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Geekspeak Baffles Web Users
An anonymous reader writes to mention a BBC article on the technology buying public's continued frustration with 'geek speak'. Despite ever-increasing adoption of high tech gadgets in first-world nations, the terms used to describe what these new toys do often elude the people who buy them. From the article: "Acronyms in particular foxed users. 75% of online Britons did not know that VOD stands for video-on-demand, while 68% were unaware that personal video recorders were more commonly referred to as PVRs. Millions of people keep in touch via instant messaging but some 57% of online Brits said they did not know that the acronym for it was IM. 'The technology industry is perhaps the most guilty of all industries when it comes to love of acronyms,' said Mr Burmaster. "
statistics or anecdotes aside...
/. reader? IT professional? a parent? son/daughter to someone struggling with e-mail? parent? then please **TEACH people how to look stuff up!**
there is something troubling about the pace of technology change and tech-language change when it starts to intimidate buyers; alienate populations; exploit the niave...
it is hard to keep pace with new acronyms and insider lingo. harder still to research best-value when buying a new product. how much of this acronym is enough?
are you a teacher? smart ass
give people a fishing pole: google, wikipedia, industry acronym lists, textbooks, reference books. teaching people to be independent researchers is very important. more important in the info-age? maybe. feels like it ot me.
IANALA (I am *not* a language analyst) but I'm pretty sure that since as long as language exists those who have the ability to make up new words or to grasp the meaning of a new word without a lot of explanation belonged to the smarter segment of the population. The faster our development becomes the more important these skills are. We've now reached a point in time where it won't be long before the rate of development has become so great that it is possible for two people to no longer be able to communicate with each other even though they share a common language due to this vocabulary development gap.
:)
/. causes me to reach for the nearest search engine to figure out what on earth they mean.
:)
If you don't believe that try to decipher an SMS message sent by one 13 year old to another
And PCMCIA was a pretty good example, but some of the stuff I see here on
this place could easily be nicknamed buzzword central
MP3 Search Engine
In other news, the sky is blue, the earth is round and objects fall down!
Of course a large percentage of folks who don't use a particular technology don't know the acronyms used to refer to that technology. I'm sure back in the 40s, 70% of the population didn't know that TV was an acronym for television. For that matter, I bet 20 years ago (early days of the Personal Computer), 70% of the population didn't know what PC meant either.
Good job slashdot! If this were fark, the article would get the 'obvious' tag, and the submitter would be deserving of the 'dumbass' tag.
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
I'll grant that PCMCIA was one of the worst ever. However, I still see relatively non-geeky people using it, despite the fact that it was shortened years ago to just PC card. Yet, if I say "PC card", they think I mean a video card.
OTOH (look it up, lazy ones) people just don't care enough to learn anything new -- it's just toooo haaaarrrrd Maybe it's just trickle down from the fist-pumping manager assholes who insist that the world come to them and "present" (how damned obsequious) everything in the manager's own "business terms".
Screw 'em all -- they're obviously too dull to look up or print out one of the many excellent online online acronym dictionaries.
If a teenaged girl can decide she needs a D&C after the rubber busts, her father can damned well find out what a FAQ is. Put that on your P&L sheet, jerk. Stay up with the rest of the class or drop out.
It is bad enough to have a plethora of acronyms, there are names of things that look like acronyms (JAVA, UNIX), acronyms that have multiple meanings (DBM, GPS), acronyms that have other meanings when used as words (AMPS, BIT). One unusual acronym is 'PA' which can mean Power Amp, Public Address, Prince Albert, Pennsylvania, Panama, Physician's Assistant, Power of Attorney, Press Agent, Production Assistant, and probably more.
As technology gets more advanced, less understanding of it is required to be able to use it. My mom doesn't know how to change the oil in her car, but she can still drive it.
That depends on the inherent complexity of what you want to do. You basicly want a car to go in a given direction at a given speed. For that you have a wheel and two pedals (msking it as easy as possible). You have four actions, turn left, turn right, accelerate and brake. Almost everything else can be automated away (or is convieniently forgot like people that don't use turn signs, but I digress).
Using a computer means very many different things to very many people. I assure you that the way I use a computer, it will never ever be particularly easy. There's so many degrees of freedom I'd like, so many different things I'd like to run and so many settings for each, that you can't take away from me. And since the computer seems to be useful for more and more, it looks to me like the complexity is growing rather than shrinking because the flexibility is increasing too.
Yes, your mother could probably use an appliance where the uses are limited down to only a few, and thus the understanding required to use it. It might even be enough to make her happy, but I don't think you can reduce away the complexity of the general purpose computer, because quite a lot comes from it being general purpose. Of course many things could have been done better or more user-friendly or with sane defaults for average people, but I don't think it'll ever become easy.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I've got no problem with slang or jargon in any form.
Just so long as they don't try to teach it in school (Ebonics, I'm looking at you), and as long as relatively standard english (large regional variations apply here) is spoken in professional environments.
A big push in the IT department where I work is to say the whole thing, rather than just the acronym. There is, of course, the issue of things like GNU (which is often used), but we're told to just treat it like a brand name.
110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1
It's too bad this old myth is still being perpetuated. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acronym_and_initialis m the Wikipedia article for a full explanation.