Comments on: Review: Thinking with Type http://www.infovark.com/2008/02/29/review-thinking-with-type/ Digging the world of Enterprise 2.0 Fri, 03 Feb 2012 05:02:55 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 By: Gordon http://www.infovark.com/2008/02/29/review-thinking-with-type/comment-page-1/#comment-112 Gordon Sat, 01 Mar 2008 02:30:58 +0000 http://www.infovark.com/2008/02/29/review-thinking-with-type/#comment-112 Ben, I reckon... You're Cynical! ;) Ben, I reckon…

You’re Cynical!

;)

]]> By: Ben Tremblay http://www.infovark.com/2008/02/29/review-thinking-with-type/comment-page-1/#comment-110 Ben Tremblay Fri, 29 Feb 2008 22:18:40 +0000 http://www.infovark.com/2008/02/29/review-thinking-with-type/#comment-110 Call me cynical (Go head, call me cynical. No, really, go ahead.) but in my experience "pretty print" shifts the transaction away from contents. (I would have loved to explore this in a formal academic cog-psych setting but I was distracted by taxonomy / ontology ... trust me to be painfully earnest. Not actually cynical; actually gung.ho) The situation was this: MIL-SPEC documentation of an avionics R&D project for the Fed ... "strict" hardly describes it. This was shortly after the earth's crust had cooled; 9-pin printers were considered deluxe. As the tech_docs geek in our "Integrated Logistics Support Group" I would routinely and regularly circulate the latest version of module docs to team leaders and whatever mgt-types had insinuated themselves into the loop. Event: when I started printing those out with what was then top of the line laser printer (You really don't want to know how slow it was. Really.) quality of review crashed. I mean crashed. So: If you want someone to unthinkingly buy into what you've written, by all means optimize the aesthetics. If you want a critical review of what you've produced ... I suggest you invest in a time machine to some other era. From what I can tell McLuhan's "medium is the message" has taken over entirely. #matrix #borg Call me cynical (Go head, call me cynical. No, really, go ahead.) but in my experience “pretty print” shifts the transaction away from contents. (I would have loved to explore this in a formal academic cog-psych setting but I was distracted by taxonomy / ontology … trust me to be painfully earnest. Not actually cynical; actually gung.ho)

The situation was this: MIL-SPEC documentation of an avionics R&D project for the Fed … “strict” hardly describes it.

This was shortly after the earth’s crust had cooled; 9-pin printers were considered deluxe.
As the tech_docs geek in our “Integrated Logistics Support Group” I would routinely and regularly circulate the latest version of module docs to team leaders and whatever mgt-types had insinuated themselves into the loop.
Event: when I started printing those out with what was then top of the line laser printer (You really don’t want to know how slow it was. Really.) quality of review crashed. I mean crashed.

So: If you want someone to unthinkingly buy into what you’ve written, by all means optimize the aesthetics.
If you want a critical review of what you’ve produced … I suggest you invest in a time machine to some other era. From what I can tell McLuhan’s “medium is the message” has taken over entirely.

#matrix #borg

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