In a time where we get a lot of our news online, we also have search giants trying to tailor their results to our liking. Why is this happening? And an even better question, could it actually be bad?

The growth of content

It’s happening as a response to the fantastic growth of online content. With millions of pages appearing every day, it’s impossible to find what we’re looking for. We turn to google and yahoo and bing (who users bing? Seriously?), and they say ok ok, I want you to keep using my services so I’ll help you out. The reason why people started liking google so much was that it worked! It filtered out the crap and gave you what you wanted.

Then they started personalizing searches as well as ads. This was where the internet started to work for us. And against us. It worked for us because now we could get to the content that we WANTED. The content that was relevant to us. All the irrelevant content was being filtered out by google or blocked by our ever-present adblockers. And that in itself is the inherent problem in filtering results. We are removing information that we don’t want.

We are slowly (and successfully) blocking ads, filtering and personalizing search results & blocking friends and twitter feeds that annoy us. What’s worse is we don’t just block out what annoys us, we block out things that we don’t already have an interest in. And our excuse (and it’s a good excuse) is “information overload”. With hundreds of updates on our news feed every day, we don’t bother with them all and block links on topics that we aren’t already obsessed in.

No more discovery?

Yes, we still discover new things online every day, thanks to news sites and blogs and facebook shared links. But it’s limited to the circle of friends we choose (and whether we block their links from showing up on our news feed). We are consciously limiting our own horizons. And ideas don’t come from empty brains. They come from brains exposed to and stimulated by (inspired by?) a multitude of ideas. To create a rich soil from which ideas can grow, we can’t simply limit ourselves to only ideas or blogs or circles of friends that we are comfortable with. How can you think about solutions on “the shortage of clean water” when you don’t even know it’s a fast growing problem that is already affecting the developing world and will affect the developed world soon as well.

A future of 12 year-olds

If the internet starts getting any better in “personalizing the web” or “predicting relevant search results”, our online information exposure will be limited to things that interest you when you first came online. Imagine the kids nowadays who come online at a young age. Imagine a 12-year-old. Now, what if his main source of information isn’t TV or the newspaper, but rather the internet? Not so hard to imagine is it?

That 12-year-old will have an internet that only ever feeds him what he is interested in. If that happens for a year, at 13 he will still only know about the topics that interested him at 12. If it happens for another 3 years, at 15 he will still only know those topics. He won’t get exposure to politics, or extreme ironing, or coding. Fast forward 20 years, you’ll have a person whose age is 35 but has not much more world exposure than that 12-year-old. Simple because the internet was waayyyy too good in “personalizing search results”.

Real Life

That was obviously an extreme example. But that’s where the internet collective is headed unless we introduce a way to get new (and possibly disruptive) ideas to come into our line of sight. Currently, that purpose is served by “real life”. By having friends and family, we are often forced to expose ourselves to their ideas and viewpoints as well and this can serve as a trigger for us to learn about a new topic.

But the internet has given us access to millions like us. In our own geographical area, we might find 1 or 2 people who think the same. You make friends with them and make a clique. On the internet, there are millions like us. There is no end to people who have the same viewpoint. Under those conditions, why would you hang out with someone who is completely different from you? We already pick our friends in real life. This is easily magnified in our virtual lives.

So what should we do about this? Is it even a real problem in the first place?

The current work-places and office layouts are laid out to facilitate progressive accomplishment of perceived behavior of employees at various management rungs. The mode of communication-interface is becoming non-verbal among the employees. The assumed and tacit differences are mental battle-fields in the mist. The reactive mentality which is often the bellwether of aggression is overt in the day –to-day business transactions. Despite knowing that such attitude is transitional in tasking; the resulting emotion may cause short-term disgruntlement of all involved. Such situations often challenge assertive attitude because of the merging differences with statements of aggression.

What on EARTH is it saying?!!!!

I’m sorry but I have no idea myself. It took me 10 minutes to read it and I had to read it back 7 times over to make some sense out of it. This is what happens when you try to use heavy jargon, convoluted words, and fancy language to try to impress people. You might impress people with how many words you know, but you destroy the message you want to send across.

Let’s fix it up?

