Out in the wild - and really - these days what else would you call ‘LinkedIN’, I 🔗 read a post by 🔗 Tim Parsons that had garnered a few comments. It was touching on a pet peeve of mine, despite TL;DR being a technique I use from time to time.

This was the essence;

Sometimes it just can’t be any shorter and still be useful. Some lynchpin bit of data or context would have to be sacrificed, a risk go unnamed, a requirement remain unidentified.
Sometimes information exchange has to include all the information AND the meta data it needs to build a bridge from you to me.
Sometimes “Too Long; Didn’t Read” is a terrible risk/reward proposition, and you have to go all the way to “Very Long; Must Read.”
When everything extra has been distilled out, but there’s still a lot there, that’s a sign of something complex enough to be fascinating, or at least full of critical, decision-influencing intel.

He ended his post with a reference back to the source.

I remember 🔗 Marjorie Anderson activating that thought in my head weeks ago, and now it won’t leave.

This resonated ….

Sometimes TL;DR simply must yield to VL;MR

Which got me to thinking.

You know how I am with that word … ‘content’.

To remind from one of many posts on the topic - just on this blog ….

As long as ‘we the creators’ keep using low cost, homogenous, non-descript words like ‘content’ to describe our work, our soul, our passion, our beliefs then our work will continue to be viewed as ‘free - to - cheap - to - low - cost’, ‘homogenized, non differentiated, interchangeable fodder’ (which coincidentally is what silos have always been used for), then, we only have ourselves to blame as the resultant payment for our art, our thinking and our ideas, will continue to race to the bottom.

And whilst on the topic of silos ….

You should never … ever … trust a Silo. It’s theirs. The stuff you put there is theirs. Even our' handle is actually ‘theirs’.

All this and more can be found in an earlier post here : 🖇️ Friends Don’t Let Friends Write Content

And it is not just me …

Just today

and last year .. Dana Carvey and Will Arnett brought it up (listen it’s a one minute snipped) on the Smartless podcast.

Anyway, with that all said … ‘set up’ done … ✅

So What?

It struck me that ‘TL;DR | VL;MR’ is the second axis I have been looking for in my one man war on ‘content’. So I drew the picture.

‘content | material ' on the x axis and ‘TL;DR | VL;MR’ on the y axis - and I was left with ‘Yeah .. so what?

The ‘so what’ was because I realized that it was missing the third axis …‘Entertainment | Understanding’

The fact is that so much that is running around the ‘interwebs’ is ‘Entertainment’. Nothing wrong with that, but VL;MR is really about Understanding.

Moreover, the front facing 4 quadrants are all about ‘Entertainment | Understanding’ and TL;DR | VL;MR - not ‘Content | Material’

So I drew it again.

The coloration isn’t quite right for all occasions, but in this particular context

1. on the entertainment side - it doesn’t really matter which end of the TL;DR | VL;MR spectrum you are - a 240 character tweet can be as entertaining as a 3 hour movie or a 1,000 page book, BUT on the understanding side .. sure sometimes a pithy one liner can shed light on an issue that a three volume encyclopedia will never do. It’s also true that a very short mathematical equation is very powerful when it comes to ‘explaining’ - IF you understand the language of math(s) (I like to accommodate both sides of the Atlantic if I can), which most people do not.

But generally that is not the case, because what triggered me is that context and history and space and time and .. is needed to really bottom out ‘Understanding’

So far so good?

I added the third dimension.

And we are there … nearly.

The dimensions are right - but the colors remain at odds with my thinking. I have the image in my head plus the colors need to be fading from one color to the next - depending on the context. I am not a graphic artist … and I could draw what I am thinking … eventually … and maybe I will return to complete / correct this.

But before I do that. Make sense? See where I am coming from?

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