The written word is one of society’s foremost methods of communication. On a global level, billions of words are written every day. Despite this, the written word as we know it could be perceived as losing the value it once had. This may sound complete nonsense, but hear me out. The English language has developed beyond measurable significance since its birth and through the stages of Old English, Middle English and Early Modern English. Now we have entered a new era, where alternatives to words are being sought and found.
The acronym, despite pre-dating Modern English itself, has seen a rise to prominence in recent years. Driven undoubtedly by the rise of internet communication, terms such as LOL, DK and LMFAO now have a home in the vocabulary of the ‘broadband generation’. Resultantly, these socially accepted acronyms have, in instances, replaced the use of words and terms used 15 years ago. The rise of acronym usage in general language has been accentuated in commercial fields where terms such as POV, NPD and CRM (to name a few) are dominant. Once we delve into individual organisations, we see that often corporations have virtually developed their own commercial language, containing few words and many acronyms.
The increased use of images in society has also had an effect on the impact words have. Any organisation or brand with a widespread public identity now has a logo. Often it is this logo/image which people associate with – not the word which spells the organisation or brand’s name. Why do brands need to use words to identify themselves? Simply put, they don’t. A brand logo not only has linked images and messages, but they can be designed to aesthetically resonate with consumers – something words often fail to do. For example, what does the word Apple mean to consumers – a fruit, a flavour or a technology brand? Alternatively, what does the fabled Apple logo mean to consumers? It means innovation, design, intuitiveness and premiumness – to name a few of Apple’s core brand images.
To this end, Fred Barnard famously said ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’. The rise to prevalence of infographics means this is now truer than ever. A whole field of expertise now exists, dedicated to turning thousands of numbers and words into telling images. Whilst this field has actually been operating since the 1970’s it has recently come to prominence with practitioners such as Hans Rosling even finding themselves on mainstream television.
Given the forces reducing the value of the written word, the question to be asked is; why is this all happening? The answer is in fact fairly simple. We live in a society where time is a premium and thought is currency. The net result of this is that people would rather quickly scrawl an acronym than invest time and thought in the comparatively longer time-old tradition of writing in the full. This philosophy is epitomised in the world of blogging. The blog phenomenon which started in the 1990’s has now developed into what is known as ‘The Twittersphere’. No longer can people spare (or be bothered to spare) hours of their own time writing paragraphs regarding what they are doing when the current trend is to do so in 140 characters. Given the word limit in this community, acronyms are becoming even more widespread to keep south of 140 characters. Furthermore, the development of smilies J (even Microsoft Word now has a smilie function) and #hashtags means that fewer words are being used in the popular, word averse world of Twitter.
That all said, often it is not the writer who moves away from the traditional usage of words, but the reader who forces them to do so. Again driven by a time-poor society, we now live in a culture where people do not demand to read page after page of information, giving birth to a ‘Summary Society’ where it is often demanded that content is distilled into as few words as possible in order to save the end reader time. To meet this demand, especially commercially, words are being used with a ‘less is more’ approach – with schematics and infographics being actively encouraged to take their place.
The continuing decline of the value of the written word depends largely on whether acronyms, infographics and such the like continue to grow. Will this continue to the extent the value of the written word depreciates further? Possibly, BWDIK?
Copyright © 2011 Northstar Research Partners
