What an interesting article!
A few thoughts were triggered while reading this… I definitely connect with the idea that our communication skills have been very dependent on the technology available to us. Examples that come to mind are from back in the day when cell phones didn’t exist. gasp! People weren’t as connected to each other because if you weren’t at your house to place or make a call, you just couldn’t reach someone, or be reached. Now, with the lovely invention of cell phones – people are talking ALL the time. In fact, I feel naked without my cell phone and check it far too often. It has even become my clock now… but that’s another story.
Another example is text messaging. Because we are limited to a certain number of characters in our texts, we are forced to use shortened words and a whole new text lingo. We have to completely alter how we communicate because of the form we’re using. And to take this even further, since children are texting and instant messaging online far earlier in life than any other generation, I speculate that their communication skills will some-what suffer because of this. If not suffer, they will definitely be altered because of this new form of abbreviated writing.
Now, back to the main point of the article, “How Google is changing the way newspaper headlines are written”, I definitely see the positive sides to more straight forward headlines. This makes searching for what we need far easier, however it severely limits the journalist’s creativity. In my personal opinion, I believe the style of the headline should depend on what kind of article or work it is. Obviously, if it is a satire article more creative headlines are expected. But headlines that are too obvious are going to make for a snooze-fest online.
“The human readers of blogs are beginning to behave like bots, too: Quickly scanning for semantic meaning and ignoring everything else. So maybe optimizing for searchbots isn’t a bad idea — because you’ll also optimize for humanbots.”
I don’t want to become a humanbot… and quite honestly, with all the technology that is being developed and the number of hours we spend online per day, it is a fear that only keeps increasing. There is simply too much information online and therefore, creativity is falling by the wayside.
1. How do you forsee creativity diminishing online? What other forms of communication rely on technology?
2. If headlines lost creativity, what implications would that have on newspaper popularity? How might it affect the speed of the dying newspaper?
