The lost art of description

I was just walking through a shopping centre, and some random girl walking in the opposite direction handed me a flyer as she passed. I looked at the flyer, but it wasn't entirely obvious what it was advertising. The large print just says ‘TwentyTwo’, and ‘Free admission to any of these events with this flyer’, and ‘join us over the festive season’. After reading the smaller print, which says things like ‘over 18s’ and ‘10pm till 3am’ and describes a dress code, I've concluded that it's a nightclub of some sort, but (a) I'm still none the wiser about what kind of nightclub (what music? what sort of people? is there any particular reason I might want to go to it?), and (b) it seems barking mad that I should have had to read as far as the small print to even get that far!

Now I think about it, this seems symptomatic of a more widespread tendency I've been noticing here and there for a while, which is that people increasingly seem unwilling to spend the effort to tell other people what things are.

Another good case of this: two months ago, somebody sent me a link to some website's terms-and-conditions page with a comment along the lines of ‘Wow, that's the biggest T&C page I've ever seen’ (which it is!). Naturally I was curious to know what website was so important and unusual and difficult that it needed such elaborate terms and conditions; so I followed a link to the front page of the site, and it didn't tell me. It has links on the front page to web forums, user registration, chat, and a FAQ, and it has site news about downtime and server upgrades, but apart from one or two hints that it might do something related to BitTorrent, nowhere is there a clear description of what the site actually is, or why somebody might want to register for an account on it. Even the FAQ is unhelpful on this score, diving straight into tiny little details without any kind of introductory ‘yes, but what is it?’ section at the front.

Computer industry marketing is another area in which this sort of thing is widespread. Occasionally somebody will mention a computer-related term to me which has its own website, and I'll go and read the website and still have just as little idea what the wretched thing is. Increasingly I'm finding Wikipedia fills this niche for me: it told me, for example, what U3 was rather better than www.u3.com did. (Though it doesn't always win on this count: I still haven't got a clear idea of what UML is, because even Wikipedia just seems to define it in terms of other buzzwords. I know it involves diagrams in some way, but I've never quite worked out what you do with the diagrams once you've got them and whether there's anything else to it except diagrams.)

Finally, you also get a lot of this sort of thing in blogs and discussion forums, where people will post a URL without any explanation of what it is or why you might want to visit it. If it's a web forum, one might argue that it only takes a couple of seconds to find out for yourself, but even so, the Usenet effort economy still applies: thirty seconds of one writer's time works out to less overall than two seconds each of twenty readers', and if lots of people post bare URLs then I don't have two seconds to spare for all of them so I'd like some means of deciding which ones are worth looking at in advance. Particularly bad is if the link goes via one of those URL-squashing services which removes any chance of you being able to look at the URL itself in advance and know whether it's a news site or a comedy site or what. Also particularly bad is if the thing being linked to is a ten-minute YouTube (or equivalent) video which you have to watch all the way through before you have any idea whether the person had linked to it because it was bad, or good, or funny, or sad, or just tedious, or what.

I'm not asking for huge elaborate descriptions of things which remove any need for me to go and read the actual thing. I just think that writing, say, ten words or so to give people the first idea of what something is shouldn't be that difficult for anybody, and yet it seems to be taking the first steps toward becoming a lost art.

In other news

In other news, the reason I was walking through a shopping centre at all just now is because as of this lunchtime I've finished work for the year. :-)