Have you ever looked at a word for so long that it begins to look absurd? Have you ever said a word so often that it becomes a sound that no longer has meaning?
Try it now, look at the word ‘absurd”, don’t read it, look at it. Look at the letter shapes, the rise and fall of the ascenders, the width and height. After about 10 seconds it begins to look just plain silly. You will get to the point where you are surprised that the shapes on the page can mean anything at all, let alone convey the complex meaning that it actually has.
How about the game ‘red lorry, yellow lorry’; you know the one where you repeat the phrase as many times as you can without slurring, tripping up etc. Eventually it becomes just a sound, lacking all meaning and it sounds just plain silly.
The word digital has begun to lack meaning, it is used so often that I am pretty sure we have forgotten what it actually means. Much like swear words have just become sounds, no one actually considers what they really mean, nowadays they are used as aural punctuation.
In a day I get about 100 emails using the word digital, I look at about 20 websites a day and they all use the word digital. Of course they are digital – they are emails and websites! My particular bug bare at the moment is the use of the phrase ‘digital marketing’. It is not digital marketing it is just marketing. This is 2015 and the world is online (note: the use of ‘online’ and NOT ‘digital’!). If you are marketing without using email and the web, then to be brutally honest with you, what you are doing is not marketing!
So lets drop it – we don’t need the differentiation now, digital (ugh) is majority and not the minority, it is not new and it does not need a flag. Digital (double ugh) is standard.
So I am asking myself the question, ‘do I need to use the word digital or am I just using it for the sake of using it?’. Is it actually adding meaning or clarity, or am I being lazy and basically swearing?