I like to think that while I do certainly criticize technology products and technology companies for any failings -- Microsoft forcing Windows 10 on to customers against their will last year, for example -- I’m fair. I still get as excited about a new phone, or a new version of Windows, as I did in the past, and I don't deliberately look for negatives. The same is true for all other BetaNews writers.
However, a new study finds that tech reporting is generally more pessimistic now than in the past, and for two very different reasons.
The new report from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), and based on textual analysis of 250 articles from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post from 1986 to 2013, highlights how the tone of tech reporting has shifted in the past 20 years.
In general, the ITIF found that in the 1980s and 1990s, coverage of technology was largely positive, but this changed from the mid-1990s to 2013, when more negative reports covering the downside of technology, its failure to live up to its promises, and potential ill effects, started to appear.
All righty then... Where to start..?
Perhaps I should start with the fact that tech coverage in the '80s and '90s included both the very beginnings of the personal computer as a thing, and the entire arc of the dot-com bubble? Yes, PCs were very exciting when they were shiny and new, rather than being ubiquitous and banal, and people were very excited about the potential of dot-coms before anybody knew anything about how dot-coms were actually going to work, but I don't think it's a stretch to suggest that the bursting of the dot-com bubble, which triggered a recession, revealed that shady accounting and auditing practices had fuelled the bubble itself, and wiped out five trillion dollars in investors' pension funds and life savings, may be part of the reason why responsible journalists are little more cautious these days when reporting on the latest bit of hype from Silicon Valley. Just saying.
Then there's the tidbit that the ITIF is a pro-technology think tank, funded by (among others) Cisco, Google, eBay, and IBM? That it was established to "promote government support for innovation in many forms," i.e. to convince lawmakers that technology is the solution to every problem? Or that the report was compiled by sampling articles from only three publications (none of them specific to technology), and searching for the words “technology,” “worry,” “concern,” “progress,” or “potential?” Because that was their methology.
Or perhaps we should talk about the self-congratulatory tone of Williams' piece, praising his (and his BetaNews colleagues') fairness, while complaining that other reporters "have less time and fewer resources to dig deep into technology issues," while being incentivized to "pursue alarmist stories that generate clicks" in a way that borders on "technophobic." Because anyone must be technophobic to say e.g. that VR is a shit product that costs way too much considering that it's not useful for anything much, I guess?
Also, BetaNews apparently have more resources, and fairer journalists, than The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and/or The Washington Post. Not kidding; those are the three publications whose articles ITIF scanned for their analysis. Apparently those scrubs just don't know, but don't worry! BetaNews is here to set them straight. Seriously, what the actual fuck?
Perhaps I'm being too harsh. Williams, after all, wasn't exactly making those claims directly. He was just quoting Daniel Castro, ITIF’s vice president and the report’s co-author, in a way that implied that BetaNews was journalistically superior to the NYT, the WSJ, and/or the Post. Because that's what you're doing, when you talk up your own fairness, and then quote a think tank spokesman saying that the rest of the new media is understaffed, underfunded, ethically compromised, and technophobic, to boot.
[Sigh.]
Our Information Age way of life has many features that seem quite positive, and the technology to which we have access has done a lot to transform the way we live. Self-driving autos, for example, could reduce the annual driver-error carnage on our roads by tens of thousands of human lives per year, in the U.S. alone. But the effects of that technology are not invariably positive, and it's not technophobic or unfair to accurately report when poorly-regulated corporations, or their devices, fail to meet expectations, erode our privacy, undermine our democracy, or even put us in danger.
Also, BetaNews apparently have more resources, and fairer journalists, than The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and/or The Washington Post. Not kidding; those are the three publications whose articles ITIF scanned for their analysis. Apparently those scrubs just don't know, but don't worry! BetaNews is here to set them straight. Seriously, what the actual fuck?
Perhaps I'm being too harsh. Williams, after all, wasn't exactly making those claims directly. He was just quoting Daniel Castro, ITIF’s vice president and the report’s co-author, in a way that implied that BetaNews was journalistically superior to the NYT, the WSJ, and/or the Post. Because that's what you're doing, when you talk up your own fairness, and then quote a think tank spokesman saying that the rest of the new media is understaffed, underfunded, ethically compromised, and technophobic, to boot.
[Sigh.]
Our Information Age way of life has many features that seem quite positive, and the technology to which we have access has done a lot to transform the way we live. Self-driving autos, for example, could reduce the annual driver-error carnage on our roads by tens of thousands of human lives per year, in the U.S. alone. But the effects of that technology are not invariably positive, and it's not technophobic or unfair to accurately report when poorly-regulated corporations, or their devices, fail to meet expectations, erode our privacy, undermine our democracy, or even put us in danger.
The rule of thumb here is pretty simple: unpleasant news isn't necessarily erroneous, and reporting inconvenient truths is perhaps the most essential role of journalism. Many tech writers basically repeat press release copy, often word-for-word, with very little by way of fact-checking or analysis; it's not so much journalism as it is stenography. Williams is better than many at calling out the bullshit, but that's not saying much when you consider how low the bar has been lately.
I've been pretty critical of tech writers in the past, something which, honestly, is becoming increasingly awkward as my intended-to-be-about-gaming blog has come to be dominated by my writings on Windows 10, VR, and other tech-specific issues. Awkward or not, though, there's no way around the fact that I did the minimum work of checking Wikipedia to learn about the source of this report, and skimmed the report itself to see what their methodology actually was... two things which Williams apparently didn't do.
As luck would have it, Idea Channel has a pretty decent video this week on a related topic, which I highly recommend:
Yes, technology does have its uses; it just pays to be skeptical about some of the claims of tech companies, is all, and those of their lobby groups and think tanks... or any self-congratulatory tech writers you may come across who are too busy patting themselves on the back to do the actual fact-checking which is indispensable to effective journalism.
I'm not a journalist. I'm not trained as one, and I don't work as one; this blog is done entirely in my spare time, any isn't monetized in any way. But if you are a journalist, and you're still being out-done by an amateur like me when it comes to basic journalistic integrity... then I'm sorry, but you're doing it wrong.
#nohype