Question Technology

Why Does Tech Journalism Suck?

Chris Dahlen at Pitchfork Media laments the state of technology journalism:

I keep hearing the same gripe from the critics of the critics of pop culture: Today's writers eat it. Nobody knows how to cover music, or movies, or video games, or any of the other media that matter. We need someone to swoop in and save us: We need a new Lester Bangs, or a new Hunter S. Thompson-- one of those guys who made criticism and alternative journalism seem so vital back in the 1960s and 70s. Where they hell did they go?

[...] But I think I've found the answer: We don't have a new Bangs or Thompson yet because pop culture today is primarily a technology story. And we don't know how to write about technology.

Oh sure, we cover tons of stories about technology. We write up every new thing from could-be-big trends-- whatever happened to the podcast revolution, anyway?-- to tiny but buzzworthy ones, like that "personalized" Jessica Simpson download they're selling at Yahoo! Music. The problem is that every time we write about some new technology like podcasting, we go through the basic template-- explain how it works, decide whether grandmothers will care about RSS feeds, and so forth-- and we quote the same types of people: The early adopter, the industry analyst, the skeptic. And no matter what context the story falls into and how important the subject may seem, the overall tone is always the same: whatever it is, it's "neat." [...]

[Tech] magazines are digging deeper ruts in fallow soil. Wired's devolving into Cosmo for geeks: It hypes and glosses over tech the way Cosmo turns the most spectacular human experience, the orgasm, into bulletpoints. And who else is out there in the popular press? We know that our readers probably play an Internet-enabled XBox 360 that can pipe movie trailers while they're listening to an iPod and instant messaging their friends on a laptop. But what's the real story-- that we're entertained? We almost need a refresher course in media studies, á la Marshall McLuhan. We should start with McLuhan's quote-- "After more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace"-- and step by step, relearn our relationship to the world.

[...]  The tech press says we're at a buffet of gadgets and gizmos; but we should be knocking over the table and eating off the floor. We have to strip away the geekery, the gadgetry, and the consumerism, and instead of explaining why this brave new freakshow interests us, we have to understand what it's doing to us.

Link: Pitchfork Feature: Column: Get That Out of Your Mouth #27.

(via Slashdot)

It's a nice rant and I agree up to a point.  There's some good stuff out there, but it takes a bit of searching.  I was going to make a list, but I don't have time right now -- for anyone who cares, I'll leave it to you to scan the book list to the left and the ugly unsorted link collections to the right.  Sorry for the disorganization.

One recommendation that's not here (and not really tech, but pop culture and business culture): The Baffler magazine, and Thomas Frank's books (especially One Market Under God).

India rejects Negroponte's Laptops

I missed this bit of news last week.  From The Register:

India has decided against getting involved in Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child scheme - which aims to provide kids in developing countries with a simple $100 machine.

The success of the project depends on support, and big orders, from governments. The loss of such a potentially huge, and relatively technically sophisticated market, will be a serious blow.

The Indian Ministry of Education dismissed the laptop as "pedagogically suspect". Education Secretary Sudeep Banerjee said: "We cannot visualise a situation for decades when we can go beyone the pilot stage. We need classrooms and teachers more urgently than fancy tools."

Banerjee said if money were available it would be better spent on existing education plans.

Link: India rejects One Laptop Per Child | The Register.

Via Techdirt, who call the preference for classrooms and teachers over computers an "ideological stumbling block."

Update: More news this week -- the project now says they have orders for 4 million, from Thailand, Brazil, Argentina, and Nigeria.  When they have orders for 5 million they'll start production.  Link: One Laptop Per Child gains ground | The Register.

Brad King's "Long Tail" Meta-Review

Brad King, on his Technology Review blog, promises a different kind of review of Chris Anderson's book The Long Tail, which has been reviewed just about everywhere by now:

Well, the most obvious difference will be that I'll start by laying out my feelings about the book before I've read one word of it. Once that's finished, though, I'll be heading down to Borders to purchase the book (a very un-long tail action). Then, over the next few days, I'll post the review in small chunks, sort of a long-tail-type review, taking into account readers' responses. And if Anderson finds this, maybe a note of response from him as well.

So why do the review now, when so much has already been written on the book?

Here is where my real bias is revealed. Anderson's book has garnered much attention in the press, at least as much for his position with Wired as for the book's subject. His position has given the book a weighty feel, and, like others in the technology press, that concerns me a little. When word of the book bubbled around the digital water cooler a few years ago, among the digerati that make up my world, its main idea -- simply stated, that digital commerce enables businesses to create successful niche markets -- was hardly revolutionary.

