The lesson Kipling wrote of is one of the first things they teach you about writing if you attend a college of journalism (and I suppose any other college of writing discipline).  I remember going over the “Five W’s and H” in Journalism 101, or 1001, or whatever they called it back when the writing instrument in front of us was an IBM Selectric. What I wonder now is that when this was first presented to me, did I think to ask, or even ask myself, just why these six things are important to a news story? After all, these are taught as more than just important “rule of thumb” items; we were cautioned that without these six items our stories would be deemed incomplete. Today we might say they would “FAIL!”

Perhaps asking why would have led to broader discussions about human nature that were not necessary for beginning writers.  If I’d thought about it then, why these six things are vital to all human communication, would I have found an answer? I don’t know. What I do know is that explosive growth in social media is making me revisit everything about my old assumptions.  I’m taking the time to challenge the fundamentals and hold them up to the new light afforded by technology.

In tinkering with the model a bit, I noticed that the six elements can be neatly fit into three groups.

This actually gives me an answer my question as to “why’ these items are important.  When people communicate, whether it is in journalism, in literature, in conversations or now on the Internet or in Social Media, they need to be given enough information to draw mental pictures of what is being communicated.  The better the information, the clearer the picture.  Great literature and all great writing soars when it conjures vivid things in the imagination.  People need to have ideas about objects and subjects upon which they can impose other the other elements.  And, perhaps because we exist in time and space, we need to be able to place the objects and subjects of our communication in time and space.

Digging into this a little deeper, it occurred to me that so far as “coordinates” are concerned, the old “Five W’s and an H” model is incomplete when it comes to what I’ve now recast as “coordinates.”

It seems to me that the “where” part of “coordinates” should refer to a particular geographic place whether it is specified, imaginary or assumed.  It also seems to me that the “when” should refer to a particular time whether it is specified, implied or assumed.  It also occurs to me that some things are still missing if we’re really going to understand what elements are necessary for “successful” communication (and I’m not sure if this is comprehensive) to occur.

These elements seem necessary, though not all of them and not always, to enable people to draw clear mental pictures that lead to understanding.  But when I got to here with my thought process, it still seemed incomplete on a go-forward basis.  Perhaps there is something that has fundamentally changed about human communication that actually cleaves us between the generations that inherently understand and are pre-adapted and those generations that will always struggle with the change.  And I think it can be summed up with this:

I think there are people – mostly Baby Boomers and Gen Xer’s – who will always struggle to keep up and have difficulty  succeeding in the age of the new communication paradigm.    And it’s probably because they their minds can’t cope well with the things that are virtual.  For some it is already natural to grasp that each item in the contents of Google’s database is a proxy for a virtual time/space coordinate.  For others, it will always be awkward.   I’m trying to figure out ways to help the awkward communicate better in this new landscape.

“No, the ‘www’ isn’t part of my email address.  But you have to have the ‘@’ in there to send it.”