Archive for the ‘Online and social media’ Category

Online overload: we shall overcome?

Posted by Catie Holdridge

Our brains are being re-wired and overloaded with every click of the mouse, according to Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.

Our innate love of the new has found a virtual wonderland online, but the scattered nature of our movements while there could be damaging our ability to concentrate and think creatively. ‘Our gadgets have turned us into hi-tech lab rats,’ says Carr, ‘mindlessly pressing levers in the hope of receiving a pellet of social or intellectual nourishment.’

And we will happily keep foraging, despite being only too aware that the worthwhile information may well be buried amid superficiality, conjecture and adverts for Viagra. Since every nugget of new possibility delivers a helping of the pleasure chemical dopamine into our brains, it’s hardly surprising that so many of us are – quite literally – addicted to our inboxes. A recent poll on business networking site LinkedIn revealed that the vast majority of participants (227 out of 409) checked theirs 21 or more times daily, with one person commenting that he checked at least 180 times a day.

The charge of addiction is even more convincing when people are first forced to do without. A recent study found that people asked to avoid all media contact for 24 hours experienced withdrawal symptoms associated with smokers going cold turkey.

For the experiment, called ‘Unplugged’, volunteers from 12 universities worldwide had to live without access to computers, mobiles, iPods, TV, radio and newspapers for one day. Participants’ diaries revealed they felt isolated, anxious or even afraid, and overwhelmed by the deafening silence of an iPod-less existence. But, for the majority, early panic was before long replaced by coping mechanisms like going for a walk and seeing friends (the old-fashioned 3D variety). With ears freed up, they were suddenly aware of birds singing and their neighbours’ comings and goings.

And presumably such quasi-religious, Awakenings-style moments could come to us all, if we just get off the hamster wheel once in a while. But, after we’ve smelled the roses, we’ll inevitably have to switch back on again eventually. So should we just accept being re-wired?

Tags: Internet, LinkedIn, Nicholas Carr, The Shallows, Unplugged experiment
Posted February 18th, 2011 in Online and social media, Technology | No Comments »

Word choice betrays your personality

Posted by Catie Holdridge

Whatever online persona you may have chosen to adopt in your blog, your deepest personality traits may be given away by your choice of words, a new study has found.

The specific words bloggers use relate to which of the ‘big five’ personality factors dominates in that person. These factors are: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

For the highly neurotic, the most commonly used words were: ‘awful’, ‘though’, ‘lazy’, ‘worse’ and ‘depressing’; while with wild-child extroverts, ‘bar’, ‘other’, ‘drinks’, ‘restaurant’ and ‘dancing’ kept cropping up. Agreeable people happily repeated ‘wonderful’, ‘together’, ‘visiting’, ‘morning’ and ‘spring’, while the conscientious made sure to reiterate ‘completed’, ‘adventure’, ‘stupid’, ‘boring’ and ‘adventures’. For open types, ‘folk’, ‘humans’, ‘of’, ‘poet’ and ‘art’ appeared most often.

The research project – run by Tal Yarkoni, a psychology and neuroscience postdoctoral fellow at the University of Colorado at Boulder – is one of the largest conducted examining the connection between writing and personality.

Thanks to bloggers’ typically prodigious outpourings, Yarkoni had around 115,000 words from each of the 700 or so participants. This larger-than-usual sample meant that the research could go beyond broad topics focused on, and look at particular words that recur.

The results suggest we can’t completely separate our online and offline selves, however much you might want to maintain a particular facade of yourself. And this is hardly surprising, says Yarkoni: ‘Our personalities don’t dramatically change just because we’ve turned on our computers.’

Still, at the very least, it’s probably best to try to keep work and business blogging separate, no matter how lazy, awful and depressing you may find your boss.

Tags: big five, blogging, personality, Tal Yarkoni, word choice
Posted January 27th, 2011 in Choose your words wisely, Online and social media, Psychology/linguistics | No Comments »

Oxford English Dictionary to go online only (probably)

Posted by Catie Holdridge

The next edition of The Oxford English Dictionary probably won’t appear in print, according to the Oxford University Press (OUP), the dictionary’s owner. Instead, it is likely that the third edition will be accessible only electronically.

