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What is the most jargon-laden area of technology?
Segueing off of this question at Andrew Baker's recommendation... technology has many specific terms to memorize, but where do you think most of these are? In the mobile space? Information security? Networking? Somewhere else?
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- Martyn Davies
Hmmm... Telecom... That's probably a fair bet.
I expect that information security is pretty heavily jargon laden as well, since it is cross discipline and must utilize some of the jargon of other elements of information technology.
One thing, though: Regardless of which industry we're talking about, I don't that most jargon is generated to feel special, but because it can be annoying to say certain things the long way as often as you have to say them. It's supposed to be an aid to communication, so long as you only need to communicate with other professionals of that discipline. (It gets quite awkward when you forget who your audience is, and your audience has changed)
I'd hate to have to say (or hear, for that matter) "Open Systems Interconnection model" as often as I use or hear "OSI model", as just one example.
Couldnt agree with you more Alan! We certainly love making ourselves feel important by surrounding ourselves with jargon that no-one understands, its our "secret" handshake.
I don't think it has anything to do with self importance or secret handshakes. EVERY industry has their TLAs and FLAs. I worked at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for about 8 years and the health professionals definitely have their own acronym language, and a later position of over 6 years with a food retailer, the production and supply chain folks had a specific language, the marketing folks had their own, and definitely the finance department had an acronym set specific to their functions.
It's not that I'm lazy, I'm efficient. It is naturally more efficient to use a Three Letter Acronym than to constantly spell out or say the complete phrases of function specific language.
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Having spent a LOT of time in IT standards development, I know that it is a jargon factory and confess my own contributions to it.
However, I have NEVER seen as much jargon and acronyms produced, re-used, and abused as in US government IT -- measured in elapsed time and density. It even reuses its own jargon in ways that produce misunderstandings among agencies and, in some cases, within them. Government IT FTW!