am not retired from trying to
communicate with the population at large.
I am politically aware and follow many alternative ways of thinking about and
doing things. One organisation I have been attempting to intellectually
penetrate is a group called p2p which stands for peer to peer. It started as
wiki collecting ways of thinking about computer networks, but grew into
something that deals with how humans network and share information, and also
possessions. A component of it is "The commons". I very much approve of what it
is trying to do in principle. If you look at the home page you will see how
extensive it has become, covering almost every aspect of human endeavour, but
in practice I find it inaccessible and impenetrable.
http://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/
When I try to read much of the material published on the massive p2p wiki, even
in my own areas of specialty, I get lost in words. I read the words, I re-read
the words, I experiment with what I think the words may be talking about, and I
can find no substance. It is all form - clever words - and no function. Or at
least, that is how I perceive it. When I press the authors to give me examples
of how their principles have panned out in practice, they tut tut patronisingly
and assure me that one day I may understand. In other words, the problem is
with the reader. Are they right? Has my brain deteriorated to mush, or are
their words really just verbiage in those cases where they cannot be applied.
I raise this with this group because, as technical writers, we are very
structured. Our most important skill is our ability to structure. But is it. Is
the world changing? Several trainers of my own age I know - people in touch
with students at this time, are saying that they are struggling to find a point
of connection with the younger people they are training, who no longer seem to
think the same way we do. To me, if I stop to analyse what they write, they are
writing a collection of non-sequiturs and are not drawing out any relationship
between these ideas. I try to fill in the gaps and find the connections between
the non-sequiturs but cannot. The net result is that I can find no way of
implementing the ideas. My inability to connect the non-sequiturs is apparently
down to my own inadequacy and not inherent in what they are writing.
Consider this article.
https://medium.com/enspiral-tales/power-1b3dce5f1d29#.jcxmd6fsb
It is published by this NZ group. http://enspiral.com/
It is regarded as being a valid component of the p2p wiki of p2p initiatives
worldwide.
This subject is of concern to me because I have been writing training materials
on creating innovative workplaces, that get the best out of all their workers
by allowing their workers to be the best they can be. So this is something I
have been pretty immersed in quite recently, and personally it is something I
have dedicated a lifetime to, starting with being part of hippy communes in the
70s. How people do or don't work together matters to me, particularly as I am
absolutely incapable of working in a hierarchy. My livelihood used to depend on
concealing that limitation for as long as I could. So I should be able to
extract some practical meaning out of the article above, an article that is
purporting to have designed a new form of working with others that is not
hierarchical. But I cannot. I can extract a few disconnected ideas, but not a
methodology that could be applied in the field.
I gather there is some element of deliberate intent in the non-structured way
this generation is writing. They want to get away from hierarchy, and as
traditionally, information is organised either hierarchically or relationally,
they are trying to find another way.
So consider this site. https://redefineschool.com/about/
It is also about how to teach children to be collaborative and compassionate
human beings (I think). Again I can read the words and watch the videos, and
even extract one or two really good ideas from it. But it is a mess. Their
attempt to bypass structure has made it horrifically inaccessible - to me.
I have always worked on the assumption that the brain, in order to store, and
just as importantly, retrieve information, needs a structure within the brain
to store it. Where we are bombarded with a mass of fractured ideas and given no
structure to help us store them, do we find a way to store them anyway, or do
these ideas get lost? In this second example, I think they are saying that they
spend a year learning how to give themselves the space to be who they want to
be, and another year learning how to create space for others. I think that is
what they are saying because I have studied facilitation methodologies that
specifically deal with how to grant yourselves and others "space". So I grab
the idea that I already have prior data on, and file this away in that filing
cabinet. The rest of this website is lost to me.
|
Now, the crux of what I am asking is - do communicators need to provide context
and tie ideas into neat packages as we have always done, or is there a new
brain out there that can somehow store, process and re-use unstructured data?
Cheers, Christine
0439 979 483
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