A seven year old knows best

On Friday morning, I was reading the newspaper about the US election and I promised myself to understand it. To really understand what it meant.

Yes, the Republicans made it in the house of representatives and strengthened their position in the senate. That's not very good for Obama. I can understand that. But how bad is it? According to my newspaper, it's worse than ever before after WW2. Worse than for Harry Truman in 1946 and worse than for Bill Clinton in 1994. But what does it mean. Really?

At this point of my reading, my seven year old son sat down beside me, watching the front of the newspaper. He then said: That's Obama, isn't it? I said: Yes! He sais: I know why he looks so sad at the picture. I said: You do?! He said: Yes, he will not be able to decide as many things as he could before. He lost a competition, you know.

He then ran away to play again. It took me a while to digest that he actually gave me the answer that easily. He had watched "Lilla Löpsedeln" on TV and they obviously knew how to tell a story that anyone could understand.

I think that's why we often fail in communication. We get lost in details and miss out the real point. Instead of telling a story about an operator, who can now read his newspaper and drink a cup of morning coffee while the machine does his job, we talk about how sharp the cutting edge of the new insert is, or how many cutting edges there are.

Next time I'm writing a text, I'll ask my son how to write it.

What is one-way communication?

I participated in a work-shop today whith about thirty engineers, where communication came up as a success factor in this highly engineered project. As I was the representative from the marketing communication department, they all looked at me every time this success factor came up, and it actually took me a while to understand that they meant information. Not communication.

It’s a complicated area and one obvious success factor is to inform people properly so that they don’t misunderstand what they are supposed to do. Information rather than communication.

The difference isn't always clear. There is even a word for one-way communication. How do you communicate with someone that doesn't answear? That’s information and nothing else. I couldn’t help but twitterize this issue.

Is Twitter a forum for information or a forum for communication?
Most people with some Twitter experience would probably say that it is a forum for communication. It is a social media, which means that we're talking communication, rather than information. However, there are numerous twitter profiles, following not one single person, and just use the medium for informing about what they think and do, or even worse just use Twitter to promote their products.

If we for the sake of this blog post could agree that Twitter is a social media though, which would mean communication rather than information, I just have one other question: Why are the people we communicate with called followers? A follower in my mind is not someone you communicate with. Could possibly be someone that you'd inform.

Facebook "followers" are called friends. Linkedin "followers" are called connections. Both these are more communicative. Why not call them contacts? Or connections, but that's already taken.

Ideas someone?