The Passion of Shared Meaning
Kathy Sierr writes in Creating Passionate Users: The new geek speak / neo-marketing language: "We mock the corporate b.s. speak, but have we listened to ourselves lately? "
Adding a picture worth the proverbial thousand words...
"When people are passionate (or even just "into") something, they have a shared lexicon that helps dinstinuish them from those who aren't."
I struggle with groups about the issue of "wasting time defining words." It can be a frustrating experience, but it is also a breakthrough experience, especially for distributed groups. If we don't calibrate on some key terms, we can quickly lose each others meaning. So when Kathy connected meaning to passion, a little lightbulb went off.
From a process standpoint, how can we facilitate conversations around the meaning of words we use that builds on the passion and avoids the pain of more traditional "lets define this and that" processes?
posted by Nancy White at 3:28 PM
2 Comments:
Hi Nancy!
There are some intensely tribal aspects of word choice - deciding who is an an in-group and who is not depending on what language they use, what special words they have mastery and power over.
The real challenge in online identity comes when we have to modulate our language to meet different needs at the same time. In an in person meeting there's just you and who ever else is there - writing for a blog, you're writing for everyone who happens by.
Belatedly, so it is like writing for the unknown. Or at worst, expecting to be misunderstood because you can't know your readers (at least until they speak up.)
Not to stop ourselves from trying to write clearly, but maybe we COULD cut ourselves some slack!
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