Simply Communicating

One of the links you'll notice on my blogroll is Baskin Dim Bulb. This is a marketing blog written by Jonathan Salem Baskin. I don't know him from Adam and I don't recall what first brought me to his blog but I was impressed enough to immediately add him as a site I wanted to keep track of.

Many of his posts are very heavily business related and I don't read them because they have little to no application in the realm of state-funded education. Once in a while, however, he points out some boneheaded marketing approach or lauds a very good one. He also has some really insightful observations about communication.

Today's offering is called "Text is the New Multimedia." It speaks to the ineffectiveness of video or other "cool" multimedia experiences and how many businesses fall short when utilizing simple text (as in a press release excessively heavy with meaningless adjectives). What caught my eye was this:

As opposed to video, text is a "hot medium," if you buy into Marshall McLuhan's theories about media (and I do, for the most part). Even when viewed online, words engage a single sense, and thereby establish a direct connection that is richer in specific information and meaning than more participatory, or "cool" multimedia experiences.

When we're blown away by a video, we translate it into words to label our reactions, code our memories, and subsequently share our thoughts. Even reduced to tweets and abbreviations, text remains the most facile communications engine available to us, only you wouldn't know it from all of the media excitement and agency sales efforts to tell us otherwise.

Maybe that's why blogs and things like Facebook and Twitter are so popular.