Context
There was a post today on Blogs.sun.com that sparked a lot of discussion inside the Sun Blogging community. This post and the ensuing discussion embodied what is great about blogging. It was a somewhat controversial post, not really bad, just controversial. It was a prime example of what can happen when something is taken out of context. In this case the context was the blog itself and the chosen writing style of the owner of the blog.
The post seemed to be a little whiny and maybe even a little immature, but hey it wasn't the first blog that could have been described that way. For me, what was really interesting was the discussion that it generated. The subject of the first email was simply “Cringe”. This person said that the post made him “cringe” and he simply wondered if he was being “too sensitive or not”. This simple inquiry generated a diverse discussion that ranged from the appropriateness of the language used in the blog on a corporate blog site and censorship to the first amendment and the author's right to freedom of expression. There were opinions but it wasn't until later in the day that the author of the post in questions actually weighed in. He seemed genuinely surprised by the reaction that his blog generated and he wondered if anyone had even read his blog over the last four years that he had been writing. He finished by saying that his goal for his blog was to write about a somewhat normally dry topic “with as much silliness and humor as I can muster”.
One of the responses opined that perhaps the blog in question was more like the “Colbert Report”. What I take out of this whole incident is that when viewed on it's own, this post could be viewed as possibly inflammatory but when viewed in the context of the entire blog site it could now be viewed as somewhat humorous. Context is important! It provides a point of reference within which to understand what is being observed. In this case it was just a blog, but the same could be said of just about anything. As a systems engineer my job is translate a customers requirements into a solution. Without context, a customer's comments or stated requirements can be misinterpreted and the result will be a proposed solution that neither meets the actual requirements nor solves the real problem. Context is indeed important!
Sun is really a great place to work and one of the reasons is the people. We are a diverse group of individuals with different views, different opinions and one thing in common - We all want to do the right thing for the company and our customers. One thing that can help us do both is to remember that everything is not always as it seems and that context matters in everything under the sun.
