Out of the Blue and into the Black: The Pursuit of Innovation and a visit to the DSM Biotechnology Center

The Language Shift

But some notes are looking a lot, lot different.

Here’s an example to chew on. This was a visual record made by one Ingrid Nouwens, a former DSMer who ha become a professional visual recorder in recent months. She made this from remarks I gave on innovation and technology at a private DSM meeting recently.

Note the emphasis on keywords and graphics. And if you’ve seen the rise of infographics, the spread of factoid memes like the Harper’s Index, or as we do when we mine Google Analytics to understand what Digest readers read and realize that 55% of what they read are slides — visuals, not text.

As I noted in my 2003 book with Jeff Alan, Anchoring America, information has been expanding at twice the pace of GDP growth since 1929, and nothing since 2003 in the rise of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Linkedin, SMS texting, or mobile phones that has altered that trend.

Language is becoming more symbolic, pictorial, brief, shareable. URLs are routinely longer than the messages that invite you to click on them. The world is going Missouri: Show Me.