Meaningful Technology, Meaningful Language

When I was asked to give a presentation titled “Putting Buzzwords to Work on the Web” at SXSW 2006, I was a little worried I’d have to give a presentation too glossy for my style. But given the chance to speak at SXSW, I considered it further, and discovered an opportunity to discuss something of interest to me — the language we use to talk about technology.

As I’ve said previously, the language used to describe technology generally focuses on and emphasizes the wrong things. I decided we’ve arrived at this point because, for the most part, it requires technical sophistication to create meaningful experiences on the web, and we’re using the language of the web’s creators– engineers and developers. My conclusion was that in the larger picture, this language is unfitting and unfamiliar to most of the people using it.

The word “tools” is particularly interesting– we use “tools” to make the computer do things– “blogging tools,” “word processing tools,” “photo editing tools.”

But intuitively, blogging is really just journaling—however, we don’t intuitively think of a real-world pen and journal as a “journaling toolset.”

To most of my relatives, RSS might as well be three random letters. But to those same relatives I can explain why content syndication is relevant on the web primarily because syndication is an word they already understand.

Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie did just this at ETech and wowed the crowd. He showed the value of syndication in a simple demo. If he had focused on the protocol or its potential in abstract terms, he would have had little effect. But by focusing on practical purpose, by demonstrating how syndication will be the underpinnings for solving practical problems, people got it.

But I’m optimistic that the language we use to talk about technology will change for the better– as I said before:

I’m convinced that over the next couple years we’ll see this language change because as “content management” evolves from a “tool” into something more meaningful and relevant to a larger audience, the web experiences we’ll have will be influenced by a new crowd, those without computer science and engineering degrees. And just as natural language evolves over time due to sociological and cultural influences, the language of the web will change as a new wave of contributors enter.

So how do we speed up the evolution of the language of technology into something more meaningful and relevant to a larger audience? One small but important step is to actually about purpose, not acronyms. Let’s realize that buzzwords in themselves are empty and meaningless. What is meaningful is purpose.