I really like it when you speak to me like I’m a search engine
Isn’t it annoying when people talk over your head to someone more important?
Well, OK fair enough, it probably doesn’t happen to you. But it happens to me all the time, at least 100 times a day I would say, and it’s quite demeaning.
How badly does this hurt? Well put it this way. It’s like being patronized, passed over at work and suddenly realizing that you are the elephant in the room that everyone is ignoring. Well, I know that pain, even if you don’t.
Thanks to a combination of cloud computing, the Internet of Things and the abandonment of legacy good manners, all those humiliations seem quite charming now. There’s a whole new ‘paradigm’ of disruptive degradation going on now.
Many people are bypassing me now, to speak directly to a machine. Yes, they seem to think Metal Mickey is my boss now. Being ignored for a human higher up the food chain is horrible, but it’s a thousand times more galling when you’re being passed over for an inanimate object.
My opinion is now a massively low priority, apparently, in comparison to some automaton called Al. AKA Big Al. Or, to give this fiend in electronic form their full title, Al Go Rithm.
This power shift has been going on for years, but everybody was too busy to fill me in on this. They were talking to Mr Gorithm, most likely, and his other robotic alpha mechanisms. Until last week, when a top public relations guru took pity on me. She was probably doing it as some kind of social responsibility obligation, mind, but it helped because she explained why all press releases, white papers, briefings and all forms of communication are now written in an impenetrable language.
They’re not written with humans in mind any more, she said. They’re written for the search engines. That’s why they’re so often full of corporate catch phrases, product names that read like serial numbers and jargon that means nothing in any language used by humans. It’s because the material isn’t written for human consumption. It’s primarily aimed at the Algorithm community that works for search engines like Google and Bing.
That explains why, in many corporate communications, there is a constant replication of facts. I said a repeat of the same information, however, confusing, is worked into every release. To re-iterate, things are said in triplicate, just to please the Google searchers. But those key phrases aren’t repeated too many times, as the search engines are now learning to be suspicious of obvious repetition.
This makes the messages baffling for most normal humans, who don’t normally assimilate information using mathematical techniques, and don’t rank it on the same brutal inhuman priorities. But the agencies that put out this gobbledegook care far less about humans than they do about machines. So they really don’t have time to humanize the message and make it assessable to those of us who don’t have exoskeletons.
So instead, we get the machine’s hand me downs. If information is the vital nutrient of the digital eco-system, we humans are now being forced to feed on the scraps off the machine’s table.
That hurts.
You’re too clever and sensible to let this happen to you, but here are some tell tale symptoms of decline, in case you spot it elsewhere. If you notice this happening to one of your friends, for example, you can step in and do one of those ‘interventions’ which are now so fashionable among the Twitterati.
Watch out for anyone who repeats everything three times, always crowbars ghastly product names into the heading, using MIxeD upper and LOWER case with no logic, ignores all the grammatical rules that humans use, and shuns the conventions of layout that have taken designers centuries to evolve. These are symptoms that the author doesn’t really give a damn if your eyeballs are driven off the page. It’s the machines they want to talk to. You don’t matter.
Which is odd, because machines aren’t cleverer than us. And they don’t have feelings like us. Not yet anyway.
I’m all for the Internet of Things and machine to machine communications. But let’s not chuck the baby out with the bathwater.
