Beer Goggles #1 - Dialogue Trees

Stop and have a chat. It's a no brainer.

Everyone loves to have a yarn from time to time. A social tool that has been key to our species’ rise to prominence in the food chain. Whether it be teaching others which berries are safe to eat, deciding who to behead next in the French Revolution, or simply asking grandma to pass the salt. Communication is in our DNA.

At first it was a relatively simple affair made up of spoken word round a campfire, or a cheeky bit of prose only a fraction of the population could actually read. And eventually...

The Internet joined the chat.

And thanks to the internet we are now able to share information with each other at a scale and volume unparalleled by any other time in human history. The spread of culture is no longer limited to a physical space or person. Instead, it has gone digital, and we can talk and be influenced by people we would otherwise never have met.

Within this new digital culture terminology is able to catch on faster, with the most popular ones trending all the way to the top of the pile.

You might find that these days when asking for a friend’s opinion on any subject matter you are typically met with three possible outcomes (a dialogue tree if you will).

This is fire = Good

Eh its mid = Okay

That is so trash = Bad

When presented with this flow chart of phrases you can be forgiven for thinking: ‘So what? It’s just a new coat of paint for trendy phrases that we used to say.’

And in a sense, you would be right. It is a way to preserve the sentiment of once popular words such as radical, neato, and gnarly so they can keep up with the culture and be enjoyed by the kids of today. But then why this time around do these phrases feel like they lack any substance?

Perhaps it is because there is a lack of nuance in this new terminology. With the shear amount of new content produced every day, it can be hard to keep up with the number of different ways to say you like something. So, instead of sifting through the litany of useless words we get bombarded with on a daily basis, we choose to let our interactions default to what is popular at the time and so parrot these terms before we even fully understand them.

It makes me wonder:

What would Demosthenes, an orator known throughout the Ancient Greek world for his powerful rhetoric, think of the lingo today?

I can’t know for certain, but I'm sure he would think pizza is pretty fire.

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