"Twitterization" of Business Communications

[catherine]

It's been interesting to me to watch a trend in report-writing preferences by my clients. I'm in market research, and it used to be a report was a written report with bullets, and subbullets, and there might be a bolded statement that summed up the point of that particular page or section--kind of a headline.

But more and more my clients are refusing to accept traditional reports. Reports are now expected to be "picture books"--some words, but everything made very visual with photos, and graphics, and illustrations, and pages broken up with columns and different colors. You can't have a page of pure text anymore, or the client will rebel.

I'm wondering if this is because the younger generation has been "trained" to absorb information predominantly via visual cues. Not only that, but with the advent of Facebook and Twitter, people expect to read very short blocks of text that don't need much context.

Has anyone else experienced this? It's just an observation I find interesting. I don't really mind doing reports that way--it tends to be kind of a creative challenge, but it just seems that written communication has become a completely different animal than it was even a decade ago.

[Miss Cellane]

i think another factor is that this look is trendy. And a lot of businesses want to keep up with the trends. And if they market to a younger crowd, the business knows what the younger people expect to see.

It's not just market reports. It's the news. It's articles on the web. Everything is a video or a slide show. What text there is gets chopped up into little bits. You look at a page of text and there's pictures all over the place, various columns and boxes and call outs. It's difficult for me to figure out where to start reading on the page, let alone what the most important bits are. And it takes a lot longer to put together than just plain text with a picture or two and some captions.

I guess I'm an old fuddy-duddy, but I look at pages that are 75% graphics and I start wondering where the information is--I'm just so used to the text being the main thing and the graphics backing the text up, instead of the other way around. And because I don't trust graphs and such--you can make numbers do anything you want them to.

I guess I prefer lots of words instead of lots of pictures. I need the context.

[sweetana3]

I really enjoyed reading the NewYorker while on a trip. Long dense 6 page articles. It was great. I hate trying to read Time magazine since it is all pictures/graphics or highlights.

[herbgeek]

I find this trend of visual cues gaining ground in customer support documentation as well, and I'm annoyed. Everything is a Youtube video. What annoys me is that when I have a pdf or paper document, I can quickly scan it to find what I'm looking for. With a video, I have to sit through the ENTIRE thing.

[iris lily]

catherine, that's interesting, I had no idea.

I am getting old and I like less text. Bring on the images, I like that!

But herbgeek is right, who wants so sit through an entire linear presentation of information, I like to scan. We will get the morning newspaper but I skim it.

[ApatheticNoMore]

What annoys me is that when I have a pdf or paper document, I can quickly scan it to find what I'm looking for. With a video, I have to sit through the ENTIRE thing.

+1

What also annoys me is that I've had jobs where I was asked to be more visual (not currently) and the thing is I am NOT a visual person. I'm a verbal and logical person.

[cdttmm]

I'm wondering if this is because the younger generation has been "trained" to absorb information predominantly via visual cues.


Sadly, it's so pervasive that is now the only way to "train" them. I teach organizational behavior to undergraduate students and last semester students hated the textbook that we used. In my opinion, it was your traditional management text, somewhat dense, but straightforward and to the point. We went to the newest version of the textbook this semester and the students love it. Why? Because "it's like reading People magazine." No joke. That is a direct quote from one of my students. The book is so full of pictures, charts/graphs, other graphics, quotes from famous people in a flashy font, little stories in the sidebars. Personally, I find it incredibly distracting to read as I find I read the main part of the text and then have to go back and read all the boxes of information/stories/etc. that were in the chapter in order to fully understand what the chapter has covered.

Oh, and their attention spans (this is 18-19-20 year old students) are that of gnats. If, during a class discussion, someone tells a story that is longer than 90 seconds the rest of them are completed checked out. Thankfully I operate extremely well with limited structure in a classroom so we hop from class discussion to small group hands on activities to videos to discussion questions to individual activities during every class period. Some days I feel like I'm teaching kindergarten.

[leslieann]

Maybe I fall into the fuddy-duddy category too, but I have trouble organizing information that comes at me in bits, bytes, and captions. When students read that stuff they often bypass the text and thus bypass the information that they are likely to be tested on.

For me, I need the organization of ideas that comes with adequate paragraph structure. I do find that I prefer shorter paragraphs these days, though, and more white space for organizing the visual information.

I HATE HATE HATE searching through an article find out the main idea and then searching again to see what the support is for that idea. That's the trouble with poor writing, of course, but it happens even more overtly when the information is thrown around piecemeal, in sidebars, photo captions, and little blips in varied fonts.

Yeah, that does sound curmudgeonly, at least. Maybe I've gone way beyond fuddy-duddy.

[JaneV2.0]

This has to be a seismic shift vis-a-vis how we process information, probably computer driven. I used to be content to read dense text and now I want short paragraphs and pull quotes that summarize. My attention span is lots shorter than it used to be, as well.

[Miss Cellane]

I wonder how much television and movies have to do with our shrinking attention span. If you watch a tv show from the 50s or a movie from the 40s, you will notice that the scenes are much longer, the actors' speeches are longer, the camera holds still much, much more. These days, 30 seconds is all it takes to deliver a news story. TV shows are shot with shorter scenes, multiple camera angles, moving cameras--there's always something moving on screen. Your attention is constantly being caught by something else on screen. Compare the pace of the old Dragnet series with CSI.

To say nothing of computer/video games, with the blinking lights and constant music. I was taught, back in the 60s, to never study with music or the TV on. Today's kids are serious when they say they can't study without the noise. Even Sesame Street is full of short scenes, bright colors, songs and music.

[iris lily]

This has to be a seismic shift vis-a-vis how we process information, probably computer driven. I used to be content to read dense text and now I want short paragraphs and pul quotes that summarize. My attention span is lots shorter than it used to be, as well.


Exactly! I am experiencing that.