For those who had been covering the entertainment industries for any length of time, this idea had been discussed for years. For that reason, I think, I was initially put off by the idea of book: it just wasn't news or news making. While those in various industries were searching for ways to capitalize on the end of the inventory age, Anderson seemed to be discovering that inventory no longer mattered. It was a bit like closing the barn door after the horse had escaped, which Lee Gomes explains much more elegantly than I in his Wall Street Journal column today.

Link: TR Blogs: The Long Tail: a Pre-Review.

I don't quite get all the fuss either.  I'm looking forward to King's thoughts.

Francis Collins on Religion and Science

Geneticist Francis Collins is getting lots of publicity, and lots of flack, for his new book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.  There seems to be some disbelief that a scientist would try to push his faith like this.  I don't see how this is much different from some of Richard Dawkins's and Daniel Dennett's books, though.

For some of the flack, see this post over at ScienceBlogs: Neurotopia (version 2.0) : Francis Collins is Confused.

Update: Salon just published a good interview with Collins -- Salon: The Believer.  I think he and his book come across better in this interview than in previous media coverage.

Teen Sets Text Messaging Record

From AP:

A Utah teen with fingers of fury is once again the speed text-messaging king of the world. Ben Cook, 18, of Provo, Utah, returned to the top of the cell-phone text-messaging heap Friday at a Denver text-off at a water park, blazing through a 160-character standardized message in 42.22 seconds.

Link: Utah Teen Sets Text Messaging Record.

I hope he has health insurance by the time the repetitive stress injuries kick in.

When I was a kid, the speed contest of the day was Rubik's cube.  Coincidentally my top time was also around 40 seconds, thank you very much.

Is Soy Food Scare For Real?

A recent article on possible health risks of eating too much soy is making the internet rounds and scaring lots of people: Guardian Unlimited: Should We Worry About Soya In Our Food?

The answer from the Guardian is clearly yes -- you should worry.  While it wouldn't be the first time that the food industry kept food risks hidden from consumers (as has possibly happened in certain cases with genetically modified foods), I'm skeptical of this article.  It seems alarmist and is based largely on a single source -- a Dr. Mike Fitzpatrick from New Zealand.  After a little searching I found his website, Soy Online Service, which assures us that it's run by private citizens without any outside funding.

Yet there's a whiff of conspiracy theory about this site.  Similar material about the hidden dangers of soy can be found in such places as Nexus Magazine ("an international bi-monthly alternative news magazine, covering the fields of: Health Alternatives; Suppressed Science; Earth's Ancient Past; UFOs & the Unexplained; and Government Cover-Ups").  There's a lot of anti-soy material like this on the web, and it seems to go back at least ten years or so.  Scanning it gives me the feeling I got a few years back when a friend tried to warn me off of Diet Coke.  I naively looked to the web for answers.  You can find an awful lot of people on the web convinced that aspartame will kill you, along with an awful lot of evidence that those people are kooks; mostly though, you'll just be exhausted from the effort.

Maybe there's something to this soy thing -- I don't know.  Perhaps some well-intentioned people learned a little bit about toxicity (but not quite enough), got scared, and thus a webspiracy was born.  This story could use some perspective from disinterested scientists (I don't think Fitzpatrick counts -- he may not make money off of this, but he has surely staked his career on it).

Update: A little more Googling and I'm convinced this is conspiracy territory.  (Other people probably realized this immediately -- I guess I'm a little slow.)  I don't know what the Guardian's reputation is for accuracy, but I think it's safe to say they slipped up here.  There's apparently quite a history of anti-soy fearmongering.  I'll leave the Googling as an exercise for the reader.

More Wikipedia Commentary

Stacy Schiff has an excellent article in the current New Yorker on Wikipedia's history.
Link: Know It All: Can Wikipedia Conquer Expertise?

Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence

The Onion does a good job on Wikipedia today.  Excerpt:

"It would have been a major oversight to ignore this portentous anniversary," said Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, whose site now boasts over 4,300,000 articles in multiple languages, over one-quarter of which are in English, including 11,000 concerning popular toys of the 1980s alone. "At 750 years, the U.S. is by far the world's oldest surviving democracy, and is certainly deserving of our recognition," Wales said. "According to our database, that's 212 years older than the Eiffel Tower, 347 years older than the earliest-known woolly-mammoth fossil, and a full 493 years older than the microwave oven."

Link: Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence | The Onion - America's Finest News Source,
via Bookninja.