Let’s try to fix it up:

Modern offices are designed to allow employees to communicate face-to-face easily. However this means that body language is becoming much more important in that communication. Differences in aggressiveness and assertiveness can sometimes just be in the mind. Therefore, some people may react badly when they believe that their colleague is being aggressive when he actually isn’t, and this bad reaction will cause further discord inside the workplace. These situations make things worse because they narrow down the difference between assertive and aggressive behaviour for future interaction.

There, isn’t that much more readable? Even then I’m not sure if I’m writing it correctly coz I didn’t fully understand what the original comment meant.

Moral of the story

Please save technical jargon for journal papers. Use proper simple English when you write. The world thanks you.

Conflict is often necessary

Conflict is necessary because humans will never see eye to eye with each other perfectly. It is crazy to assume that we will all want the same thing. Agreed? Therefore, we’ve got to come together and negotiate something that would be acceptable to all parties. The dictionary term for this negotiation where each party wants different things is “conflict”.

If you don’t want conflict you can avoid it, but it generally means that you’re letting the other person have his way. That’s fine when the matter is a small one, like when someone takes your pen without asking you. It’s not fine when it’s something bigger like trying to hurt you or humiliate you. This would be a situation where I would advise for you to engage in conflict, and not to shy away.

Levels of conflict

Conflict has many levels. It can mean verbal conflict which includes calm discussions at a negotiation table or shouting matches between the bedroom and the kitchen. It can also mean physical conflict where you punch the lights out of someone (or he punches your lights out).

Either way, conflict is good. It settles disagreements. And humans will always have disagreements. The only real problem I see in conflict is the problem of calibration.

Calibrating your response

Any disagreement should see the appropriate response of conflict from you. Borrowing your pen without asking might just require a few soft words of warning. A person trying to rip off you might require a little yelling. A person trying to hurt you would probably require a bit of hurting back.

A group of people trying to jump you in a dark alley would probably best be responded with a baseball bat and the willingness to beat them half to death. Although some people would just say to me, “Violence breeds violence. Just respond with peace.”

Respond to conflict with peace?

I feel that this is complete bullshit. You can sit there while someone is pounding your face in. Or hurting your family. Or insulting your faith. I believe in having a bit of conflict. Even in marriage you’ll have conflict with your spouse. It’s impossible to agree 100% with each other. Ideally you’d engage in a little conflict and work things out. Or you could say “OK, honey” and grow a seed of anger deep inside.

Embracing conflict

If conflict comes to you, don’t avoid it, embrace it. Use it to ensure that your side is heard. Don’t run away from it. If someone is pissed off at you, don’t avoid them, go and meet them (unless you pissed of a Jedi. Don’t mess with Jedi).

However, all things said, conflict is still unpleasant for you and the other party. So do yourself a favour. If conflict comes to you, embrace it. But don’t go looking for it. After all, why would you WANT to make your wife/family/friends pissed off at you?

But it’s something I have surprisingly few regrets about. It’s such an enriching experience to learn, not just how to stand up and speak, but to do it in a focused and structured way.

1. It taught me where Iraq was.

I confess. I was horrible at geography and history before this. I could tell you that I had heard of North Korea but I wouldn’t have been able to accurately point it out on a map.

Because of debating, I can safely say that I can at least point out a few countries.

2. It taught me to never stray from your objective.

You should never ever explain more than important. Because they’ll stop listening to you anyway after they hear what they want. And all you’ll end up doing is wasting everyone’s time including your own.

And the importance of having a clear objective becomes that much clearer. Now, I utterly hate people who do things or say things that don’t help them achieve their objective. Ok well, maybe I don’t hate them. But it’s so frustrating to hear them blabber on and on about irrelevant things, or to see them do so many things that are pointless.

Of course, to only do things relevant to your objective, you have to have an objective in the first place. Over 4 years, debate drummed it into me that you must always have an objective.

3. It honed my skills in explaining complex ideas in an economy of words.

You only have 7 minutes to explain how you want to save the world before bedtime.

Let’s say it takes 5 seconds to say a sentence. That’s only 84 sentences you can say to describe the political situation in some country on the other side of the world and explain why aid is the worst thing you can do to the farmers in the area as well as put forward your own solution for the problem at hand and of course defend it from the arguments of your opponent.

