How advertising is the opposite of documentation

You know that documentation and advertising are at odds, if you’ve worked in either for any length of time. Here’s a conspicuous definition of advertising that’s pretty much the opposite of what documentation does:

I want to make the public aware of something they don’t quite yet know that they know – or have them feel that way. Because they’ll move on that, do you understand? They’ll think they thought of it first. It’s about transferring information, but at the same time about a certain lack of specificity.

I found this in chapter 7 of William Gibson’s novel Pattern Recognition. Last I heard, the book hadn’t yet become one of the seminal texts in advertising, so take it with a grain of salt… 🙂

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