Loopy Lou |

“We aim to quantify and make significant the complex and harrowingly difficult to understand logic that surrounds web-space design, and by doing so make more productive and efficient the underlying nature of your burgeoning business. In essence, we aim to make life simpler for our customers”: Really? You could have fooled me. From that ‘simple’ sentence I had the strangest feeling that actually what they really wanted was to baffle me and cause me a severe mental break-down–

Yes people, we now live in the age of high-speed, high-tech information; coming at us from all angles, twenty-four-hours-per-day. As such many businesses have adopted the ‘chuck as many complicated words at the consumer as is metaphorically possible’ ethos, and because of this horse insurance is now known as equine insurance and having your carpet cleaned is known, in some circles, as ‘initiating a hygienically sound, no-nonsense approach to extricating all the grime and filth from your precious carpet’. Why! Why does it have to be this way?! Why does it all have to be so ludicrously overdone? That’s the really big question of the millennium. Forget why we are on this Earth and whether or not extra-terrestrial life exists: I want to know why we have swapped the decent and easy-to-read language of old for stupidly complex and difficult to read information that helps nobody and nothing.

I suppose we can’t have it all and that’s the point. If we want to have high-tech products, technology and new more efficient ways to live our life, we will have to accept that language will also change as we go. Simply, we have come too far and we can’t pick and choose what we keep and what we throw away: we have to take it all and do our best with what we get.