4e Buzzword Inflation: Does Internet Speed Apply to Language?

12 May 23rd, 2006 by 6 Kevin f Cheng :: 7 9 f 12 Comments 28

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Not too long ago, I had an instant message conversation with my brother where I was regaling a humorous anecdote. He responded with:

Literally laughing out loud

Which at first made me think about one of the other VOIP features we talked about but then made me think about how the value of our Internet language seems to go down at … Internet speed.

After all “LOL” was supposed to meet the need of expressing that you’re laughing out loud instead of or just “hehe“. (We could debate whether people actually ever Roll on the Floor Laughing My Ass Off because frankly I’ve never seen it in person.)

Now we’re seeing the usage of the word Beta become questionable. Betas traditionally are buggy and lack polish. When a video game is in beta, you expect crashes and such. With a plethora of “Web 2.0″ companies coming out with their own products each one seems to be perpetually in Beta. Flickr takes this to a new level with “Gamma”. In this case, the word Beta is being used to describe products that are in fact very polished and rarely crashing.

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OK/Cancel is a comic strip collaboration co-written and co-illustrated by Kevin Cheng and Tom Chi. Our subject matter focuses on interfaces, good and bad and the people behind the industry of building interfaces - usability specialists, interaction designers, human-computer interaction (HCI) experts, industrial designers, etc. (Who Links Here) ?