The Bottom Line is I Hate Jargon: why hated language is inescapable

Everybody says they hate jargon, but everybody uses it. How can jargon be so hated yet so prevalent? It’s clearly more than just a personal shortcoming of your annoying co-workers. It’s more likely that jargon is a symptom of sociability and thus we’re all susceptible to it. Looking closely, there seem to be at least three types of irritating jargon (each with its own jargon-like name!):

Fluffy Neologisms (FuNs): Often a “verbized” noun or a verb phrase shortened to one word, e.g. conversate for have a conversation. Frequently an active sounding, metaphorical stock phrase for something simple, e.g. circle back for get back to you and take it offline for talk after the meeting. FuNs are most often emergent (bottom-up).

Pernicious Euphemisms (PEus): These are classic business speak, e.g. calling criticisms opportunities. The purpose is to mask some harsh reality, neutralize something negative or insinuate desired behavior (e.g. employees must be passionate – i.e. work-obsessed, myopic, ass-kissers – as opposed to just good at their jobs). PEus tend to be institutionally imposed (top-down).

Exclusionary Technicalities (ETs): These are jargon in the traditional sense of “words or expressions that are used by a particular profession or group and are difficult for others to understand”, e.g. AJAX interface or MVC Architecture. They’re domain specific “technical” terms intended to ease in-group communication. ETs can be either institutionally imposed (by e.g. standards bodies) or emergent (from e.g. open source developers).

We tend not to think of legitimate uses of ETs as jargon in the pejorative sense (unless you are particularly insecure). After all, these words have a technical rationale. What gets us miffed is inappropriate use by the tech guy in an effort to maintain his wizard status. So, for ETs it’s intention that matters. A lame, illegitimate use can turn an ET into a PEu and open the user up to justified criticism. Indeed, many words that end up as PEus probably started out as ETs in management science.

FuNs, though, seem inexcusable to most people. They probably stem from middle-management aping the “management science” consultants they caught the PEus from. And that’s part of my point: jargon is catching. It’s not simply some aggravating sign of your boss’s personality disorder. Rather, it’s a symptom of sociability which we all display; it's an equilibrium in a social market like a fad or a trend. Of course, there is the pretension to hate, but generally before the pretension there was the desire to communicate something in a codified way.

The net net on jargon...

Typically, we’re aggravated by jargon in one of the following three ways.

1. We consider it pretentious when the user is too obviously attempting to wring cultural or social profit from what should be a purely instrumental linguistic exchange.

2. We’re exasperated when some overused phrase, which has been nearly drained of significance by loose use, is unreflectively trotted out. This sort of hackneyed jargon is often used more as a combination filler/badge than as a thoughtful addition to the discourse, serving no purpose in the conversation other than a noise our type tends to make in situations like this one.

3. Worst of all, we’re infuriated when someone mixes 1) and 2), using hackneyed jargon pretentiously.

But if you look at these from the other direction – from the jargon user’s perspective – you can see how the user could derive value from using jargon. After all, people don’t use jargon in order to be negatively viewed by others; presented with socially informed options, they have made a choice, albeit a non-deliberative one. When we have questions about a choice, look to the expected value of the options for some answers.

Let’s start with the most straightforward example: legitimate uses of Exclusionary Technicalities (ETs). You can see how these are valuable: they are agreed upon domain specific names for objects, phenomena, etc. If we want to speak efficiently and non-circuitously when discussing these things with our peers, we should use the jargon. The more people who use the term for the intended thing, the more valuable the term becomes in the field and the more value it holds for a potential adopter. After a certain percentage of your peers start using the jargon it behooves you to climb aboard. We call this a network effect: the more folks using the jargon, the more valuable it becomes. Network effects can lead to cascades (where everyone sees the value of adopting the jargon as greater than not adopting) and suddenly the jargon is everywhere.

