Digital Marketing Insights
from Newfangled

"We are, each of us, largely responsible for what gets put into our brains." It's an interesting notion, isn't it? It's certainly easy to say, especially if we're being prescriptive. But maybe being prescriptive is too easy. It leads us down unnecessarily judgmental paths, assigning "good" and "bad" in ways that might be suitable for us, right now, but not for everyone at all times. Take the internet, for example. Access to it can lead to decadence or edification. Ultimately, it's a neutral doorway. But the experience beyond it — and its qualitative measure — is entirely up to us. Another way of looking at it is this: We get to choose the voices in our heads...

Just because you don't speak the language doesn't mean you don't know anything. Judging someone's intelligence by their ability to communicate with you on your terms is an unfair — but sadly very common — practice. We do it to each other all the time. In fact, did you know that language barriers represent one of the most common biases in intelligence testing? On a smaller scale, any time you assume someone will know what you are talking about, you run the risk of being wrong. Whose job is it to fix that?

We probably spend more time explaining things than anything else. Seriously, I've checked the timesheet data! New ideas. How things work. Best practices. Documenting it all. So what are we, really, but brokers of knowledge...?