In the course of reading through this blog, you will encounter three types of errors, or deviations from truth: mistakes, fallacies and lies.
Mistakes are simple errors of fact, usually products of my ignorance. They’re easy to fix; just post me a comment and I’ll edit the offending blog post. Contrary to popular belief, I don’t know everything, and more times than I like, I get things wrong.
Take note that I’m quite good at distinguishing fact from opinion. I will usually stand by my opinion as published (unless you show me incontrovertible proof that my opinion is wrong.) I’m sorry, Kanye, but I don’t think Beyonce had the best video of all time. This is my blog. If you don’t like it, don’t read it.
Fallacies are a bit more complex. They are errors of judgment and represent flawed thinking. I will plead human frailty and say that sometimes I ignore Occam’s Razor to get to a conclusion that I like. If I say A, therefore B, therefore C, therefore D, and you can’t see the logical connection between C and D, please speak up in the comments. I may or may not adjust the blog post to be clearer. Naturally, I reserve the right to disagree with the comment and do nothing about the original post.
Please note that a lot of what I have to say is based on a belief that all agencies, at their heart, have similar processes. I surmise that agency processes are somewhat homogeneous because people move from agency to agency quite freely without losing their effectiveness. Again, mistakes are easy to make when I generalize like this, and for that I apologize.
I use the term lies in the same context as the authors of The Science of Discworld, an excellent science book I recommend to everyone whether or not they have read anything by Terry Pratchett. They point out that when we educate children, we deliberately lie to them, telling them a simpler version of the truth today so that they can grow up and later come to terms with a more accurate truth. For example, we teach children that white light splits into seven colors, when in reality we have just one color spectrum that we’ve rather arbitrarily divided up into seven color categories. As another example, we teach children about good and evil, all the while knowing that the world is really more about shades of gray.
I lie to you in this context. Not everything I write here is the exact truth. Sometimes it makes sense to program an entire Web site in Flash. Music on a Web site is not always lame. And if the strategy is sound, by all means go ahead and give the client the social networking site he asked for.
In writing this blog, I’m constrained by how new to digital I perceive my readership to be. Many of my agency friends are coming into digital completely cold, so I make sweeping generalizations to get them up to speed quickly. So if, while reading a post, you find yourself excited that you’ve caught me over-generalizing, congratulations. You’ve grown past the original lesson and have come to terms with a more accurate truth.
When you get to that point, let me know. I’d be very happy to hear about it.
