Techno-speaking…

OMG! What do you get when you combine Artificial Intelligence (AI) with artificial English (AKA made-up, social media-driven, acronyms)?  Is today’s techno-speak creating communications confusion?  I mean the English language is complicated enough.  Add in BAM, BOOM, and God knows what else, and at the EOD are we SOL? 

IRL I can’t tell if it’s FOMO or the machines that are driving us towards some new language.  Perhaps it’s just the IOT that we, our children, and our door bells are acclimating to.  It’s not new:

Maybe we’re saving our thumb muscles while operating those tiny little keyboards on our phones that’s behind the emergence of a short-hand slang.  I mean banging on our devices throughout the day (especially while driving our cars) can be strenuous, yes?  Maybe we’re witnessing (i.e. creating) a new “Modern English” for Google: 

Modern English is widely considered to be the lingua franca of the world and is the standard language in a wide variety of fields, including computer coding, international business, and higher education. 

“Lingua franca”, indeed.  Should I say, “LF”?  I see a whole lot of creativity these days with our technology-driven approach to communication.  BTW - who exactly is (or are) the SoMeIn that’s coming up with this stuff?  I wonder if such creativity is essentially costing clarity?  The Digital Transformation Playbook © by David L. Rogers written way back in 2016 offered: 

As technology journalist Alexis Madrigal has observed, “It turns out that our creativity is good but our judgement is lousy.” 

Lousy judgement – that’s not new.  David S. Pottruck told us even longer ago; 

E-mail and voice-mail have, of course, exacerbated the problem in the last ten years.  Unfortunately, for all their convenience, these innovations have made it much easier to believe we are communicating when we are merely informing; if I have e-mailed you, you know it. This presumption frequently escalates from knowledge to understanding, then to consent, and finally to the delusion of wisdom. 

Ah yes, “… if I have e-mailed you… you consent ...”  How many times have we had that delusion of wisdom? 

IMHO, electronic, one-directional, techno-speak-based messaging frequently leads to erroneous assumptions.  For instance, I assumed BAM was a word.  You know like, “I was driving to work and bam I realized today is our wedding anniversary and I haven’t bought a card or a present for my wife yet.”  But nooo; as it turns out, BAM stands for Business Activity Management. 

Then there’s BOOM, which again, I thought was a word.  As in, “When my wife realized I bought her anniversary gift at the 7-11 on my way home from work that night, boom, there went any chance for a romantic evening.”  LOL!  Silly me; BOOM stands for Business Opportunity Optimization Management. (Who knew?) 

Call me kooky, but BAM sounds a lot like what my manager wanted to talk to me about during those sales forecast reviews (which seemed to be the only time he actually wanted to talk to me).  And I think I witnessed BOOM the other day when I was ordering a pizza and being up-sold extra toppings and side dishes by the restaurant’s AI chat-bot! 

I guess we all have to adapt to the evolution of today’s “New English Language”.  We’ll need to pay attention though… what we assume was written by the writer may not actually be what the writer assumed we would understand he wrote. 

Wait… WHAT??? 

GAP (oops – my bad!  I meant GAP) 

When life gets tough we could get a helmet… or… we could leverage the peace and share the power of a positive perspective.