If you spend any time trawling freelance job sites like People Per Hour or Elance as a seller or a buyer, you appreciate how shocking is the divide in communication skills between the haves and have-nots. Just this morning I clicked the ‘learn more’ link on a job abstract, only to see the message that Elance had taken down the job because it was unclear. I then went onto check around two dozen further briefs, every single one of which was virtually unintelligible.
Two things should strike you about this.
Firstly, the vast majority of businesses posting jobs in this way have either no idea of what they want, or if they do have an inkling, have no idea how to verbalize it. This is not confined just to the developing world, nor to recent times; I know a man with a PhD in English (UK university-awarded and not via correspondence) whose grasp of the rules of English is not that of one for whom this is a first language.
Secondly, the arbiters of intelligible writing deployed by these sites are either automated, or themselves linguistically deficient.
“What we have here is a failure to communicate.”
Now the question arises as to how the consequences of this situation will unfold.
Entities who buy a product in full cognition of what is changing hands (and how), are aware of the term caveat emptor, if not expressly, then at least implicitly. Those who neither know what they want, nor how to identify it when it is presented with a bill of sale must learn the meaning of mea culpa. This latter fairly represents the true nature of how online, remote transactions like this actually take place.
The problem arises here in that the vast majority of buyers cannot perceive the difference between right and wrong copy, and so compound the inaccuracies of brief, deliverables, customer engagement (or lack thereof) into a deficit. This is made all the more epic in size once the sheer volume of information already out there (as well as the rate new noise is being added by the second) is taken into consideration. And it is mostly noise.
If you want a glimpse of how this movie ends, just look at the recent EU and local elections. You could argue that the rot of political disengagement by the electorate began during the Thatcher/Major governments, when a sclerotic Labour opposition failed utterly in its duty effectively to question and dislodge the rotting tail-end of that era of Conservative government. But what if it began even before that, and was brought about by a different aberration entirely: the failure to communicate.
And throughout Europe this voting weekend just past, in reaction to a paucity of information the electorate could actually use, those voters that could still be bothered to exercise their right most likely voted by habit; what their parents did or their grandparents did. And thus we have returned to the politics of extreme left and right. it’s no longer factional or even regional. It’s tribal. This is the message that the rump of engaged voters across the EU have tried to convey to the diametrically opposed federalist clerks in charge of the EU. No wonder it was unedifying for everybody involved.
And while it’s arguable that sourcing cheap writers for your flyers and SEO specialists for your website from Utar Pradesh and Beaufort West is trivial compared to the idea of political franchise, it is much more essential than that, because it is the very stuff of which community engagement is made: words. And in that same argument lies the absolute importance of clarity; of how to use English. (The French – apparently much more protective of their mother tongue than the English and its commonwealth – protested against lousy communication by voting for the Front National.)
Fearing cultural corruption through migrants from Eastern Europe or Africa into Britain is a red herring in many ways, because some of the worst transgressions are illegal migrants from the USA.Just a few weeks ago the twittersphere was alive with badinage among columnists David Aaronovitch, John Rentoul, Oliver Kamm et al over the usurping of the English hanged by the American corruption hung (“…often with hilarious consequences”).
If further proof be necessary, ask yourself is it really a coincidence the Scots and now even the Cornish want to go their own way?
Vive la différence… Mais pas ici, je vous en prie.