Business Jargon: "Capturing"
Lots of people at my place of employment talk about taking notes to "capture" a discussion or writing a memo in such a way that it "captures" the information to be conveyed or - worse - summarizing a "brown-bag" so that it "captures the learnings."
Captured? There's nothing wrong with using good old words like "record" or "contain" in these contexts. Using a silly imported word like "capture" makes it sound as if the information is wandering ferally through the wilderness, and we're the doughty biologists who will seize it and bring it back to the zoo for study. Nothing could be further from office-life truth.
Captured? There's nothing wrong with using good old words like "record" or "contain" in these contexts. Using a silly imported word like "capture" makes it sound as if the information is wandering ferally through the wilderness, and we're the doughty biologists who will seize it and bring it back to the zoo for study. Nothing could be further from office-life truth.
posted by Christopher Tassava at Thursday, January 13, 2005
1 Comments:
I thought about your post today during a meeting when someone invited us all to consider the project's workplan as a "living" document. Perhaps both these business bon mots hint at an underlying hunter-gatherer metaphor in the world of knowledge work. Information is cagey, embodied in living documents that must be captured before they disappear back into the underbrush.
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