In an age of highly connected teenagers you’d think, according to the popular stereotype, that young people were living their lives as bedroom recluses unable to be parted from Facebook.
A recent study by Ericsson ConsumerLab of US teenagers paints a different story:
In an era of online social networking, it may come as a surprise that teenagers’ preferred form of communication doesn’t rely on technology. Asked what form of communication they would miss most if it were taken away, the vast majority of respondents replied “face-to-face.” Less than half as many said they would miss texting the most, putting it in second place. Meanwhile, Facebook use came in as only the fourth most popular, after talking on the mobile phone.
Graphically it’s quite stark:
The report goes on to say that although teenagers have a huge array of communications available to them they see them as tools to create real-life interactions. I quite liked the diagram of how Ericcson envisaged how these tools fit into the Teenage Dating Timeline:
Speaking as a father of a couple of UK teenagers it correlates quite closely with the way that I see interactions happening around here.
A fuller summary of the report is here.
It’s a simple question: "What is this document trying to say and to whom?"
I regularly ask this question to myself as I’m reviewing documents.
Most of these documents have followed a template which has been defined through a methodology. Much of the time people have written a document that fulfils what the methodology requires, but fails to communicate the story.
They’ve missed that the fundamental part of any decent methodology is that the document template is there to assist in telling you what the framework of the story needs to be. the methodology is rarely any good at telling you what the story is.
We should all regard ourselves as story tellers.
Without the story we aren’t communicating, if we aren’t communicating then we aren’t adding and value, if we aren’t adding any value then we ought to change so that we are.
(This is also one of the reasons why I dislike long lists of things in tables. They might be full of information, but they don’t tell a story)
I live near to a place called Fernyhalgh Lane and after more than 25 years I am still none the wiser as to the correct pronunciation for it. Even people who have been born in the vicinity pronounce it differently. One thing is certain though halgh is not pronounced halgh. This got me thinking about all of the other places that are pronounced in a different way to the way that they are spelled.
A few years ago we went on holiday to the North East of England and stayed near to Alnwick which is pronounced without the l and without the w. I’ve listened to countless America tourists struggle with the word Worcester. Then there’s Magdalene College at Cambridge University which is pronounced Maudlyn.
So I wondered how many places and things there were that required some level of local knowledge to aid you in the correct pronunciation. After a little bit of searching I came across what is possibly the longest Wikipedia entry I have ever seen:
List of names in English with counterintuitive pronunciations
How does anyone stand a chance of getting it right?
The other week I wrote about how I’d tried to change the balance of my writing so that I was Writing Less to Write More.
The challenge was to spend less time on Twitter and Facebook so that I wrote more consistently here.
The lesson I’ve learnt from this experiment is that there are limits to my writing output. I don’t have enough capacity to allow me to contribute in all of the places I’d like to, I have to be selective.
Over the last few weeks I’ve allowed myself to put the experiment in reverse and to deliberately get sucked back into Twitter and Facebook. This unsurprisingly precipitated a drop off in writing here, it wasn’t a conscious thing, it was just the way it was.
If you are a keen observer you will have noticed that I still wrote the occasional post, but nothing of any quality, or with any consideration. I wrote the easy stuff mainly in the Because it’s Friday category.
So I have a choice, I can contribute lots of little bits to all sorts of social media places, or I can contribute in a considered manner – I can’t do both. It’s a personal preference, but I think I’d rather be more considered, so it’s back to Writing Less to Write More.
One of my favourite blogs is Talk Normal.
I work in a business that has a wonderful ability to use and abuse words. Tim Philips’ work is a wonderful antidote to the rubbish that assaults my ears every day.
He’s recently published a podcast which everyone who works in the IT industry should list to and take stock.
On answering a question about how this has become a problem Tim has this answer:
When the Internet came along there were all these exciting companies, run by people who really had never lived in the real world, but they were presented as the business innovators for the next generation, so we liked to copy them.
He then goes on to link this observation with the rise of email and other IT communication technology to produce the perfect setting for the plague of word abuse to spread.
Perhaps we should also be the ones to take up the challenge to talk normal?
Talk Normal Podcast 1 by Abby Coften
Update:
Episode 2 and Episode 3 are now available also.
I’ve often thought that schools should spend much more time teaching people to tell stories.
Universities should, in my opinion, have story telling as a basic requirement for all courses.
I sit in so many meetings where someone stands up and talks through a set of slides. I use the word ‘set’ to describe a random collection of information.
The slides themselves aren’t coherent, the order of slides isn’t coherent, in short there is no story.
People connect with story, stories travel and live on beyond the event itself. Tell a story and you’ll be memorable.
One of the best lecturers I ever had at university was my ‘Stress’ tutor. He regularly started lectures with a broken component. He’d then tell the story of how this component got broken. This story would always be told with glint in the eye and an air of mystery.
Our job was to solve the mystery in order to complete the story. He’d then tell us the real end of the story. I still remember one of the stories about a tow bar component that had actually led to someone’s death – that’s nearly 25 years ago.
I’m not a big fan of signs, particularly ones that state the blindingly obvious, so today post contains a selection of imaginatively modified ones:
There’s plenty more here, but be warned I picked the polite ones.
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