http://www.estiloskateboards.com/mark-appleyard/
It seems we’re in danger of being distracted to death. Look around you and you’ll see the signs. That teenager making friends on Facebook – that’s a dead giveaway. That office worker clicking on every new email as it arrives – he’s a culprit. Those drivers on their hands-frees – they’re a big part of the problem.
Stupid, stupider, stupidest
In a recent article ‘Stoooopid … why the Google generation isn’t as smart as it thinks it is’, published in The Sunday Times (20th July 2008), Bryan Appleyard warns that technology may be having a detrimental impact on our lives. Those social networkers aren’t really making friends – they’re just playing ping pong (keeping some online acquaintances on the go, whilst batting others away). That email obsessed office worker is locked in a perpetual cycle of distraction. And those drivers might think they’re multi-tasking; really they’re just trying to cram even more meaningless activities into their days.
But it’s their failing ability to concentrate that’s really got Bryan hot under the collar. And if, like some of the experts cited in his article, we can judge ‘ability to concentrate’ by how many teenagers are reading War and Peace at the moment, then they may have a point!
(Hands up if you’ve read War and Peace. Keep them up if you’ve made it right to the end!)
Appleyard’s concerned that as bibliophobic children keep logging onto Google to get their fill of info-fixes and social interaction, they’re eroding their ability to concentrate. And the rest of us aren’t doing any better. Distraction is becoming our way of life. That’s a pretty sobering message for marketers. But here’s a thought…
Maybe we’re all getting better at spotting the guff! The internet’s full of it. (You might have noticed.) Maybe distraction is our natural way of filtering out the rubbish and homing in on the good stuff? Maybe we should actually welcome that distraction? Whisper it quietly: maybe it’s a good thing.
Distraction or discrimination?
Take skimming. That’s first up against the wall come Appleyard’s revolution. Certainly, skimming is habit forming. And the net makes it so easy. But when the vaguest search string can cough up hundreds or thousands of responses we’ve got to skim and scan. We’ve got a lot of land to survey, and the promise of easier pickings on one site over another will always draw us in.
It doesn’t mean we’re easily distracted – it means our discriminatory impulse is working at full strength – forcing us to winkle out waffle and home in on the meaningful bits. It’s one of our greatest attributes – cherish it.
Nine times out of ten, readers’ eyes and minds wander if the site they’ve opened doesn’t deliver on its promises. After all, we’ve made a commitment. The site promised us it would honour that commitment. We clicked, but it hasn’t delivered. Cue wandering eye.
That’s why people pay good money for good copywriters. Writers who can match what clients want to say with how they want to say it – and to whom! That’s what they call a ‘big ask’!
The fault lies not in our search engines… Unfortunately most web content isn’t written by copywriters. That’s why most of it is too long, too wordy and too easy to get distracted from. The internet is supposed to make research easy. Information shouldn’t just be easy to find, it should be easy to read.
If it is, it gives readers something to focus on. It gives them reasons to stay where they are; to curb the urge to look elsewhere.
If it isn’t you can’t blame them for exercising their right to click offsite.
The copywriter’s job is as much about editing as writing. Good writers write well; better writers write well and edit brilliantly. They’ve got the discriminating eye of a jaded web surfer. They know how to distinguish between what’s nice-to-know and what’s need-to-know.
Tolstoy would have made a terrible copywriter!
Swimming not drowning
Appleyard suggests we’re drowning in a sea of information; constantly flitting, forever restless. But really, we’re making use of our increasing capacity to fill in the blanks. We’re so much more media and marketing literate that we can get the gist – we don’t need three paragraphs telling us what we can surmise in two lines.
We’ve moved on. And the Google generation is leading the way. So information comes in easily digestible chunks. It doesn’t matter if you think that’s a good thing or not – it’s a fact. If you can’t deliver the right bite size chunks, customers will get distracted; they’ll look elsewhere.
We’re living in an instantly accessible, information rich age. The internet is at the heart of it: full of meaningful information and trivial fluff; full of possibilities for those who can exploit it. For marketers, it’s still the single biggest resource at their disposal.
The internet isn’t eroding our ability to concentrate, bad writing is.
Looking for a copywriter that understands your needs? Our flexible and consultative approach ensures that we deliver high quality training, consultancy and copywriting services. Once we have talked through exactly what you need and why, we can match the best writer to your requirements. Contact us for copywriting at The Writing Stable.
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