Focus Tales

Well, it's coming up on the anniversary of a full year of this blog (in April) during which I have not posted an entry.

Too much has happened in the intervening time to write about. Most bloggers would be thrilled by this wealth of events, given that these are the stuff of which life (and hence, blog entries) are made. I refer, of course, to the three Rs: Remarriage, Retirement and Relocation.

During this embarrassingly long interval of hyperactivity with no literary output, the phenomenon of social networking has taken a stranglehold on the web. Facebook in particular has become as daily an addiction for the generations behind mine as Days of Our Lives is for my own age group (66+). Twitter likewise, is filled with Tweets, or is it Twits? And these are only two components of a whole movement, abetted by the ubiquitous cell phone/camera/movie theatre/game parlor that has become a tool for the upheaval of entire societies and cultures.

To post to a blog requires reflection, introspection and above all, time. Where did all that go?

In the old days (a couple of years or so ago) it would take, at a minimum, ten or fifteen minutes to sit down and write anything on a blog. Even assuming the computer was already running, there was the ritual of having to log onto the blog site, run the editor, type up the entry, proofread it, and then post it (and in many cases, correct it post haste). Blog hosting companies soon adopted the idea of simplifying posting by allowing direct posting from an email message, and now, of course, you can post voice messages directly from your phone.

Other writers have mentioned Attention Deficit Disorder as a symptom of our times: some call it The Demand for Instant Gratification, and the doddering amongst us find Impatience to be a sufficient description of the trend. My generation experienced it mainly on three occasions: Christmas morning, sermons, and the last week of school.

If it is true that humanity is speeding up and becoming more interconnected at the same time, there is a down side to this trend, which has already shown up in, for example, Facebook. Some call it over-sharing. There's TMI (too much information). The stretching of privacy boundaries until they snap. The arbitrary changing of corporate policy or rules while the game is on. The inattention to craftsmanship and detail. The elevation of the trivial to the consequential.

Along with the ratcheting up of the pace and triviality of mass communication (and to think that most of this junk is now stored and indexed and retrievable), comes an overwhelming need to limit intake and filter content. It gives me pause to think about the hours of my life that I have irretrievably wasted on reading comments that follow even a New York Times piece, or a home improvement site. It becomes an addiction, like gold mining: panning the muck for that valuable gem of insight or information that can instruct me, enrich my experience, or save me effort, when the odds against success are those of a Reno blackjack table. Even the search engines are swamped.

When I ponder my tendency to waste these hours (which are now more available, given that I finally smartened up and retired), I conclude that I'm as needy for community wisdom as a teenager is for social interaction. The difference is, a younger person has little difficulty in mastering the technology, while I can't seem to hit the mute button on the remote without changing the channel or turning the damn thing off.

I cannot multitask, talk on the phone while watching TV, boil water unless I remain in the kitchen, or converse with an Android. So what are my options? This post started an hour ago. I have only one option: to go from Point A to Point B in a single, straight line, pausing only to deal with spelling, grammar and composition. I suppose that during this interval, a million or more Tweets have flown by , and another 3/4 of a million people have logged onto Facebook.

As I gaze at the Ohio River in flood, a slowly turning raft of sticks, twigs, branches, bottles, tires, styrofoam and plastic revolves just offshore. Occasionally an object will break free from the vortex and rejoin the current, only to become entrapped in the next whirling mass.

The burden of churning flotsam reminds me of social networking.

Let me make this perfectly clear

Nixon used to say that phrase a lot, didn't he? It was right up there with "Make no mistake", and "I am not a crook".

Can it be true that manuals are written as part of a corporate strategy to wrest yet more after-purchase money out of the consumer's bony fingers?

Currently, I'm trying to assist a friend in another state who is having a problem getting his VCR to record or play back anything that comes via the new cable box service he has had installed. I think that video manuals and instruction sheets hold the record for being the least well written documents.

I suppose the companies keep their costs down by writing documentation that takes little note of the end user. The quick start guides that show the cartoons of how things get connected often seem to leave out certain facts, such as the ones that show optional gear as though it were part of the standard setup. The optional gear is the stuff that actually makes the rest of it do what you bought it for in the first place.

This, of course, makes after-market revenue almost a certainty, and the rates for such personal attention vary all over the country.

Even though most of the manuals for installation and setup are now available on the web, that just means that it's more convenient to find this miserable collection of poorly-written, myopically printed documentia. And while we all appreciate that it's there, we still can't get past the fact that it doesn't say what we want to know, which is, in simple terms, How do I get this damn thing to work properly without my having to go back to college?

Well, it comes down to the fact that the young generally do not understand the needs of the elderly. Unless they've had first hand experience of no experience, they can't possibly write a manual or prepare a tutorial that starts at Square One and step-by-steps it through everything it takes to make it happen.

After all, the technical writers of today were born in the generation that had a computer in their home. And the next ones will have them in their brains. They have little in common with us: their documentation is rife with assumptions about what we know, based on what they have always known.

And then there's the matter of English as a second language, but let's not get into that here. Generally, these manuals seem to have been translated word by word, choosing the first, not the contextually applicable, meaning for each one.

My friend just wrote that he's thinking about telling the company to take the gear out and return things to the way they were. And I just wrote back that I believe he has found the solution. Corporate America doesn't lose customers willingly.

And for any of you out there who may be technical writers, don't take this personally, but just as a favor to me, will you please read "How to Give Instructions" from Lifehack.org. Dustin Wax, the author, has a wealth of good ideas. They're not hard to understand. So why are they so difficult to do?