People legitimately using ETs tend to value communication; the jargon’s value to them is in speaking the language their peers speak. The “value function” is stable, producing a value that rises rapidly to a plateau and maintains high value for a long time provided there are no relevant shocks (say, new standards rendering the old ones obsolete). We call this a monotonic externality. The value function tends to go in one direction, up, until the plateau. It doesn’t suddenly reverse with changes in use of the term.

Illegitimate uses of ETs, however, are a slightly different story. For example, I hear of a technology that’s getting a lot of buzz in the tech blogs and that I’m sure all of my clients will want soon. I drop the new jargon in meetings, making myself more attractive to the client. Of course, all other strategists are doing the same thing. The ET, which solidified it’s value in the tech world enough to be noticed in our non-tech world, is clearly of value to a lot of smart people. So, we assume its value without doing any sort of true evaluation. Many other people do the same thing. Next thing you know, everybody’s talking about and asking for AJAX interfaces, or MVC Platforms, yet very few know just what these are. These ETs have become jargon in the bad sense. Now we’re in an Informational Cascade: given a certain number of visible and presumptively knowledgeable adopters, people stop evaluating and go straight to adopting. The more the jargon’s exposed by adopters, the faster it’s adopted by others.

However, informational cascades are very unstable. Once someone actually does stop and try to figure out what’s being talked about, the cascade can be very quickly shattered. Ideas that spread like wildfire can die out just as fast. The jargon then becomes an embarrassment... what was the big freakin’ deal about “Web 2.0”? Then a backlash can set in.

PEus and FuNs are the prime examples of this sort of success followed by backlash. Despite their differences, they tend to follow the same general cycle: acceptance and use followed by derision and annoyance.

This “value function” that increases rapidly creating a cascade and then crashes just as rapidly after a certain point seems to be what’s called a non-monotonic externality. That is, the value of adopting becomes negative after a certain level of adoption within your group; after a certain level of saturation it becomes uncool, embarrassing or simply over-inflated like a linguistic bubble in a socio-cultural market. A value curve like this looks just like a fad or fashion curve.

In this case, the value function is pretty interesting. There’s an element of “network externality” in that jargon serves as shorthand in recurring situations and it’s assortative, defining your in-group. For these reasons, it behooves you to adopt if others in your group are. But then there’s also an element of informational cascade in that we value adoption simply because others are doing it. It’s about unreflective conformity and social learning. So it’s coordinating to a large extent. Still the curve suggests that difference is significant. That is, the value function delivers disvalue given a certain saturation. But our experience with offices is that negative feelings don’t set in until much later than most fads. Often, an office has to be lousy with a particular bit of jargon before we start to hate it.

Everyone’s “value function” is different, of course. Some get annoyed very easily (“misfits”) and others never really get annoyed (“team players”). Also, whether we evaluate jargon negatively or not is very contextual. I could listen two techies spewing jargon at each other all day and not care, but if one of them scares a client with a string of acronyms, I could really get annoyed.

Basically, the big moral is that we all tend to use jargon and it’s not a personal shortcoming. Rather it’s the result of very common social market conditions. Social markets are noted for each actor’s actions being partly determined by the actions of others. Dynamics like this lead to equilibria, but because of things like the fragility of informational cascades and non-monotonic externalities, they are fragile equilibria. We start to disvalue jargon that was once valued (even if non-deliberatively) for, among other reasons, the desire to feel distinct. We don’t like to feel conformist, while at the same time we clearly value a certain amount of conformity (viz. network effects and informational cascades). That’s just the nature of a non-monotonic value curve; the fact that something’s being used by our peers is reason enough to start doing it, but after a certain level of saturation we start to disvalue what we once valued (we can think of slang in similar terms, though the value curve is usually much shorter, thus it’s much more fragile or fickle). So, the conformity arises, but is rebelled against after a certain level of saturation.

