Abstraction is the price of brevity

Communities create their own jargon because they need brevity in their conversation.

The price of that brevity is abstraction.

Jargon unites people in as much as it alienates them from each other.

I’ve experienced this first hand – visiting data miners, market researchers, marketing scientists, entrepreneurial developers, and brand managers. It becomes very easy for people to dismiss entire modes of thought purely because the jargon doesn’t resonate.

Deep within abstraction are generally understood understandings. For instance, the term ‘qualified traffic’ means something very fundamental to a search marketer. The same term, ‘traffic’, is perceived a fair bit differently among web analysts. And in terms of CRM people – well – they don’t view ‘response’ as a form of traffic.