The influential Aamulehti newspaper has begun criticizing Twitter. “Messages are usually one-liners and rarely have content. For the most part humbug… People’s posts are mainly nonsense and harmful to themselves.” Editor-in-chief Jorma Pokkinen has already declared himself an opponent of social media, but just last week he attacked the Finnish Lutheran Church’s ‘twermons’. “The new religion’s name is Twitter-Tweet. People can’t find great truths in coffee-shop chatter, and that’s all that tweeting is. The article I’m writing has 3671 characters; I’m off to get a coffee and figure out how to get that down to 140 characters.” Elsewhere in the paper interviewees from carefully chosen groups praise the superiority of paper compared to electronic communications: “The reader has not rejected the printed paper”, “My paper is a part of my breakfast”, “I’m not going to start my computer; I want to read the paper.” Condensing Pokkinen’s message into a single tweet is actually simple: “Don’t use social media—subscribe to our paper.” (46 characters). I do understand that the print media going to defend its own business interests; they’re not ready to admit, “Hey, guys, we’re losing this game.”
The word of the week is augmented reality.
The ARea 13 seminar was organized in connection with MindTrek to explore augmented reality. AR means bringing virtual material into the physical world. The seminar demos illustrated how reality can supplemented by our human creations – for example by using the free Wikitudeapplication. I was particularly inspired by the Nomadi smartphone application which gives you a virtual tour of Tampere or helps you create and share your own travel route. Nomadi will automatically record the route and you can add points along the route, together with your own comments and pictures. Useful reality supplementing is still taking baby steps, but the experiments are creating the future. Big issues are usability and the quality of the content: ads, vague text and video on the cell phone screen do not provide a very addictive experience. But while we wait for smart glassesand a better user experience, we can examine augmented reality guidesand try out ways to use them.
The word of the week is MindTrek.
MindTrek, a three-day conference for digital media and business, is a distinctive event. This year, as sometimes in the past, the theme seemed unfocused – “Discovering Tomorrow” – but in a way that also increased the surprise and appeal. Ville Oksanen delivered an inspiring talk on privacy and cloud services. He contends that Finland should present itself as a cloud service center. Finland’s advantage, apart from location and know-how, is a solid reputation for protecting privacy, a reputation untainted by illegal surveillance. The shining star of the seminar was of course Steve Wozniak, who was interviewed via video. While not saying anything revolutionary, the laid-back legend discussed the importance of technology in learning. He pointed out that Apple has always been able to show how its devices improve the user’s quality of life. Teemu Arina illustrated the life of a biohacker: when he got ill he began to measure and analyze his body functions and, based on the data he found, built a personal nutrition and fitness program instead of seeking treatment through drugs. The most interesting MindTrek panels dealt with crowdsourcing. The good news is that no one wonders any more whether people will participate. Pia Erkinheimo argued convincingly that people will participate in crowdsourcing if it is well organized. – And speaking of organizing, MindTrek’s scheduling and communication were often haphazard. Along with discovering tomorrow, the organizers needs to discover better preparation.
The word of the week is language column.
One of my most enjoyable readings this summer was Anne Mäntynen’s dissertation ”How one talks about language”, because its observations apply so well to The Word of the Week. Her study deals with the rhetoric of language columns, and her source material consisted of 204 newspaper articles. The structure of such articles has remained surprisingly similar since the 1900s: they usually begin with an example and end with a recommendation. The article opens with a quotation or a reference, as well as a question. That opening often includes a loose reference to time –often, nowadays, a few years ago – or, nearly as often, connects some aspect of language to a current debate. The text itself proceeds from problem to solution, from question to answer, from specific to general, or vice versa. Writers describe good language with adjectives like short, clear, smooth, and bad language with words such as redundant, obscure, awkward. Mäntynen’s study insightfully illuminates how a writer builds expertise into his story. He appeals to authorities, shows that he knows them, and includes examples from his own work. The key authorities here are the Finnish Language Board and the Institute for the Languages of Finland in addition to dictionaries. The Finnish word for such language columns, pakina, could be translated as anecdote in English, though sometimes the only person who’d find them amusing would be another Finnish linguist.
The word of the week is the Cyrillic alphabet.
