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Sporting their tight Speedos, men and women stand erect with bodies all tanned as their heads touch the cirrus clouds about to launch themselves from 100 feet. Theirs is a dare-devilish act culminating with a big splash diving in pool water hopefully to live for another dive but with no guarantees.
These admirable athletes are engaging in the exhilarating-to-witness sport called platform diving.
Here ye now all of you: This sky-high diving is the only context in which this word platform should ever be used. All other contexts are banned starting now.
You see, platform is the most inappropriately massively overused word in the history of the English language.
Recently, Angel Reese, a star on the LSU women’s basketball team that won the NCAA championship, proclaimed she’s using that title to strengthen her online “platforms” such as TikTok and Instagram. A bigger platform means more followers, likes, more Name Image and Likeness bank. Self-absorption, capitalism, and narcissism all in one platform.
Hers is a platform gone platinum, running amok upward with no ceiling in sight. College athletes such as her are becoming more focused on building their personal platforms than sharpening their skills or becoming better teammates or caring selfless human beings. They are really diving into this.
She’s far from the only one.
By my current estimates, 89 percent of the people on Earth now have a podcast. Whether they admit to it or not, invariably they establish a podcast to enhance their personal branding platforms, sell more books, and gain more attention and stature with the aim of influencing more people and, generally, stroking their egos and filling their pockets with more money.
I fess up to building my own platform through the Sammy Sportface Baby Boomer Brotherhood Facebook page. I do it to get more people to read what I write, be respected, and maybe one day it will lead to more friends, fortune, and fame. It hasn’t, but it might.
Some day. But I feel sheepish and embarrassed for striving to build my own platform to enrich myself. It’s self-absorbed and blatantly self-promotional.
But I’m different. I provide actionable information in my blogs that you can use to elevate the quality of your life. It’s not all about me.
You understand all this.
This guy never makes any sense. He never serves up actionable content.
It’s not really a laudable life to develop a platform for your selfish reasons; only if for altruistic purposes such as to share good vibes and encourage others. Rarely, though, is this why personal platforms are built.
But we keep hearing about them: she’s got a big platform, his platform is huge.
“Hey man, I got a platform now to speak my mind? “Hey, how big is your platform now?” “How many clicks is your platform getting?”
What’s wrong with the word platform? This guy has odd hang-ups. Why does he write about topics no one cares about?
Who cares?
We’re living in the age of the platform phantasmagoria. Platform is a four-letter word.
I’m not sure the word phantasmagoria fits here. But platform seems just fine.
Platforms torture the tech industry
It gets worse. Building online reputations and money-making opportunities isn’t the only context in which the word platform has become the world’s most hyper-over-used term to describe just about anything.
In the technology industry, I have worked with countless marketers and engineers on, for example, semiconductor chip new product announcements. Invariably, the product marketers wanted to call the offering a platform when, in truth, it was a silicon chip on a circuit board. “Platform” sounded impressive, but it was really just a marketing spin more than truth-telling or clear communication. I get trying to make your product or service sound as impressive as is credible, but using the same word as everyone else — platform — is as dull as dirt and vague and misleading communication.
I believed then and still do it was mindless non-thinking to call something a platform. Yet we had to jump off the cliff like sheep holding onto our platforms. We embraced unfulfilling work; the opposite of creative.
For the past several decades through today, so many things have been labeled a platform as part of the high-tech platform wars: cloud platforms, wireless platforms, video platforms, virtual reality platforms artificial intelligence platforms.
A Wall Street Journal reporter once told me the word platform was being used so much to describe so many different products and services and other offerings that the word had lost any meaning.
If everything was a platform, then how could anyone tell which platform was better than the other? And how could every one of these things be a platform? It didn’t even make sense. Imagine receiving 100 press releases daily from different companies and every one of them using the word platform.
Mob psychology, like in the case of people joining the Sammy Sportface crusade, messed us all up. The thinking has been that if you didn’t call what you were peddling a platform you had no chance of selling it or generating press attention, which was stupid and not true. “Keeping up with the platforms” was akin to “keeping up with the Joneses” and the Joneses, we all found out, we’re all that cool.
There’s more. For the past several years we’ve had the platform wars. The Facebook platform vs. the Google platform vs. the Microsoft platform vs. the Apple iPhone platform? Is the Amazon Prime Video Platform better than the Netflix platform?
I honestly don’t care no matter what you call these things. You’re talking about platforms that are all one and the same. And I don’t want to ever hear the word platform again – no using the word platform in the comments section — because every time it’s used it’s for some selfish reason, or because no one is original enough to call their product or service anything other than a platform, or because it reminds me of painful and fruitless conversations trying to convince marketers to use some other word besides platform.
The point is this: Don’t follow what everyone else is doing. Use fresh words. Stop chewing on old deer meat. Bite into a new animal.
Get creative. Make yourself stand out by describing something without using the word platform. Get off Planet Platform where millions of people are crammed together suffocating each other, dying of brain lock.
Describe yourself or your product or pursuit of podcast listener growth without talking about a platform. Don’t talk about using your platform after winning a basketball title to influence social change. It’s off-putting and unimpressive. Call your platform a program or goal or initiative or razmataz or potato or anything else other than a platform. Just say you have a podcast and don’t say it’s your platform.
Expand your mind. Help others expand theirs. Stop saying and writing what everyone else is saying and writing. Never write a sentence you’ve ever read before. Never describe something using words already used by others.
Create. Think. Go down another verbal path. Stretch your mind. Trailblaze with words. Make your life more stimulating. Treat your readers to fresh concepts and ideas.
Push aside all references to platforms forever. Unless you’re talking about diving into a pool from way up there in the sky.
Off the diving platform.
Author Profile
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Sammy Sportface, a sports blogger, galvanizes, inspires, and amuses The Baby Boomer Brotherhood. And you can learn about his vision and join this group's Facebook page here:
Sammy Sportface Has a Vision -- Check It Out
Sammy Sportface -- The Baby Boomer Brotherhood Blog -- Facebook Page
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