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I’m always coming late to the party. Over the weekend, traveling through Arizona with a clogged computer, I stopped in at the Apple store, 12 minutes late for my appointment at the Genius Bar. They hold the appointments for 10 minutes, after which you go into the queue. There were about 300 people in the store. Standing in line, I asked a roaming Apple person how long she thought the wait might be for those of us who had trouble making our way through the desert to this oasis.
“You need to talk to the guy with the iPad,” she said, nodding toward a fresh-faced young man tapping his screen at the front of the line. “He has better visibility on that.”
For about five minutes I wondered why she would say has better visibility on rather than knows more about. Then I estimated my chances of going mad in the Apple store and exited.
Although I had failed to fix my laptop, I thought I’d discovered a new bit of Applespeak. But on returning to my hotel room and Googling (because, of course, the mere dwelling temporarily inside the Apple store had magically repaired whatever was ailing my hard drive), I found the expression everywhere.
Straight uses: In the report “Electricity Market Reform,” February 15, 2011: “Until we have visibility on that, it is quite difficult to be confident that this is going to drive the real uplift in investment that is absolutely crucial.” From Investorshub, March 2012: “YES but we don’t have visibility on that time line.”
And complaints: In a blog kept by McSmith, tracking terms of art in patent litigation: “Visibility = figure out what the hell we’re going to do.” In Kuno Creative, under 2013’s most overused expressions, under “Emerging Garbage”: “We don’t have ‘visibility on that’ yet. Huh? You mean you can’t see it? Replacements: see, understand.” In Meeting Boy’s blog, August 2013: “’I’d like to have visibility on that.’ Took me 5 minutes to realize that was just a fancy way of saying, can I have access to the report?”
Clearly, the expression’s been around long enough for those in the know to grow annoyed with it. But where did it originate? Ngrams yield one clue. Before 2007 (which is as contemporary as the data get), the term rose steeply from 1990 to 2003, where it peaked in books using it mostly to refer to information visible on computer screens — flight parameters, production lots, access-control parameters that those involved were attempting to view. More recent instances, though their general meaning is opaque to me, seem to confirm the figurative use of a computer-screen term; for instance, this December 2014 entry in the techie discussion Gossamer Threads, under “NetApp: Toasters”:
I’ve been testing a few monitoring scripts for cDOT and had to pull
out some physical components on heads / disk shelves, I noticed the
following:
when a PSU removed from a DS2246 disk shelf, this fact is not visible
for CLI tools like “alert” or “system health”. Also Zephyr API calls
of ‘ses’ category don’t seem to have visibility on that.
In a literal sense, then, the fellow with the iPad in the Apple store has “better visibility on” my chances of seeing a Genius before the sun sets over the mountains because he’s looking at a schedule on his little screen, and that schedule shows the remaining open slots.
Figuratively, though, the expression seems to me to accomplish two things. First, it places knowledge, or understanding, in the categories of vision and transparency. If we can see it, we can know it. Look, there it is, plain as day, right on my computer screen. Second, and related, it removes responsibility from the person who’s trying to “figure out what the hell we’re going to do.” If you don’t have visibility, it’s not your fault. Not the same—no, not at all—as not having a vision.
How useful a term it is, then, not having visibility. Shall we welcome it into the lingo of academe?
What do you think my grade will be in this course, Professor?
Sorry, kid. I don’t have visibility on that.
I know, I know. It’s already in your syllabi. I’m always late to the party.
(Credit–and apologies–to James Joyce for the title of this post.)