Did I mention you have to find the flaws in what your opponent says and attack those too? 7 minutes is waaaayyyyy too short.

4. It made me meet so many kinds of people.

There are a number of awesome people in this world. It seems that a huge proportion of them are in debate. Not only that, you get to meet so many varieties. I don’t just mean in terms of race or culture. I also mean in terms of people who are just different. Their styles, their personalities, their very outlook on life.

And where else could you find such a diverse group who would be more than willing to talk and talk and talk and…

5. It allowed me to get away from the calculator.

I’m in engineering. The hard sciences don’t give much room to discuss world issues in class. In law or economics or sociology, you discuss world issues all the time. So I stepped out of my classroom and tried to be a little more well-rounded. I didn’t want to just be a guy who knew how numbers worked. I wanted to know what those numbers meant.

Engineering is supposed to use science to solve real world problems. How do I do that unless I know what those “real world problems” are?

So…

If you’ve got the time, join debate. It’s so worth it.

If you haven’t got it, make time.

Of course, having a whirlwind of data isn’t always the best either. There’s always a thing called whitespace.

Whitespace

When you have too much information at a time, your brain won’t be able to process all of it at once. It needs space between information. For example, that pause people make after saying something important. Or the way a webpage looks so so soooo much better when everything useless is taken out and you have the minimum to see.

One reason why people like the facebook layout  is because it doesn’t cram too much on the same page (or at least that’s true if people don’t have a bunch of apps). By spacing the columns of information and limiting the information that gets there in the first place, you can better appreciate and concentrate on what you DO have on the page.

Put large blocks of space in between the blocks of text and things look much better.

Learning whitespace

So I think that we might need learning whitespace too for the same reason. Learn 3 things in half an hour and you’ll walk away with all 3. Learn 48 things in a half an hour seminar and you’ll still only walk away with 3. You might have written all 48 down but in the end you’ll only grasp the overall concept of all 48 and not the individual concepts of each.

So we need learning whitespace. And that’s when I realized what storytelling really does.

I’ve always been a believer that the best way to get information across is to tell a story. Our mind has evolved over thousands of years of oral storytelling to accept stories as the best medium to send information across generations.

A story (a well told story) compresses information into the format that’s best to learn in. Data like dates and names are spaced properly, with the story parts in between to catch your attention again. So you get a bit of info, then while you’re processing it, the author catches your attention with a little story before going on to the next bit.

Books should only have a few major points

I always complained that those hundred ringgit books would only have 3 or 4 main points in a book. Sometimes only 1 point in the whole book! Now I realize maybe it’s better that way.

Of course this only goes for books that aren’t story books  in the first place. Because any book that wants to get a point across should always use stories to do it.

So…

Whenever everything looks too cluttered, just add a little whitespace.

The brother

My youngest brother, Affan, debates.  He’s been debating for just about a year. His team (Al-Amin Gombak) also ranked first in this year’s Interschool debates.

Ranking first is... *drumroll* Al-Amin Gombak!

Yeah, I know it’s grainy, but that’s the best resolution I could get. I’ll put up the proper tabs (digital) next time.

So I’m really proud of him. He’s only in Form 3! And since he basically skipped a grade, you could even consider his age to be in Form 2.

The story

We were in the hall, just after 6 intense rounds of debating. They were just about to announce the rankings. Al-Amin Gombak had already had 5 wins and had just met up against MCKK in the 6th round. It was a silent round though, which meant that no one knew who won or lost! We were waiting in suspense wondering who won the last round.

And they kept delaying it! First talking about the tournament, then making one announcement after another. Finally though, the big screen up front started up. And…

“Ranking first. The only team with 6-0 in this tournament (6 wins – 0 losses) *drumroll* Al-Amin Gombak!”

The comments

“So, how long did you train them?”

“You must be proud of them.”

“What did you do with them?”

The truth

I actually didn’t do much. It was all mostly them. I only trained them for about a month before that. Actually, more like 3 weeks. And even during that time, we had the weekends off and they had to go for tuition and other co-curricular activities sometimes.

