Sunday, July 02, 2006

Virtual conversations are imaginary; therefore, they are real. Imagining an audience, taunting it, deliberately showing your contempt, you can engage your imagined listeners in an unpleasant conversation.  Even if the talk is internal or mediated through the web, though, the exchange is real. Example Peter Handke, whose first major play was called Offending the Audience, recently won Dusseldorf's Heinrich Heine Prize, with a promised payout of E50,000 euros. But then he went to the former Yugoslavia, a state he feels nostalgia for. He spoke at the funeral for the man who had just beaten the international court of Justice by dying, before receiving a verdict in his trial for crimes against humanity—Slobodan Milosevic.  Shocked to see someone showing solidarity with a politician who had profited from a campaign of genocide, Dusseldorf withdrew its prize (Handke is no longer mentioned in the mealy mouthed description of the prize), editorial pages attacked Handke, and the Comedie Francaise cancelled its production of his latest play.  If you offend your audience, they take their money back.  Handke often says that the language used in conversations between people is like a game, artificial, a bit hackneyed, not very real. So why does language exist?  What is the purpose of language? Handke's jokey answer is that language exists so it can appear in great books. The New York Times sent Deborah Solomon to interview him. She asked Handke, "Aren't we using language now in this conversation?"  Handke said: "The most real dialogue for me is when I am alone, writing."  Heine talks to his audience The poet Heine himself thought that his audience—that vague, floating assemblage of people he could not see, or touch—became real to him as he imagined conversations with them.  As he wrote, Heine sometimes addressed the audience directly: "Eventually, a writer becomes accustomed to his audience, as if it were a rational being. You too seem saddened that I must bid you farewell, you are touched, my dear reader, and precious pearls fall from the bags beneath your eyes. But worry not, we will meet again in a better world, where I also intend to write better books for you. —Heinrich Heine's Holy Hits Translated by Nicholas Grindell, assembled by George Klein. That's the spirit!  --Jonathan Notes Solomon, Deborah, July 2, 2006.  Facing His Critics. New York Times Magazine, Page 13. Heine, Heinrich. Heinrich Heine's Holy Hits, translated by Nicholas Grindell, assembled by Georg Klein, at http://www.signandsight.com/features/686.html 3:49:21 PM    comment []

Sunday, October 02, 2005

Monika Duvinage is created dozens of forms for an Infopath-like application...and hearing about those, I realize: hey, forms are just another way to interrogate the visitor, to ask questions, to collect ideas.  Forms are part of the virtual conversation. No wonder that we now have seminars on form design.  Used to be an esoteric subsection of graphic design.  But now forms mean interactivity. On web applications, much of what we do is fill in forms and hit Submit.  The field names are really implied questions: what is your street address?  What is your favorite color? We know the drill so well we hardly think about the exchange involved: the site is asking a series of standard questions, in a familiar pattern, and we are glad to answer, because we want to make the purchase, or get the white paper, or take advantage of the service.  Of course, we do not paying with a little smidgeon of our privacy.  And for the site, the information gained can be valuable, if seized on by alert marketing folks. Shopping is a (weird) relationship, and electronic forms are the tool we use to engage in this stripped-down, bare-bones interaction--this virtual conversation. Best, Jonathan 11:54:54 AM    comment []

Sunday, July 31, 2005

Writing is just the beginning.  I once met an editor who told me, over lunch at an expensive New York restaurant, that writers are a dime a dozen. Thank goodness he was paying for lunch. But no matter what industry you work in, you must expand from your skill in writing to become an expert in at least one of the following areas. Interface or interaction design Information architecture Usability Translation management, localization, and globalization In all of these extensions of our craft, the key is getting to know your user. Note that I do not call this person a reader.  Nobody reads online: or at least, not until they absolutely cannot postpone it any longer. Before people condescend to read, they navigate, they search, the browse, they skim. They do anything to avoid reading. Yes, eventually, when certain they have found the right spot, they read.  But not at length.  Just enough to get going. Traditional writing jobs, such as reporting, doing technical communication, crafting web content, are going to be downsized, outsourced, and minimized.  Result: the pay will get less and less, as has already happened in the newspaper business. And as well-educated folks in India pick up the work that used to be done by American and European writers, jobs get cut. To survive, specialize.   Yes, you have to be able to write well.  But you also need to learn project management, and you need to be able to show where your work fits into the business, how you are contributing to profits.  Becoming business savvy is critical, and that awareness often leads you into fields that are not traditional for writers. One thing you can do that outsourcers cannot: you can get to know your customers really, really well. In a special issue of a journal for technical communicators, titled The Future of Technical Communication, JoAnn Hackos says that getting to know the needs of your customers is the key to fighting off the low-cost outsourcers. Customer knowledge is the most difficult to replicate by those with little access to customers. (Hackos, JoAnn.  August 2005. The perspective of a management consultant. Technical Communication. 273-6.) Yes, we need to learn new technologies such as XML, and content management, and a few of the related tools like web servers, collaborative software, XML editors, content management systems.   But we have to think a lot bigger.   We have to think about the people we are writing for. If we can show that we know our customers better than anyone else, we have unique value for the organization, whether we are called writers, or usability gurus, or content managers. Understanding what customers need and enjoy-that requires something that you already have.  Imagine that. Best, Jonathan 7:56:27 PM    comment []