Some Things You Should Know Before Developing a Social Site

Designing and building a social site, or “online community,” can be painful. When the client doesn’t understand what leads to success in this space, which is almost always the case, it can be excruciating. Marketers breeze in with MySpace and Facebook sized expectations fueled by the misconception that simply throwing up a mess of loosely themed, content-free social functionality (surrounded by a high wall) will somehow drive “connection” hungry users to their door. Not surprisingly, more often than not these projects fail. And, of course, the designer gets the blame. If the designer’s feature set or IA or visual design had been slightly better, the community would surely have thrived.

This post is a bit of tough love for those embarking on social site development. What I’m about to suggest might sound like the rationalizations of a burned designer, but understanding it can really help manage client expectations. The online social space just doesn’t work the way most of us think it does. Beyond a certain point, things that designers have direct control over tend to be minimally determinative of site success. That is, once your site looks credible/"genre-appropriate", has a non-scary modicum of differentiation and honors the default category expectations, the designer’s direct impact on success dwindles rapidly. Why? Because success in this space is largely (but not solely) driven by subtle, nonlinear social network-based phenomena that have very little to do with the qualities of the actual site itself. Good design is clearly necessary for marketing and sensible development, but it's nowhere near sufficient for success.

Three closely related phenomena seem particularly important to social site success. The first two are what’s called “externalities,” which for our purposes boil down to a person’s behavior being partially determined or influenced by other people’s observable behavior. Bearing that in mind, here are the three tricky phenomena.

1. Informational Cascades

Cascades (for short) are what’s called an informational externality and they impact the decision to join a community. The idea is that it’s cheaper in time and attention (and thus still strictly “rational”) to join a community others join than it is to waste energy mulling over the pros and cons, regardless of your own judgment of community value. Learn from others and, if they’ve done okay, you’ll probably do okay, whatever your personal assessment of site worth may be.

So after a community platform gets some traffic, most users shut off judging for themselves and join because certain relevant others have. Differentiation or design based incentives to lure folks in only really matter for the first n users, where n is relatively small and extremely fickle (so-called early adopters?). After that, the join decision is often based on 1) the fact that others are doing so and 2) the assumption that they must have good informational reasons for doing so. Thus 3) new users often disregard private information, meaning that 4) the information of all but the first n becomes effectively irrelevant. Voilà, exponentially diminishing returns on design outlay (and testing!) beyond a relatively low threshold.

2. Network Effects

Like cascades, these are also a type of “externality,” a consumption or production externality. Network effects impact the perceived value (or utility) of the site both before and after the join. In a nutshell, the value of social functionality increases nonlinearly (some say logarithmically, others exponentially... the jury’s still out) with the total number of users.

Actual details from economists and “theorists” in discussions of network effects are mostly fudged idealizations, but the kernel of truth is that people consider social functionality valuable only if some significant proportion of people (usually friends and acquaintances) are using it. So, your online community might have the coolest social functionality, but if you never managed to get a significant number of folks to make that initial commitment of time and attention (say by having decent content or non-social functionality to get traffic in the first place), you’ll never get off the ground. And without people, a community ain’t... and never will be.

3. Path Dependency

This one tends to be the result of the other two processes working together. Often, the situation the world ends up in is the result of a large number of historical moments in which agents choose between a couple of alternatives. When we’re dealing with externalities like the one’s mentioned above, these small choices in the past can have a startlingly powerful impact on the present. A notorious feature of these path dependent processes is that small (really small) changes in the decisions made by individual users in the past can have radical effects on how the present turns out. Winners could have been losers but for some schmo joining one site and not the other. From this decision, cascades can occur, with incipient network effects following shortly behind. Presto, a path dependent process with significant potential for sub-optimal lock-in.

Some Elaborations and Lessons

Big words, scary ideas, but what does it mean? Below are some simple, realistic consequences of the above ideas with some suggestions for actual development. Keep these in mind when embarking on a social site project and let them guide your expectations and success parameters.

1. This one’s been said a lot, but has never really sunk in. Provide some reason for people to use your site even before there’s any socializing. You need content or independently useful, non-social functionality to get to the point where the externalities discussed can take hold (unless your product is just a cool bit of standalone social functionality like a “widget”).