All 4 of them are pretty smart and have good logic. They can think on their feet. They can solve world issues. In their training, I never told them much about arguments that they should use for this case or that case. (No, I won’t tell you more about our trainings. *grin*) They came up with that themselves. Every win they got from that tournament, they got themselves, using their own arguments.

So the arguments were sometimes a little weaker than I would’ve liked, but oftentimes much better than I would’ve expected of them. After all, they’re still in highschool! I didn’t start debating and speaking in front of people until I was 18 or 19. They’re starting at 14 or 15… and winning!

So I can’t fully take the credit for training them. But I can be proud of them. And proud of my brother. But I suppose my father must feel this even more. After all, I only trained him a month. My dad (and mom) have been taking care of all of us and training all of us for the past 25 years. If this feeling is what it’s like to see your child succeed, it’s amazing. I can’t imagine how it would feel as a father to see your son or daughter doing well.

But it was only worth it because Affan wanted it so much. Not me or my dad. He wanted it, and he got it using his own skills and abilities. I think that’s what really makes us happy. That we’re not forcing him to do something but that he wants to do it himself.

The future

I don’t know what’ll happen. But I know that they’ve already made a target of themselves. From a little known school that most people haven’t heard of (did I mention that it’s my old school too?) to becoming the top ranking team at a national interschool debate tournament. Some schools will be gunning for them next year. And I’m sure that both sides will have fun doing it.

The other schools

I know you’ve never heard of Al-Amin before this. I hope that this helps. Because it is honestly annoying that when people ask me what school I went to, and I say “Al-Amin”, they get this blank look on their faces.

So maybe now people will think “oh, I know that school“, the same they do when people say MRSM or MCKK or TKC. Here’s hoping that it’ll happen that way.

The ending

After this whole event though, they proceeded to the knockout rounds. They skipped the double-octofinals and won their octo-finals, but were finally stopped at the quarter-finals by KYS (Yayasan Saad College). They were a good team.

So in the end, Al-Amin Gombak never made it to the finals, and they didn’t win…

…

…but there’s always next year. *grin*

And so I heard about how they wanted to cast a play (for an internal theatre competition) and how the English department had a lack of men (because they were taken up by the other competing plays). Put together a bored engineering male (student) and an English play that needs males; what do you get?

We practiced day and night for months! Memorizing the scripts, acting out the lines, vocal training in the middle of the night… It was so much fun. We had a great director too who really knew her stuff and showed us exactly what we needed to do to get it right.

Then we reached the night itself and we performed in front of hundreds of people! I’ll admit I’m an amateur but I didn’t embarrass myself too badly that night. We came out of it feeling pretty good about ourselves. And I came out of it feeling a little wiser about some things.

1. It taught me that I’ve come far.

You don’t know what you can do until you do it in front of 500 people. I’ve always had a bad reaction to speaking in front of people. And I’ve always tried hard to fight against it. Performing on stage was just the best test to see how far I’d come. I was pretty happy.

2. It taught me that rehearsing the same script a thousand times doesn’t make it dull.

Repeating that script a thousand times didn’t make it dull. It was the same script, day in and day out. But instead of boring me, it made me more connected. Once I knew them by heart, I could stop looking at the paper and really let my imagination move me instead.

But every time we rehearsed it, there would be something else that could be changed, something else to be improved on. So we practiced again and again, each time improving, until we could pull it off with the emphasis needed.

3. It taught me that I can do more.

Too many times I see people limited by what they do. Don’t get me wrong, engineering is awesome, maths is fun and physics is the most interesting thing in the world. But they’re not the only things I want to be able to do. I want to do more.

4. It taught me how to speak a little louder.

For those who know me, they know I prefer to keep my voice low. I hate people who shout for no reason, especially when they’re on the phone. I always imagine that they’re shouting because they’re afraid the person on the other side is too far away to hear them. After all, they’re sometimes a few hundred kilometres away! Lol.

Those vocal exercises they use are really good. They were good enough that they helped us ‘project’ our voice to the whole audience (we weren’t using microphones). So yeah, I can speak a little louder now. But maybe I choose not to.