Writing’s just the beginning.  I once met an editor who told me, over lunch at an expensive New York restaurant, “Writers are a dime a dozen.”  Thank goodness he was paying for lunch. But no matter what industry you work in, you must expand from your skill in writing to become an expert in at least one of the following areas: •    Interface or interaction design •    Information architecture •    Usability •    Translation management, localization, and globalization In all of these extensions of our craft, the key is getting to know your user. Note that I do not call this person a reader.  Nobody reads online: or at least, not until they absolutely cannot postpone it any longer. Before people condescend to read, they navigate, they search, the browse, they skim…anything to avoid reading. Yes, eventually, when certain they have found the right spot, they read.  But not at length.  Just enough to get going. Traditional writing jobs—-reporting, doing technical communication, crafting web content—-are going to be downsized, outsourced, and minimized.  Result: the pay will get less and less, as has already happened in the newspaper business. And as well-educated folks in India pick up the work that used to be done by American and European writers, jobs get cut. To survive, specialize.   Yes, you have to be able to write well.  But you also need to learn project management, and you need to be able to show where your work fits into the business, how you are contributing to profits.  Becoming business savvy is critical—-and that awareness often leads you into fields that are not traditional for writers. One thing you can do that outsourcers cannot: you can get to know your customers really really well. In a special issue of a journal for technical communicators, titled The Future of Technical Communication, JoAnn Hackos says that getting to know your customers’ needs is the key to fighting off the low-cost outsourcers: Customer knowledge is the most difficult to replicate by those with little access to customers. (Hackos, JoAnn.  August 2005. The perspective of a management consultant. Technical Communication. 273-6.) Yes, we need to learn new technologies (XML, and content management, for example), and a few of the related tools (like web servers, collaborative software, XML editors, content management systems).   But we have to think a lot bigger.   We have to think about the people we are writing for. If we can show that we know our customers better than anyone else, we have unique value for the organization—-whether we are called writers, or usability gurus, or content managers. Understanding what customers need and enjoy—-that requires something that you already have: imagination! 7:51:14 PM    comment []

Friday, July 08, 2005

Where is it?  Not here…not down here…not even on this other page… The missing detail.  The one step I need.  The how to that wasn't there. These days you get big complicated applications with flimsy little Start Here booklets, if you are lucky. Hey, you want a complete manual, go to the bookstore. Or download our PDF, and print it yourself. But the Dummies books are incomplete.  I know, I've written three of them. The editors never know what the topic is.  They just check to make sure you have used the right styles. And most of the writers aren't writers.  They are engineers moonlighting, beginning usability gurus, fledgling UI designers—anyone who can afford to write on weekends.  Real writers can barely afford to write a computer book.  So they get jobs as technical writers…and leave stuff out of the manual.  Why? Casual.  Rushed. Incurious. No imagination. No real work on what the users might want to do. No real exploration of the product itself. No analysis of the competition. Hey, who has the time to know what you are talking about? If you give a damn about your users, put in that extra fact.  Bigger manuals are good.  Completeness is a virtue. And if your content appears online, I don't have to know how many words you poured out.  I only read the steps you wrote just for me.     Prompts for the tech writer who cares: ·        How does the same feature work in different circumstances?  ·        What are all the goals a user may have in mind, when coming to this function?  ·        What problems come up, as you try this function out?  ·        What actions may have to be spun off into a separate procedure?      9:39:45 PM    comment []

Friday, December 17, 2004

How to get yourself filtered out At Email Universe, Christopher Knight points out that if you want to get past Microsoft Outlook’s two built-in spam filters (one for x-rated email, the other for all the rest of the junk mail), you must avoid using a list of words and phrases. http://emailuniverse.com/ezine-tips/?id=1221&;cat=resources Want to test this out?  Send yourself an email with the bad words, and see what happens in Outlook 2003.  To get your email dumped in the junk mail folder, get excited. Use at least one exclamation point!!!, or say you accept credit cards, or offer a money-back guarantee.  Free is definitely an alarm bell.  And using more than one dollar sign in a row is as bad as barking “order now!” or “Extra income.”    The To lines are dangerous, too.  If you address the recipient as a friend, or the public, at the domain, you will get banished. Ditto, if you say you yourself are in sales, or if you boast you are a success. To be sure to be rejected for sexual content, mention the legal age of adulthood, such as 18 or 21, in the subject or body.  Mentioning adults or specifying that your product is for “adults only” will get you banned.  Of course, the very mention of sex in the subject or body will get you filtered, especially if you offer “free sex.” And don’t even think about going for an extra-extra-extra large row of kisses.  XXX is taboo. You would think that a lot more trigger words might have made it onto the list of banned terms.  For instance, what has happened to Viagra, Rolex, and Penis?  And what about all those emails from Rumania, sent at 2 am?  Surely Microsoft could update its filter every time we send or receive, so that the scams and phishing expeditions get caught.  How many banks want my credit card information and bank account number, by email?  For the complete list of words, see Microsoft Office Online: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/HA010450051033.aspx 11:53:02 PM    comment []

