Re: Word-a-Day Bonus Round: screencast

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Thu, 2008-04-03 at 13:45 -0500, Shaun McCance wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-04-03 at 18:54 +0100, Calum Benson wrote:
> > On 3 Apr 2008, at 18:32, Shaun McCance wrote:
> > > Since we've got screenshot on the table, what do people
> > > think of the word screencast?

[snip]

> My top concern is this: how many people have never
> heard the term screencast, and how many of them will
> be horribly confused the first time they see it?
> I don't know the answer to that.

Interesting data points:

I mentioned this to a coworker, who's a sysadmin.  He
knows the word screencast, and thinks it's the right
word to use.  It is what they're called, right?

I then mentioned it to Silke, my fiancée.  She's a PhD
student in Industrial-Organizational Psychology.  She's
a smart person and a skilled computer user, but she's
not entrenched in the tech industry like we are.

It's worth mentioning that she's not a native English
speaker, but she is fluent and has a large vocabulary
and almost no detectable accent.  You probably wouldn't
even suspect she's not a native speaker if you talked
to her.

She had never heard the term "screencast".  I asked her
to guess what it means.  She wasn't even sure if it was
hardware or software.  She was thinking of some sort of
encasement (or cast) for the monitor.

She asked me to use it in a sentence.  I provided the
not-very-helpful "View a screencast".  She managed to
connect it to "podcast" and "webcast", both of which
are words that she knows, for some reason.  (I can't
be sure it was my sentence that led her to make this
connection.  Her brain might have just happened to
make the connection around the same time.)

Even with this connection, she still didn't realize
it was the video analogue of a screenshot.  She was
thinking of some sort of video or audio, but wasn't
realizing what it was a recording of.

When I explained it to her, she said she didn't even
know that was possible.  She doesn't think it's an
intuitive word.


So, there's one observation of what happens when a
person not already familiar with screencasts comes
across the word "screencast".  I think that one
falls in the "horribly confused" category.

On the other hand, the fact that she didn't even know
it was possible to record a screencast is interesting.
Imagine stepping back a couple of decades and using
the word "email".  Lots of people will have never
heard the word yet, and they would have a hard time
deducing what it means, because they won't even know
that email is possible.

Connecting an unknown word to a known technology is
one thing.  Connecting an unknown word to an unknown
technology is much more difficult.

--
Shaun