The Cluttersphere

The Persuaders episode on Frontline missed a crucial question. Advertising is filling the mindspace available, and crowding out everything else. It has taken over movies, TV, the internet, the mail, newspapers, every medium with which we interact. We are swimming in the stuff, allowed to pay attention to little else.

So, what does that mean for people and organizations that have messages that are not commercial in nature? Messages that need to be heard, information that the average person really does need to have.

They don't get heard, that's what happens.

There is so much competition for our attention that those who have rational, reasonable things to say get drowned out. In order to get heard, they have to resort to marketing, in one form or another. And thus is credibility lost. The message gets lost in its attempt to work within the medium.

Take a scientific discussion of global warming. A few studies are done, and published in scientific journals. The scientific community responds by calling for more study, and trying to make some people outside the community of the potential dangers. A fine start. But people don't pay a whole lot of attention to the scientific community. Have you ever read a physics journal?

And so, in an attempt to make people aware, more sensationalist message go out. And more. It gets picked up by people whose job it is to alarm people (aka The Media and The Government). They don't take time to develop a rational understanding of the issue, they just grab hold of dire predictions and magnify them. Real data, real information, valid warnings and predictions get set aside because the predictions are made to sound as bad as possible in order to sell airtime or get votes.

Imagine the frustration that scientists must feel. They are responding to the situation in what they feel are appropriate ways. But the message gets away from them. Things are said by media and political figures as if they were fact, and then the debate centers on those inaccurate statements as though they were the original message.

And all because there is so much clutter that the scientists had to yell more loudly than they should have to get any attention at all.

That is the ultimate loss we face from The Persuaders, the ability to communicate clearly and appropriately.

I think what strikes me most about the technical and professional writing is how much time and effort goes into professional documents. I'm looking through a benefits summary for my employee insurance packet. It contains the phrase "Member Co-Payments do not accumulate towards the Out-of-pocket Maximum."

Someone, more likely several someones, thought about that sentence. They spent hours trying to come up with the clearest, simplest way of saying that your copays don't count towards how much you've put out during the year. And then, they had to run it past the lawyers, to make sure there was no liability potential in the phrase.

Further than that, though. Think about Google. I am dead certain that there is at least one person who works there whose only job is to think about that one word. About how it can be improved, in whatever sense, about how that logo, that millions of people see every minute of every day, can be changed. And changed in a way that improves their image without diluting it.

That person knows that logo. Knows every pixel. Thinks about it while on vacation. Sees it burning in the night behind eyelids closed in sleep. All that effort, just to extract the maximum possible value out of six letters.

If you want some idea of how hard this is to do, try this writing exercise. Your task is to write a story with exactly fifty words. It must have a beginning, middle and end. It must be a valid story. And it cannot have any more or less than fifty words. Now do that every day, for a paycheck. Tell me that's not hard work.