2. Beyond a certain default determined threshold, fanciness of design and coolness of functionality are only really important in terms of innovation and differentiation not conversion. In other words, they won’t guarantee success (in traffic or use) no matter how relevant they are. They can get you noticed, which may start a cascade among those with a low switching threshold (early adopters?), but if the network effect threshold isn’t reached, you’ll remain niche (sorry, Virb). Remember, though, that trafficking in early adopters is particularly dicey given that they've especially low switching thresholds... they'll abandon you just as easily once something newer and cooler comes along. If they abandon before the cascade can reach a scale large enough to overcome the higher non-early adopter switching thresholds you won't reach your tipping point.

[ASIDE: The iPhone isn’t necessarily a counter-example. It does in a new space (mobile computing) what Apple does everywhere (simplify and amaze) and relies on Apple’s existing converts and proselytizers to fuel uptake (create a cascade). It’s success is the result of an already converted base expecting and getting really cool design, not of really cool design converting all comers regardless of prior commitments.]

3. A hallmark of path dependent processes is that they tend to be “irreversible” to a certain extent. For our purposes, this means that once your users have made an investment of time and attention, switching isn’t as easy (costless) as marketers think; switching isn’t zero-cost and this can create a kind of inertia in users. In other words, just because you build it, that doesn’t mean they’ll come. Users must perceive value significantly greater than the switching cost of time and attention. Without that initial threshold of users (network effects) or initial visible rush (potential cascade), there’s little perceptible value and no informational precedent that tells them joining might be a good idea.

4. The value of testing diminishes rapidly as uptake increases; it’s value is effectively nil beyond the first n users, where n is the “tipping point” (the point where a cascade occurs and network effects can start to be felt). Also, it won’t guarantee success, even if the product tests well. All testing really does for you is ensure you have made something that honors current design and functionality conventions, something that’s not scarily new. It will never guarantee success because you still have to provide extra value to overcome switching costs, no matter how low. And testing certainly won’t allow you to create new competitive landscapes through innovation. So, definitely test but with diminishing value and limited ends in mind. (Remember, this is only really applicable to social sites... transactional sites, etc. tend to get more value out of testing)

5. If the success or failure of online communities is a path dependent process, then copying the design of other social sites in hopes of copying their success makes very little sense. Of course you need to honor conventions, understand defaults and identify areas for relevant differentiation in the space, but beyond this you’re not really generating value (and it’s really lame to boot). Qualities matter insofar as truly bad or scarily unconventional sites won’t be in the running. However, the predictors of success typically aren’t site qualities (the various competitors all do pretty much the same, category-appropriate things), so imitating qualities of successful sites is no guarantee, only a good bet. Finally reproducing the winner is silly given non-negligible switching costs. People won't jump unless your offer exceeds the switching cost set by the current site and its value. Don't offer what they already have because there's no incentive to move.

6. It’s not always the case that the best community (by whatever standard) wins. Informational externalities (cascades) coupled with production/consumption externalities (network effects) often lead to a “sub-optimal” option taking the win. Lock-in as it’s called is clearly observable in situations like the maintained dominance of Windows, the market triumph of VHS over Beta, or (everybody’s favorite) the QWERTY keyboard. Of course, your product needs to be competitive, moderately differentiated and (if this is your thing) “innovative” in a non-alienating way. But developing and (especially!) testing at great expense your new category killer won’t really put you in a better position to recoup your investment. At most it means you’re a standout among the crowd of competitors. Without significant marketing and some lucky breaks, all that extra work simply sets you up to look new, feel cool and keep users IF you get them in the first place. It’s a set of sad facts that the best rarely win, first mover disadvantage is very real online, and the just good enough often get the biggest return (I’m talkin’ about you, MySpace).

Well, those are my observations. Hopefully, you can now embark on your development with clearer vision and a better sense of what can and cannot be accomplished through design. Anyway, hope it wasn't too scary...