How to talk about technology

Communication World, April, 1995 by Mark Frey

If you examine the history of science, you will see that many great inventions came about through this same type of metaphoric linking: Medical doctor William Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood by looking at the heart as a "pump," rather than as an organ. Mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler's discoveries were triggered by the analogy of the sun in the universe. Chemist Friederich Kekule made his discovery of the benzene ring after dreaming of a snake with its tail in its mouth - these and other examples abound in the history of science.

Imagine a scene in which a group of primitive people see an airplane for the very first time. Even though they are unfamiliar with the airplane, they are compelled to call it something, so they say that it is a silver bird. A bird is the one thing in their world of experience that can be compared to an airplane. Even though they do not yet understand airplanes, they at least have some sort of basis upon which to build an understanding. To successfully talk about technology, you need to start off talking about birds before you talk about jet airplanes. Take what the audience is already familiar with, and link your ideas to that.

In the nineties, everyone is talking about the metaphor of the "information superhighway." This metaphor evolved as a way to explain the revolution in telecommunications. Although the comparison with a highway is far from completely accurate, its usage serves the same purpose as in the example with the primitive people looking at an airplane for the first time. The metaphor creates a link between the unknown and the known.

In summary, when you speak about technical matters, you must pay more attention to your listeners than you would in ordinary discourse. Not only must you take their prior experience into account, you must also discover the surest means by which your material can connect to what they already know.

RELATED ARTICLE: Better directions to the Information Highway

Like the six blind men who each defined the entire elephant by the singular part he grasped, many people are trying to define marketing on the Information Highway by a similarly limited view.

The cyber waves of online services and "the Net" are new communication media that require a new marketing approach. Rather than use a one-dimensional marketing strategy based on advertising that forces a print ad or TV ad format into an interactive media, Successful Marketing Strategists, Berkeley, Calif., promotes a three-dimensional model that addresses seven areas of marketing - its Big 7 of Cyber Marketing:

1. Technology education of the marketplace, 2. Building general market awareness, 3. Press relations, 4. Product distribution, 5. Marketing promotion, 6. Research and product development, 7. Customer service and support

Millions of cyber surfers are information junkies. They want lots of specific information and they want to meet people who have information to share. Surfers can go directly to the information they want and never see a print or video ad. Users pay by the minute to surf, so when they want product information, they have little interest in spending time with the type of ads that they can see for free in a magazine or on TV.