Have U noticed how more & more ppl that U know R starting 2 use a vry strange new language when they communicate w/ U in written format? U C it everywhere, in text messages 1st, but now it has consistently expanded in2 all comms forms.
It began with the text message, and that blasted response of “message too long to send” that we all dreaded. Ugh, how am I going to condense a grocery list from a paragraph to a sentence so I can text it to my partner? I guess lettuce could become let us, and cat food could shorten to catfUd.
Yeah, it’s stupid. It’s like saying that people you work with in India are “offshore resources”. No. An offshore resource would be someone working on an oil platform in the middle of the ocean. But back to language condensation.
Ah, I’ve just coined a new term for this madness…Language Condensation. Use it. Believe in it. Share it.
So this LC spread from text into other forms of communication, namely microblogging and status updates (read: Twitter & Facebook). Twitter is easy to understand – you are limited to 140 characters for your microblog/update. You can’t go beyond it no matter how hard you try, so if you want to convey a message you’ve either got to fit it, or split it. But I’ll give you a tip, no one likes part1/part2 messages. If you can’t say it in 140 characters, it’s not worth saying. (or at least that seems to be the mantra of Twitter)
Facebook, which has recently become more twitter-like with its activity stream, does not have the same limits. You can post a status update, attach a URL, insert an image, and pretty much add as many hyperlinks as you want. You can’t put more than a paragraph or so, but it goes WAY beyond 140 characters and can be much more “rich” in terms of media. But still you see this LC going on. We’ve started communicating in micro-updates pretty much everywhere we go online – but now it’s spreading to verbal communication.
I was chatting with a coworker the other day and had to just pause and stare at them a moment. I say chatting, but really it was them walking past my office and delivering their status update as they walked. “On my way to a meeting maybe we can catch lunch later bye!” I have to hand it to them, it was less than 140 characters at least. But come on. Seriously? My activity stream is a human conveyor belt that flows past my office.
“Good morning Heath” (from someone who walked by so fast I couldn’t even see who it was, and by the time I responded they were already half-way down the aisle)
“I’ll be five minutes late to that meeting,” followed by “Can you send me that presentation?” followed by “I can’t get into IM, what’s the bridge number?”.
From all around me I’m hearing status updates in 140 characters or less. We just can’t be bothered any more to come up with a full and complete sentence that expresses exactly what we want to express without fear of the listener missing out on some critical component of the message that will cause them to misunderstand my intentions and raise their eyebrows in a quizzical manner as if they are asking me to repeat myself but don’t want to actually ask me to repeat myself.
Wow…it’s completely draining to use so many words in one sentence. I apologize.
Tuesday. Having coffee. In a meeting. Dr. appt today. Good weather. L8r.