OED3 won’t be ready for at least another decade, and the decision is not yet final. But when asked if it would appear in print, OUP Chief Executive Nigel Portwood said, ‘I don’t think so [...] The print dictionary market is just disappearing.’

No surprise that this is down to the increasingly ubiquitous presence of the internet and the latest alternative ways to read and access information. The second edition of the reference guide – considered the world’s most definitive work on the language – was published in 20 volumes in 1989. It’s also been available online (by subscription) for over ten years, where it receives two million hits a month.

It seems inevitable that new technology like the iPad will revolutionise our reading habits, but how happy are we all about it? Are those of us sentimental about the feel of paper between our fingers just holding on to a fast-receding past?

Simon Winchester, author of The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary, has come – reluctantly – round to that way of thinking. ‘Until six months ago I was clinging to the idea that printed books would likely last forever’ he said. ‘Since the arrival of the iPad I am now wholly convinced otherwise. And even bibliophiles like him are naturally evolving past pages. ‘I have two complete OEDs, but never consult them – I use the online OED five or six times daily.’

So it looks like the end of the printed word could indeed be nigh. Is it time, then, for techno-sceptics to stop wringing their hands over the demise of books in order to embrace this paperless future?

Tags: iPad, OED, Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University Press, paperless office
Posted September 16th, 2010 in Online and social media, Technology | 2 Comments »

To coin a word or drop a clanger, that is the question

Posted by Catie Holdridge

On misusing or fumbling a word, is it better to hold your hands up to it or to compare yourself to the world’s greatest playwright?

For Sarah Palin, apparently, the answer was easy. Her use of the entirely made up ‘refudiate’ was no error; indeed, inventing it was akin to something Shakespeare himself would have done (oh, when will the comparisons between those two end?). Last Sunday, in response to proposed plans to build a mosque at Ground Zero in New York, Palin begged ‘peaceful Muslims, please refudiate’ in a Tweet. While the message was later deleted, she eventually followed it up with one declaring, ‘Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!’

Of course, this ‘new word’, judged by those with dictionaries to be an accidental combination of ‘refute’ (meaning to prove to be false) and ‘repudiate’ (to reject as having no authority), still wouldn’t quite work in this context, if at all.

More appropriately, perhaps, Palin also aligned herself with George ‘Malaprop’ Bush, the ‘misunderestimated’ president who was ‘mindful not only of preserving executive powers for [him]self, but for predecessors as well.’

The English language always has and always will grow and change. But the question now is: should we all refudiate words entering the language out of sheer unwillingness to admit we got it wrong?

Tags: coining words, English language, George Bush, Malaprop, refudiate, Sarah Palin, Shakespeare
Posted July 21st, 2010 in Choose your words wisely, Language abuse, Online and social media | No Comments »

Writing for the web

Posted by Catie Holdridge

A website is a quick, easy and relatively cheap way to reach thousands of potential clients.

Rich web content is what keeps those prospective clients coming back for more. Most people (75 per cent*) say that content quality is the most important factor governing whether they revisit a website (*Forrester Research).

Yet content readability is one of the most obvious – and most overlooked – aspects of website accessibility. No matter how good the design of your site, and no matter how many users it gets, both are irrelevant if visitors can’t or won’t follow the content.

Of course, websites for large organisations may have several different authors. So it’s easier to slip up on content readability: personal writing styles vary and can lead to confusing inconsistency. There may also be a mad dash to fill pages as soon as they are designed – without enough thought given to subject matter, layout, punctuation, grammar and, most importantly, your site visitor.

Good writing is not merely intuitive. Here are ten top tips on how to improve your site and ensure your content is king.

1. Start with the reader in mind. Ask yourself why they’re going to be visiting a page and what their likely thought process would be. Also, ask what things they wouldn’t be interested in.

2. Use plain English. Imagine a typical customer. What terms would they use? Imagine that you are speaking to them when you write. Read the content out loud if it helps – often it’s the process of writing that causes the problem.

3. Use the active voice, rather than the passive. So rather than saying an area ‘is being redeveloped’, say, ‘we are redeveloping’ it.

