A Wooden Tongue and Simplicity

I found the contrast between two articles this week to be interesting.

Wired magazine’s article “Blogging With a Wooden Tongue” and elearning post reference to Fast Company’s article “The Beauty of Simplicity”.

I have never heard the term “wooden tongue” which is defined in the article as the “language of officialdom; of politics, power and propaganda.” It seems that blogs have become fashionable so many are now written with this wooden tongue instead of with the original intent of sharing or logging ideas. So blogs have now become complicated, more diverse, less simple.

That leads me to the simplicity article which discusses the inroads that companies like Google and Philips are making with taking a simplicity approach to their business and products. The first few paragraphs are great. But when you think about instructional technology I think the quote below is the most applicable:

It is innovation’s biggest paradox: We demand more and more from the stuff in our lives—more features, more function, more power—and yet we also increasingly demand that it be easy to use. And, in an Escher-like twist, the technology that’s simplest to use is also, often, the most difficult to create.