There are many words and phrases which suffer from serious overuse in our day to day lives – both orally and in writing. My own particular favourite is “at the end of the day”. I always find interviews with David Beckham of particular interest – as he has a number of views which involve things happening “at the end of the day”. Don’t get me wrong I am a true admirer of David Beckham both as a footballer and as a person but at the end of the day repetition of phraseology can be a little boring.
Language is fascinating and we are all recipients of the written and spoken word in vast quantities – all day, every day. 24-hour news/television – newspapers – junk mail – cold calling phone calls – politicians and of course the Internet. There’s more information on the internet than any of us could read in a lifetime. I am not sure how many billions of internet pages there are, but there are rather a lot!
My point here is regarding communication overload. I am often told in my own organisation that we need to have more communication – and I do everything I possibly can to try and meet that demand – but it seems that in society generally and in a micro way in my own life, that regardless of how much communication there is, it’s never enough!
I’m not clear what the expectancy is of “more communication” – because if we have much more we would simply spend our whole lives listening to people talking and reading what they have written.
They key in my view, in running an organisation, is to try and analyse who needs to know what. In other words communication should be targeted. I was asked this week to ensure that I and others when replying to emails did not automatically hit “reply to all” and just to take one second to note whether in fact “reply” would suffice – in many cases it would. And this practice of course would help by decreasing email overload.
The Jewish community has the benefit of an excellent newspaper – on whose web pages I am appearing here. And of course there are other Jewish publications – some of which are specifically aimed at niche markets. One area, however, where I believe there is a short coming in terms of Jewish media is a radio station. We are officially a Jewish population in London of 200,000 people approx – in reality it’s probably much more. Surely we are a large enough community/population to justify having our own radio station?
A number of people over the years have attempted to do this – some with more success than others. There is not across London a specifically Jewish radio station. There is in Paris. There is in New York and most American cities – but not in London. Why is it that this great city with such a diverse population is able to provide stations for the Asian, Greek and French communities – but not the Jewish community. Could somebody please tell me what the problem is? Why such ventures in the past have never got off the ground? I’d be really interested to know.
I am aware of course that the odd radio station does have a “Jewish hour” – a temporary licence covering a very small radius in North West London – but at the risk of going off on a fairly dramatic tangent I would remind my readers that there are actually Jewish people living all over London – and not just in the North Western Frontier of this great metropolitan city we live in!
Talk of a Jewish TV station should perhaps be left for another time.
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