4. Structure your sentences logically, by putting the ‘what’ before the ‘why’. So don’t write: ‘If the company makes these changes now, it will immediately improve the service.’ Instead, write: ‘The company will immediately improve the service if it makes these changes now.’

5. Avoid over-long sentences. The best way to do this is to limit yourself to one idea per sentence. (This makes content much easier to write too.)

6. Use punctuation helpfully and accurately. Punctuation may seem like a small thing, but it can make a world of difference. For example, a local authority website recently left the apostrophe out of the following sentence: ‘Residents’ refuse to go in the bins’. The resulting meaning was probably not what the author intended.

7. Be direct. Use the word ‘you’ whenever you can, and address the site visitor directly, as one person. (For example, ‘You can find more information here.’)

8. Talk. If various colleagues provide written information for your website, set up a meeting and decide on a style guide to ensure consistency. For example: use the same subheads and titles; if you use specific abbreviations make sure you all work to the same format. Discuss work in progress as a team so as not to repeat content unnecessarily.

9. Proofread. Inaccuracies can easily be missed. Be sure to print out and proofread the content, as mistakes are much harder to spot on screen.

10. Links. Links can be extremely helpful if directing the site visitor to relevant information. But be careful not to splatter your web pages with links for the sake of it. This can alienate the site visitor from the content they actually require. You don’t want to send them hurtling into the www ether when they could be reading your site.

Tags: web copy, Writing for the web, Writing tips blog
Posted July 16th, 2010 in Online and social media | No Comments »

I tweet, therefore I am

Posted by Catie Holdridge

Thinking about jumping onto this bandwagon. But where will it all end?

So might read my inaugural ‘tweet’ – by definition: an answer to the question ‘what are you doing?’ in 140 characters or fewer – on the micro-blogging site Twitter. And bandwagon begets bandwagon: those not tweeting are bleating about tweeting. The public is being divided into for and against camps; and perhaps the real question posed is: is there anything left now that is considered not appropriate to write about?

Twitter has seen some incredible successes in its young life. It is a popular medium for celebrities, who get to by-pass the media and connect directly with their fans. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign succeeded in large part because he embraced such types of social media. He updated subscribers via the site, keeping them up-to-date on his public appearances and decisions. No doubt this was key in working himself and his message into the nation’s psyche, while reinforcing his image as a modern man of the people.

The potential of Twitter from a marketing point of view is evidently enormous. And so it is working its way into schools and university curriculums. A recent book, by money-making strategist Joel Comm, teaches the ways of Twitter Power – How to Dominate Your Market One Tweet at a Time. Supporters predict a day when users will be able to search ‘the consciousness of the planet’ in real-time.

With a mere 140 characters to work with, Twitterers have no choice but to be succinct; and we Emphasisers are all in favour of keeping it short and simple. What’s missing is content control. Granted, escape from Big Brother (in all its forms) is generally welcome. And of course people have the right to express themselves creatively. But we’re considering writing instructions for this exciting new toy.

The Daily Mail is using the service to send out nuggets of news to those for whom newspapers are just too darn heavy.

The BBC experimented with including Twitter updates in its coverage of the Mumbai terror attacks back in November 2008, in an apparent desire to be first with the news. This rather clumsy attempt to cover a fast-moving story with equally fast-moving technology caused a considerable backlash on their website, amid accusations of inaccuracy and lazy journalism.

Sky news rather glibly (and arguably massively inappropriately) sent tweets out from the courtroom where Joseph Fritzl stood trial for his horrendous crimes against his own daughter.

Of course, skill in writing has little or nothing to do with Twitter, barring perhaps the occasional impressive haiku. What does is the attitude that whether you’ve just survived a plane crash (see the Guardian’s article) or you’ve just sat down with a cup of Bovril, the immediate prevailing thought is to publish oneself.

Faced with this unrelenting, unverified barrage of thought bubbles, will we all have to become active editors of our own (and everyone else’s) lives? Or will we just be tweeting while Rome burns?

Tags: big brother, micro-blogging, Twitter
Posted April 1st, 2009 in Online and social media, Technology | No Comments »

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