Absolute Pronouncements Corrupt Absolutely
In the last few days I've been treated to an overabundance of blanket pronouncements by experts. Here's a sampling:
"There are only five or six, maybe seven, real authors alive today."
"There are really only three or four pieces of literature that have ever been written about the Holocaust."
"There is almost no literature now. There's a lot of writing, but little of it is literature."
"The Back button is the button of doom."
"Users do not come to browse your site. They have a purpose."
"Web users want actionable content; they don't want to
fritter away their time on (otherwise enjoyable) stories that are
tangential to their current goals.
Okay, you're entitled to you opinion, and I'm entitled to mine. If you back up your opinion with data, you're more likely to convince me. But if you postulate easily disprovable axioms, or if you postulate axioms that are impossible to prove or disprove, I'm going to shut my mind to you. And that's not really what a pundit wants, is it?
I don't consider the elements from my blog yesterday about the presentation pronouncements. They were given within a certain context and were completely backed up with data. My notes may not reflect that but I can only type so fast.
Posted by: Karlyn | 24 June 2008 at 11:41 AM
I hear that. And my professor's comments on literature were also contextual. But layers of nuanced meaning can be quickly scrubbed away in a single over-generalized, categorical statement. These can thus be anathema for those striving to present a topic in all its messy complexity.
Posted by: Meg Houston Maker | 24 June 2008 at 12:32 PM
Here's another one, harvested today: "Russian literature is the greatest literature of them all."
Prove it? Disprove it? Because you can't do either, these statements stop conversation cold.
Posted by: Meg Houston Maker | 24 June 2008 at 04:48 PM
This was my favorite, from a recent Webinar e-mail pitch:
"Successful innovative new products are hard to find. According to Productscan, the number of innovative ideas has declined by 28% since 2001.
"Successful new products start with a well-defined concept. Learn how to systematically write concepts that not only describe the offering, but differentiate from the competition."
We had a good time mailing that one around the office.
Posted by: Tom | 24 June 2008 at 04:55 PM
Well, the number of my own personal innovative ideas has actually declined 27% since 2001, so I guess I'm ahead of the game.
Overspecificity like this is another tool used to make pronouncements seem more credible.
Posted by: Meg Houston Maker | 24 June 2008 at 05:02 PM