Life and Society: Idiocracy and the Disturbing Trend of Things Being "Good Enough"

A friend of ours and i frequently exchange "amazing typos" and "bizarre misstatements" from around the web, usually leading to funny commentary and slamming our heads on the desk.

Now this is not intended to be about "needless nitpicking" over tiny mistakes people make on their websites or in their sales literature. These are commentaries on the stunningly glaring errors that you increasingly find in very large and very public spaces.

Of course, in service of fair disclosure, both my friend and I have about 30+ years of experience as editors; we get paid to find errors and correct them.

Anyway, earlier today a relatively major venue online recommended that their site was "best viewed with Google Chrone" and this was being told to their readership of probably a million people.

I doubt anyone actually missed the intended meaning, but that's not really the point.

I guess what bothers me a bit about it is the fact that we seem to live in an age where most people are satisfied with "good enough" and might even feel that my pointing out something like an error like this was worth of a retort along the lines of my "being too uptight" and that "who cares, as long as the meaning is clear."

Who "cares" is generally the evolution of how we do things.

That is to say, the natural progression of building fault upon fault upon fault until nobody really knows what anybody else is talking about.

I got to be very familiar with "layered patching" when I worked in the IT industry and corrections and fixes to code was overwritten and overwritten and overwritten until any resemblance to "structured programming" had gone completely out the window.

Eventually the code was perhaps working but was otherwise essentially unintelligible. So what about our language of errors?

Of course some will just look at me and say "oh, that's never going to happen! But I'm not so sure because if you allow language to "erode" excessively by turning your back on the value of accuracy could well be an invitation to allowing language to become largely... random. Or arbitrary.

Does it matter, as long as we understand each other? And, besides, we'll have AI to keep up with spelling things?

I think it becomes relevant when you reach situations where it is essential that someone "reads the instructions." So what happens when — due to a pervasive pattern of letting small errors slip through — you essentially have ended up with instructions that are either unintelligible or don't really tell the actual and correct story of what people need to do to use a product or service or something else safely and efficiently.

Ever played that old game called "telephone" where you whisper something to the person next to you, and they whisper it to the person next to them, and by the time you've gone around the circle, something completely different comes out?

Not great, if you're doing neurosurgery...

And that's why I'm generally not as willing to just let shit go.

One of my observations here has periodically been that mindfulness takes a little extra time and effort, and that can also be applied to not just seeing something "off" and letting it slide as "good enough."

It may not mean much now, but eventually it could come back and bite you in the butt!

Thanks for visiting, and have a great Friday!

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Created at 2023-12-29 00:21 PST
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