5. It taught me that you always need to have their backs (in a calm way).

Loyalty is good but it doesn’t mean anything unless you can cover your friends’ backs when they mess up. One of the things we had to be ready for is if one of us messed up during the actual play. If I forgot a line, or someone else came on stage a little slow, what do you do?

You have to be able to cover. You have to be able to calmly see that there’s a problem and not freak out. then you have to do or say something that will prompt the person who made the mistake and get the play back on track again.

And you have to do this calmly so that the audience doesn’t suspect there was ever a problem to begin with.

What it sums up to…

…is that theatre is a very enjoyable experience. If you ever have the chance for it, give it a try.

I always heard people speak using big words. No, wait, that’s not true. I always heard about people who speak using big words.

Growing up, I never heard it much myself. Rather, I grew up reading storybooks. Good old fiction. Whether it was mystery or horror, fantasy or comedy, it was all good to me. When I ran out of books, I’d even read magazines (though of course they weren’t as much fun). I opened a few books that were non-fiction as well. Every time, the book pulled me in. I forgot about the words. Want to know why? It’s coz they wrote in Plain English.

Everybody uses Plain English… right?

So I grew up thinking that everybody used Plain English. Explaining things using simple words so that people would already understand the words and could now concentrate on understanding your message instead.

The only ones that didn’t were people who wanted to sound smart. After all, don’t you sound smart when you start saying words that have 10 syllables?

Jargon

Then I found out about Jargon. It turns out that in every field and in every industry, they have things that would be very complicated to explain but happen all the time. So special words were made up to refer to them easily. Instead of calling something “a super tiny sensor that’s made to detect sudden changes in movement up to 5 times of gravity“, an engineer could just call it “a 5G accelerometer“. Shorter. Simpler. Not a bad thing at all. Not until you put 20 words of Jargon one after another. Then it becomes a LOT harder to understand.

Which should we use?

It took me a long time to understand that for some people, it’s not that they don’t want to use Plain English. They can’t. They simply don’t know how to because they haven’t been trained for it and have never had to do it in their lives. Every time they’ve been asked to present any information, nobody has taught them to use Plain English.

When I was taking my degree, I joined my university’s debate club. I had a great chance to hear people present complicated facts and arguments in a way that the audience could understand. I heard people present these things day in and day out for 4 years.

Mistakes

It quickly became clear to me that most people don’t know how to keep it simple. The usual mistakes people make?

1. They assume the people listening know as much as they do.

They immediately start talking and assume that the audience know the same things that they have read and studied about. You’ll start hearing acronyms like UNCHR, FDI, ASEAN+3 and things like junta (pronounced hunta), naming and shaming, floating currencies and locus standi.

What?!

Take a few moments. Say what you mean. Don’t put fancy terms out there if people might not know them. You only use Jargon when people are ALL from the same background.

2. They say everything else about the issue except the issue itself.

You know who they are. The people that ramble on and on and on while you’re wondering what they’re telling you about. You heard them talk about the current global recession and the potential for bio-engineered plants in 3rd world countries, but what does that have to do with hiring nurses from the Philippines?

If you want to say something, say it. You don’t have to explain it.

3. They assume people can read minds and can get what they mean.

Let’s say that I tell you that we should reward green companies to help save the environment. And I stop there. You could understand it in many different ways.

What kind of reward do I mean? Tax subsidies? Exclusive government contracts?

What does green mean? Not burning anything? Filtering their smoke? Donating to organizations that help the environment?

By leaving it at that, it becomes very vague and each person understands it his own way (if he even understands it at all). So say exactly what you mean.

Not too short, not too long

So on the one hand, you have to keep it short. Say exactly what you mean and nothing else. On the other hand, if it’s too short people might not understand what you mean. Right?

Wrong. People only don’t understand when you use Jargon. So make it as short as possible while still using Plain English words. The same words that you grow up with and read in story books. The same words that you use while chatting with someone over drinks.

When you use this same simple language, it makes things easier. It frees his mind from spending time to understand the meaning of the word that you just said. Instead he can use that time to understand the meaning of your sentence and to imagine it in his head. He can see it, hear it, feel it.

When you can make people forget your words, you can make them remember your dreams.