Monday, November 20, 2006

Technology: One liners that stick in your head

Jack Vinson writes about blogs again and shares a quote from Martin Roell in his blogpost : "Blogs are like emails to someone you don't know yet". This reminds me of two quotes that have stayed with me lately:

One via my colleague who overheard two small boys in Burkina Faso. The first boy asked the second boy what a computer was ('qu'est-ce que c'est un ordinateur?'). The answer was: 'C'est une machine pour parler aux blancs.' (it's a machine to talk to the white people).

Angelica Senders from ICCO shared the other quote (don't know where she got it): "if you don't know how to cycle, walking is always faster": in the context of using new technologies or new tools to communicate. This ressembles the quote about talking about tagging to people who have never tagged like 'talking about sex to virgins'. (read this in a blog somewhere too).

Though I'm not such slogan person, a good one liner or slogan which captures an important notion can have its value, because it really sticks in your head. I think it sticks because you recognise it's a good compressed representation of reality.

2 comments:

hoong said...

Or a motorcycle is better than a car in a 10 KM traffic jam (which happened to me on Monday morning) . Which by the way can be equate as congestion on the network?

Some time ago you wrote about pictues and presentation. That I think is one of the best place to use 'one liner that stick in your head'. In fact one liner is a lot better than a picture or photo for a PPP. A one liner can be carried anywhere, but not a photo or video on a PC? After all computer is a tool for white men to talk to one another! (How this innocent expression cut through the core of troubles in this world between the have and the not-have, digital divide, langauge divide ...)

Bill Williams said...

One I like which I think I first encountered in SDC conference notes:
"Knowledge sharing: the more you share the more you get"