Thursday, December 16, 2004

Plowing the Dark Computers make possible new, more efficient, more convincing dreams. Richard Powers’ novel, Plowing the Dark, hymns the long slow drama of the development cycle, dwelling on the technical details as lovingly as a geek in debug mode, catching the lyric moments of ecstatic progress, recording the delusions that lead the industry forward, and the minimalist human interplay among the teams that clash, and struggle across this uncharted continent. His team is developing a virtual reality environment, and Powers has been there, soaked up the wordplay, the technology, the half-intermittent forward progress. The technology is the major character here; what plot there is resembles the memos from team meetings, reporting slow incremental advances, sudden breakthroughs, long, long hours tweaking code. Powers makes the project the center of the book—not the characters, who are just decorated skill sets, with snappy insider jokes masquerading as dialog. The slow growth, the amazing features being added, the technical difficulty—these are the themes that Powers serenades. He loves the Cavern, the virtual environment the team is building, and he fondles every image, technical term, and bit pipe in the project. He meditates on the way the high-tech feeds Hollywood, the military, the financial worlds, and responds to their feedback. For example, Powers describes a new movie as “a heavily chromed rendition of the new Aladdin and his wonderful data glove.” Immediately, he laments that the team is being “left in collective imagination’s dust.” And within a few lines, one of the interchangeable geeks is saying, “We’re engineering the end of human existence as we know it.” You have to give Powers credit for breadth of vision. He captures the crazed megalomania of geeks on a roll, the fantasies that fuel the 90hour weeks, working in the screen so long you do not know if it is light or dark outside. The project administrator, named like a Dickensian character for his dominant idea, Freese (time to freeze the software, no?), goes on the lecture circuit, sketching out his idea of the future; The computer would go transparent, more invisible than all its crude, qualified precursors in representation. Talking to data would be like talking to a friend over the phone. Explorers would move through a literal forest of numbers, strolling through their woody representations and singling out by sight or sound or smell the significant trees, the hidden arbors. Powers recognizes that this kind of “techno-evangelizing” smells of salesmanship, and he indulges the impulse, while using the project as a kind of magnifying glass on our culture, doubting while enjoying, digging in while backing out. He reflects on our fondness for imagery, religious taboos on graven images, visualization tools. But this book is not a cultural critique, an attack on computers, or a political argument. It is a total immersion. The language obscures the action, deliberately. Whole pages of commentary go by without our knowing who is talking. Not easy, when one group of characters works in the computer world, and the counterpoint character is a nebbish suffering in an Islamist safehouse. Powers often keeps the language working on both tracks, so we are not always sure where we are—just as if we were in the Cavern, the team’s Platonic cave in which we can watch the streaming imagery real time, thanks to Powers’ verbal arabesques. Powers ignores conventional plot. His heroine is a set of skills, drawn from commercial art in New York to the VR project in Seattle, tied to one of the team members and a composer who is dying of MS—but I make her life seem more interesting than it is in the novel. She disappears at the end, discouraged by the fact that her work is serving the military, and making a profit. So what? We do not care that she leaves. She has been, simply, a device to get us in the door of the project itself. And another character endures captivity in Lebanon, the prisoner of some crazed Islamic fundamentalists. We see hope take over then leak away, and memories come and go, as his personality is stripped away, and he begins to be pure existence—until he slips through his dreams into the VR world on the other side of the globe. The hallucinatory prose suggests he is really there, but not there, like a mouse racing along the baseboard. These two so-called plots are more like leit-motifs in Wagner: they go on forever, and get nowhere fast. So willful is Powers’ disregard for conventional character and plot that we too begin to track the progress of the team, rather than their lives; and we enjoy losing our bearings in this text stream. Bright, verbally adroit, technically obsessed, Powers weaves words in space, freed of their bearings, loosened from the gravity of conventional functions such as description, narrative, and dialog. So what is a book, he seems to be asking. A sequence of verbal signs, a mirage of imagery, an illusion of coherence—a brief tour of another person’s central processing unit. His personality has filtered out a lot—most of the aspects of ordinary life sanctioned by the 19th century novel. But the words remain, sparkling with referents, and the ideas, quick, momentary, glancing, like bits turning on and off. Like a crazed pioneer, ignoring civilization back in the cities of Europe, Powers presses on, working his way through stumps and furrows, clearing new land for others to farm, plowing in the dark. Plowing the Dark, Richard Powers, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0312280122/ref=pd_sim_b_5/103-5339970-4845447?%5Fencoding=UTF8&;;;v=glance 9:26:37 PM    comment []

Wednesday, December 15, 2004

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