blamebrampton (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
blamebrampton) wrote2008-08-01 07:30 pm
blamebrampton) wrote2008-08-01 07:30 pm
The difference between LJ and Skyehawke
In one of my stories, I have a scene in which the bad guys attempt to take control of the Thames Barrier to hold it open while an artificial storm surge races up the river to flood much of London. It's told in fast snatches, but there are a number of very clear bits of information given to show what's happening, including:
The rest of Draco's Unspeakables arrive. He speaks quickly: "Thames Barrier, we think there's a team using dark magic to hold it open. Storm surge is coming, a big one."
A few people responded to its posting on LJ with "I had no idea what the Barrier was, so I looked it up, it's cool/was on Doctor Who!"
Last night I posted that chapter on Skyhawke. Today I received a comment similar to "Look, I liked it, but you'd have made the ending so much more gripping if you'd explained what the Barrier was." *
I was THIS CLOSE to answering with "Thanks very much for letting me know you liked it, but if you need more Barrier info, you can find it easily! In my day we did not have Google and you had to shag computer scientists to get internet access, so just count yourself lucky, young whippersnapper and use the tools Tim Berners-Lee gave you!"
I held back, but only because I knew I'd receive a reply saying "Berners-Lee? Who?!"
Ah LJ folk, Let me never take you for granted ...
* I should emphasise that I genuinely think this person meant to be helpful here. They were not being intentionally annoying, I am just the least patient closet librarian in the vicinity.
The rest of Draco's Unspeakables arrive. He speaks quickly: "Thames Barrier, we think there's a team using dark magic to hold it open. Storm surge is coming, a big one."
A few people responded to its posting on LJ with "I had no idea what the Barrier was, so I looked it up, it's cool/was on Doctor Who!"
Last night I posted that chapter on Skyhawke. Today I received a comment similar to "Look, I liked it, but you'd have made the ending so much more gripping if you'd explained what the Barrier was." *
I was THIS CLOSE to answering with "Thanks very much for letting me know you liked it, but if you need more Barrier info, you can find it easily! In my day we did not have Google and you had to shag computer scientists to get internet access, so just count yourself lucky, young whippersnapper and use the tools Tim Berners-Lee gave you!"
I held back, but only because I knew I'd receive a reply saying "Berners-Lee? Who?!"
Ah LJ folk, Let me never take you for granted ...
* I should emphasise that I genuinely think this person meant to be helpful here. They were not being intentionally annoying, I am just the least patient closet librarian in the vicinity.
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But I have to agree that LJers are probably more keen on using Google to find out about stuff rather than asking silly questions... the way people get verbally poked when they do so without consulting the Internet at large around here is pretty scary... so we all learned early on not ask silly questions.
You might be interested to know that I had no idea what a Thames Barrier was but I didn't go search for it in Google. It might be fun to know what it is exactly but I understood from your writing that it was something important and possibly dangerous. Not knowing what it is didn't lessen the impact the scene had on me.
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And, alas, many people fail to Google. Including journalists. I argued with one recently about her assertion that the Ancient Egyptians painted their nipples with molten gold. She insisted they did. I pulled up an annotated Periodic Table and pointed out that gold melts around 900 deg C. It hadn't occurred to her to look. Sigh.
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I wonder why that is, though. Why people don't use Google. It's there, it's convenient... it works! My co-workers often ask me, "How do you know about these things?" I say, "Google." And they just look at me as if I just spoke in gibberish. Whenever that happens, it's inevitable that I do the eye-roll of the most obvious kind.
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I sometimes worry that the young generation only uses the net for information, but then I worry more that some of them don't even do that.
But you sell books, and you're young, so there's hope yet!
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Oh, you can still have hope. I sell quite a lot of books to people my age. It's the even younger ones (read: kids) these days that I am worried about. I am not going to get into that here and now or I might offend people.
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* decide on keywords (and they should be good, too)
* select one of the answers (one of ten, oh, the woes)
* read the content of the page and look for the information.
I'm sure it's scary for many people.
(I might print this bulleted list and give it as gift cards to all of them. call it the Google User Manual for Dummies)
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And I can't believe there's a book published for that. Google for Dummies? (This For Dummies series crack me up.) Granted, the name is appropriate. But I fear that this might be too complicated for most people. Your bulleted list works better. :)
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I won't go into the flushing toilets business, because that's an issue, too. And to think all the people I work with are uni graduates. *snort*
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As for Google, there was an article about how around 60% of searches were made using Google, and I'm wondering now how many is that 60% percent. I know of programmers who look at the screen wondering how to do something, and look at em funnily when I suggest Google. And considering some of the results that come up for perfectly reasonable searches... There are a lot of people who haven't discovered the internet properly.
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