Monday, February 6, 2012

My Digital Dictionary

Over the last three years, I've had the need to express particular ideas and thoughts that have not yet been captured by existing verbiage. Accordingly, I've taken it upon myself to coin the following new words:

Reader Fatigue: The cognitive exhaustion that is a result of continual flow of great information from a Google Reader. Synonyms: Mental Overload.

Digital Hording: The compulsive behavior (mostly by teachers) to save every bit of any file, program, or application on a home directory-no matter what the significance of the file.

Tweet Groupie: The sycophantic flatter who engages others on twitter for the purpose of self promotion as opposed to participating in and contributing to a digitally-oriented professional learning community. Self disclosure: I began my digital journey this way out of naivete.

Blog Crush: A high admiration and idolization of a colleague's blog, including the ideas expressed, connections made, and subsequent transformation triggered.

Post Prudence: The realization that comes once the colleagues you admire the most now follow you and your blog. Example: Once you know that @mcleod follows your twitter feed, you can't say stupid crap anymore.

Follower Balance: The idea that in a digitally-oriented professional learning community, you should be as interested in what others have to say as what you have to say. Hence, there should be somewhat of a balance between who follows you and whom you follow. Antonym: Tweet vanity.

Tab Collecting: The act of collecting tabs within your browser as a way of remembering that you want to tweet or blog about it later in the day.

4 O'Clock Push: The rush of tweets that appears from 3:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. as a result of twitter users not wanting their bosses to know that they've been surfing the net while on the job. Note: Twitter users will collect tabs during the course of the day and then push them out after the formal end of the work day.

Tweet Noise: Random, unrelated, or hollow posts that are sprinkled into our personalized twitter feed. Used in sentence: Once I got past the tweet noise this morning, I found three wonderful blog posts that I bookmarked, and one that I commented on. 

5 a.m. Twitter Clutch: The unusual mixture of British twitterers that are just about to go to bed and the North American twitterers that have gotten up early, all of whom to converse and share insights on twitter.

One-Upman Twittery: The practice of outdoing others in one's digitally-oriented professional learning community by responding to a colleague's post with a parallel story about oneself with even more elaborate outcomes.

Have you ever experienced any of these? Do you have any terms that you have coined to describe situations or experiences you frequently encounter?

1 comment:

  1. You are the Noah Webster of the web. Being a one-upper, let's take this a step further

    https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sxkJqiZWgzV-JR59Eaeo3b9Fjx_V14NeL0govGVMETI/edit

    ReplyDelete