The struggle of overused words
Language is a great thing. All words have their meaning, sometimes several, but most of the time they are clear enough so we can communicate together. We can do amazing things with them, like build towers, transmit succulent cooking recipes, design and create cool things…
But sometimes, language goes wrong. We start using some words for everything and they finally mean nothing anymore.
Some of them might have popped into your head by now. Let’s write about some of them and start with « Uberisation » for now.
This word realises the prowess of being at the same time synonym of great achievements and terrible disasters. Deriving from the name of the now infamous company Uber, « Uberisation » can be used in whatever context you’d like as soon as you want to catch interest on startups and show that your business model is based on sharing economy. You want to talk about a new startup that allows people to learn new subjects online, but you realise that the democratisation of learning and the accessibility of information is quite an old and a not so catchy tendency? So in order to get more views, you may want to talk about the uberisation of learning. You think that people will assume somebody is trying to get rid of teachers or to revolutionise an institution that is too « old school » (no pun intended). But let me tell you something: the only result you will get is, I hope, a bad consciousness. This word was so overused that it doesn’t trigger any interest anymore.
The « Uberisation » wave was well intentioned: it was the flagship of a new way of thinking, new business models, the sign that the world still could be reshaped and not only by our governments. That new patterns, closer to the people and more inclusive, could rise from old traditional and, sometimes, dysfunctional systems. But it finally ended up to be used for every single initiative involving people bypassing some kind of existing scheme (even if the tendency was already existing before), to the point it was not anymore synonym of human inventiveness but of job insecurity and so on.
Same thing happened with « innovative », or « disruptive »: at some point, they shifted from signifiers of ingenuity, scientific breakthrough and technical feats to clickbait adjectives that even start to repel serious journalists.
These sacrificed words are somehow the translation of the growing supremacy of the attention economy.
We have less and less time to grant to the ever-growing mass of information that it is flourishing out there. Brands and companies need sharpened messages, with a language referring to notions known by the many.
We are losing meaning to the detriment of mention, and that is not good news. Important notions are getting stripped from their meaning while we need people to be aware of today’s issues in order to move forward in the smartest and most peaceful way.
We are in the middle of a numeric revolution, and we need everybody to understand what is going on. As an example, take the words « digital » and « AI ». These words are also overused in the business world and in the media, where they are not really explained with what they really mean, but with what they could eventually do if, ironically, nobody understand how important they are.
Yet they are important notions in nowadays world since they traduce a new current of technologies and disciplines that could entirely reshape our way of living, not keywords to get more investments or to scare people.
Our morbid fascination for catchy headlines is slowly deteriorating our relation to the world and how we inform ourselves. We need to take a step back, and try to regain the control of these meaningless buzzwords. For that, no miracle solution: news verification, intellectual rigour, patience and education are the perfect remedy for getting back the lexical integrity.
At XXII, we try to be careful with these words: we deeply believe in the convergence of technology and science, and due to that, we are really invested in AI and neuroscience. We want to rehabilitate these words, and for all the people that do the same so please… The next time you will be tempted to use one of these buzz words to qualify your activity or if you see them in another tacky title, think twice about it and take the time to really understand what is going on underneath it!
