matt.me63.com - Matt Edgar

Thus somebody - and nobody quite seems to know whom - said of Johannes Gutenberg. But even with the belated arrival of the “w” to make up the Latin alphabet to 26, this once mighty army now seems barely enough to log into Bebo.

There are forces at work.

1. Web-based services demand that users have globally unique ids. You know the score - you enter your favoured username on the Web Too Point Oh site du jour only to find that some random namesake got there first.
2. … but people’s names are not globally unique. I guess I could change my name by deed poll to mattedgar63 but society seems unsympathetic to such innovation.
3. Fortunately many of the new breed of global web services support Unicode as standard. To force the majority of the World’s population to use only Latin characters would be bad for business, as well as deeply un-PC.
4. Kids like codes. No sooner could my son write than he was finding ways to write messages in secret. Language can be used as a tool to obfuscate as well as communicate.
5. Kids (in UK at least) are increasingly exposed to cultures with non-Latin character sets. The Iron Curtain has gone and with it the cosy certainty of Gutenberg’s lead soldiers…

And before you know it, it’s come to this. And this. And this…

25 soldiers? Make that 95,221.

In the graveyard of St Mary’s Church, Whitby, we came across this unexpected result of the interplay between people and the elements.

I love the idea that for some reason, after this tombstone was carved, they needed to change it. Maybe

• extra family members were added
• the original words wore away and had to be restored
• the stonemason made a mistake

So an extra piece of matching stone was neatly added into the original surface. I like to imagine that the craftsman was proud of this patch-up. “No one will ever see the join,” he (I’m fairly certain it was a he) might have thought.

Then the weather took its toll - it’s pretty exposed at the top of the 199 steps to the Abbey site overlooking the sea. The words wore away, becoming harder to read until it was impossible to make out the names or details of the deceased.

Except for one word, the humble conjunctive adverb, because its little piece of stone was a little newer or harder than the original. “I’m not finished yet,” it says.

ALSO…

Recently I’ve been spending time around online advertising people and I’m starting to wonder: if they’re so smart at communicating, do they ever listen to themselves? For some reason this industry has adopted the most aggressive and unattractive jargon - targeting, eyeballs, cut-through, impressions, and so on.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The parallel world of CRM does roughly the same thing but in much softer terms. CRM talks of customers, engagement, response, a lifetime. Yes, the CRM guys may be after only one thing (see Clue #80), but at least they have the decency to tell us they want a relationship.

Why does this matter?

1. because the words we use about people behind their backs shape the way we act towards their faces
2. because they might be listening.

Update 20/04/2008: Similar sentiments expressed by Russell Buckley on Mobhappy: The Language of Advertising

Picture 033

Originally uploaded by mattedgar.

We believe that life is too short to find our own voice, and that it’s easier to copy someone else.
We take some dippy hippy Ben and Jerry’s blurb and add a dash of Dave Cameron Innocent Smoothy mateyness, then we mix it up a bit (but not much). We run the results by a focus group, and the ones that score the best we stick on the box.