Last week in Sofia, I encountered a shortcoming in my knowledge: I haven’t ever studied the Cyrillic alphabet. Simply having to deal with a foreign language makes ordinary tasks a challenge; a foreign script poses a real usability problem. My visit also corrected a few misconceptions: 1) Even though we often speak about Russian letters, they were originally Bulgarian. The alphabet was developed in the 800s for Old Church Slavonic, the predecessor of modern Bulgarian; “Cyrillic” comes from Saint Cyril who helped create the first alphabet for Slavonic languages. 2) I had thought that the Greek alphabet would be quite close to the Cyrillic. It is not, even though Cyril was from Thessaloniki and the characters were developed from the Greek alphabet. 3) You might assume that signs in the center of the capital would appear in both Cyrillic and Latin characters. You would be mistaken. Next week, my trip to St. Petersburg will provide further study of the Cyrillic alphabet. – Finally, a quick quiz question: You can write a name of a certain Finnish city in the same way with either Latin or Cyrillic letters. What’s thecity?
The word of the week is the non-fiction writer’s course.
The fourth session of the non-fiction writer’s course arranged by the Association of Finnish Non-fiction Writers dealt with social media. For background information, I used Twitter and Facebook to ask authors and other book people about their work-related use of social media. Over thirty writers replied and the answers suggest that an isolated writer can find a professional community online. Keeping current with your field is vital for a writer, but he needs to use filters to avoid information overload. Many respondents said that they are choosing motifs and interviewees for their books from online discussions. A few writers have tried out different plot twists and literary approaches online prior to writing the final version. Information flows smoothly in social networks, as long as it’s not overt marketing. Authors have also reaped concrete benefits: contacts, job offers, even publishing contracts. So online discussion brings a lot of good, though it also takes time from writing. As experienced IT-writer Petteri Järvinen summed it up: You can’t have them all.
The word of the week is the task force to fight officialese.
The Ministry of Education has set up a task force to promote the use of plain language in government writing. One of their first acts was to solicit feedback about official communications. In my feedback I drew attention to communications training in the public sector as well as the use of social media. Training in plain language needs to reach the experts, not only those who produce the final documents. In the public sector, we need to increase awareness about language and its meaning: basic skills of composition are not enough when writing is the core of the work. Also, training methods should be adapted to highly-educated busy professionals. Social media, in turn, brings an important new element to public sector: interaction. Direct conversational communication teaches people how to simplify complex issues; this has been the case at the Finnish tax agency and at Kela, which effectively guides people via online discussion forums. Everyday speech closes the language gap between public officials and citizens.
The word of the week is the non-fiction of my life.
Last week the Tietokirja.fi (“Nonfiction.finland”) event filled the House of Science. This literary happening began in 2007, and from the start the most popular topic has been The Non-fiction Books of My Life, on which well-known writers from Erkki Tuomioja to Madventures twosome Riku Rantala and Tuomas Milonoff have shared their personal choices. After numerous speeches I started to think about the books of my own life, and I ended up with the following list: 1) The New Dictionary of Modern Finnish (along with its predecessors) I chose simply because I use it several times every day. No other book comes even close to that kind of use. 2) Second, I picked Wikipedia, as its way of production is revolutionary. Wikipedia’s critics need wiki-literacy. 3) My third choice is Alertbox, Jakob Nielsen’s collection of columns, which has had a decisive influence on how I see online communication. I deliberately selected the online columns and not one of Nielsen’s numerous books. Nielsen effectively refutes the popular belief that books are always better than online materials. High-quality books can exist both online and on paper.
The word of the week is numbers.
How should we express figures so that readers can easily understand them? On signs, readers are often expected to know all the specialized codes, with no effort to make those codes clear to the average person. In financial decisions, enormous figures sometimes receive scarcely any notice while minor expenses provoke furious debate. Large numbers need comparisons, or else conversion to a more understandable form: The average taxpayer pays 100 euros annually for police services. According to Auli Kulkki-Nieminen, in plain language, only the most important figures are exact; other information is rounded off or otherwise summarized: 26 130 square kilometers becomes 25 000 square kilometres; 54 per cent of women becomes more than half of women. While precise figures imply reliability, the essential thing is that the reader can grasp what the figures mean.
The word of the week is The Top 10 List from the Language Police
Language is a usability issue. In today’s society, every activity involves words. Work means writing, exploring means reading, decisions mean documents. We deal with customers via e-mail, and with online colleagues through writing. Everyone writes and everyone reads, but relatively few people are trained to write readable documents. Often people who edit the work of others lack the authority to change practices, or the expertise to rewrite content. In the workplace, plain language is everyone’s responsibility, and we need a language revival to understand it. How we use language matters; in the public sphere, good usage saves time (which means money) and improves client satisfaction. In my role as The Language Police, I’ve produced a Top Ten list to show Finnish municipalities what clear language looks like in action. Those who order this presentation, intended for managers, technical professionals, planners, and anyone who needs to write effectively, will also receive a free book (both are in Finnish).
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