A rchive Date
[ 12-11-2000 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Mass Media ]
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[When buzzwords become meaningless droning
Thankfully, many of today's tech buzzwords are doomed to fade into the obscurity they deserve. And it happens at
Internet speed.
By Jessika Bella Mura
Special to digitalMASS
In a recent New Yorker cartoon, a boy and girl sit on a couch, as if something might happen. "I'm hearing a lot of buzzwords from you, but I'm not getting a buzz," she says. So it goes in the digital business. We may be seeing a new emphasis on substance these days, but some people still talk as if they're only as good as their last press release.
I won't deny the importance of getting on the right linguistic bandwagon. Earlier this week the Boston Globe reported that in light of the sagging fortunes of the incubator model, many such outfits are dropping the word "incubator" from their names.
This kind of verbal costume change has happened before. Remember PointCast and the splash it made with "push technology"? The folks at NewsEdge in Burlington were already running a similar business and debated whether to adopt that expression. "We did," says marketing VP David Scott, "and it turns out it was a mistake." Push soon developed negative connotations and one-time adherents rushed to disavow the term.
Digital-age jargon has reached a wide audience, what with routine use of e-this and i-that. But right now the lexicon is a bit of a mess. You've heard the gibbering, and you may have perpetrated some of it as well. Have you ever talked about "incenting" your customers or the "learnings" you have gained? Are you "channel agnostic"?
My current pet peeve is "granular." Have it mean whatever you want -- it's as "impactful" today as "leveraging" something was yesterday. And about as meaningful.
Joe Pickett, executive editor of the latest American Heritage Dictionary, takes a more benign position. Any slang, he says, comes to some extent from the "natural tendency of people to play with language and to celebrate it with new coinages."
"The digital world is definitely one of the hotbeds of language innovation today," he adds. The question that interests him is "why certain of these words get adopted by the broader culture and others, in fact most of them, die a pretty rapid death."
Flipping through Gareth Branwyn's Jargon Watch dictionary, published way back in 1997, I don't see many terms in current use. (Can anyone say "meatspace" with a straight face at this point?) With the commercialization of digital culture, the trademark techie exuberance enshrined in this language has given way to consultantspeak and marketing lingo.
Nothing if not creative, techies have struck back with the derisive Buzzword Bingo. Meetings just haven't the same since you could track abuses like "going forward" and "managing upward" on your scorecard.
Kevin Lach, marketing VP at Fact City in Waltham, says that buzzwords start out as useful shorthand and then quickly get out of control, especially when newcomers try to guess at an industry's secret verbal handshake. "You get some pretty funny combinations," he says. "People who want to 'iterate ubiquitous metrics' and things like that."
But strip out the faddishness entirely and it shows. Lach says, "Sometimes I might craft some written pieces, going out of my way to have clarity in the writing, but then I run that by some of my peers and they'll say, 'This is very clear, but it's boring.'"
The battle continues, then. Matt Klainer, who's in client development (make that "sales") at About, notes that "viral marketing" has made a comeback now that there's less money to go around. And heaven help the engineers hip deep in their three-letter acronyms. (Those who can't tell one ASP from another have a slew of TLA dictionaries to turn to online.
Just because this language can sound horribly sterile doesn't mean that people don't take it personally. Consider the fracas that erupted a couple of weeks ago when the copy editor for Wired News announced that he was going back on many years of Wired Style to spell email with a hyphen. That's right, a mere hyphen inspired passionate debate. Most respondents asserted that the editor, Tony Long, was imposing some very old logic on a new language that had been created for techies, by techies.
Then again, people like Long put the brakes on the pace of reinvention for good reason. The English language is remarkably stable -- Jane Austen and Mark Twain don't give us too much trouble after all these years, and we regard them as true to their times. In our day, we may err on the side of casualness, but that may not be a bad thing -- at least not until yesterday's papers start looking like something out of Chaucer.
Jessika Bella Mura is the new digitalMASS Culture Columnist, writing about the local cyber-culture. Jessika can be reached at jessika@world.std.com]
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