No doubt someone will now add a typically humorless wikipedia article that describes the article.

Human-Powered Artificial Intelligence

Salon has a fascinating article today about Amazon Mechanical Turk, which is Amazon.com's on-line workforce project.   Companies pay people pennies to carry out simple online tasks because it's cheaper than programming computers to do them.  It takes its name from the 19th century fake chess-playing robot "The Turk".  Excerpt from Salon:

The 21st century twist on the Turk, conceived by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, doesn't try to hide the people inside the machine. On the contrary, it celebrates the fact that we have become part of the machine. For fees ranging from dollars to single pennies per task, workers, who cheekily call themselves "turkers," do tasks that may be rote, like matching a color to a photograph, but they can confound a computer. Conceived to help Amazon improve its own sites, Mturk.com is now a marketplace where many companies have solicited workers to do everything from transcribing podcasts for 19 cents a minute to writing blog posts for 50 cents. Amazon takes a cut from every task performed. [...]

To a labor activist like Marcus Courtney of WashTech, a tech workers union, the whole arrangement represents a dystopian vision of a virtual sweatshop. "What Amazon is trying to do is create the virtual day laborer hiring hall on the global scale to bid down wage rates to the advantage of the employer," he says. "Here you have a major global corporation, based in the United States, that's showing the dark side of globalization. If this is Jeff Bezos' vision of the future of work, I think that's a pretty scary vision, and we should be paying attention to that."

Link: "I make $1.45 a week and I love it" | Salon Technology.

Google has starting getting in on this type of action too, though perhaps less publicly.  How long before someone proposes this scheme for Negroponte's future $100 laptop workforce?

The picture above is from The Sheep Market, a wonderful little art thesis project by Aaron Koblin.  He paid online workers two cents apiece for 10,000 drawings of sheep, which he now offers for sale in sticker form for $20.

Age and Technology

(Updated 7/27 with link to article.)

This passage, from an essay by Megan Mullen on Marshall McLuhan's classic Understanding Media, struck a chord with me and might with others of 1960s vintage:

I feel a deep personal connection with Understanding Media because the book was published the same year I was born.  We have both entered middle age now.  For me, this means being frustrated with people older than I am for feeling ill at ease with technologies that both fascinate me and facilitate my everyday tasks.  It also means being equally frustrated with those younger than I am (particularly my students), who seem to have lost touch with narrative-driven technologies such as books and old-style movies.  I also feel a certain sense of paranoia, suspecting that younger people now place me in the category of those discomfited by newer technologies.

Source: Megan Mullen, "Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media: Coming to terms with the future he foresaw", Technology and Culture, April 2006.

Do Your Laundry On The Internet!

From the department of unnecessary technology:

Washers and dryers that link wirelessly to internet-connected home networks are being tested by consumers who are receiving updates on their dirty laundry by cell phone, computer and TV set.

Messages not only indicate when a wash is complete but also can warn that a lint filter is clogged or a load is too large. Users can remotely command the machines to fluff dry clothes or start a load from a distance after being told -- oops -- they forgot to start the wash. [...]

The technology test, dubbed Laundry Time, recently began evaluating how three Atlanta families use the devices over six weeks.

"When you think about it, it's just laundry," said Tim Woods, an Internet Home Alliance vice president. "It's not exciting. But this isn't about technology. It's about the emotional impact of the technology," [...]

But some observers are skeptical.

"I think this is a great example of people using new technology to solve a problem that doesn't exist," said Laura Champine, a home products analyst for Morgan Keegan. "I've done my own laundry for four decades and I've never been away from my home and wondered how it's doing. Until the cell phone can load the dryer, I don't know how this technology will work for me."

Link: Wired News: Washer to PC: 'Laundry's Done'.

Assessing Nanotech Risks

Here are two new, lengthy documents discussing the risks of emerging nanotechnologies:

The Project On Emerging Nanotechnologies, a Washington D.C. based institute, released Nanotechnology: A Research Strategy for Addressing Risk.  Kevin Bullis at Technology Review writes about it in his blog today: TR Blogs: Averting a Nano Tragedy.  Here's an excerpt from the report's abstract:

[The report] proposes for the first time a comprehensive framework for systematically exploring nanotechnology’'s possible risks. The report moves beyond a general call for more nanotechnology risk research to recommend how this research should be prioritized and implemented— -- who should do what, when, and how.

The report argues for a top-down strategic research framework within the U.S. federal government. It recommends a shift in leadership and funding to federal agencies with a clear mandate for oversight and for EHS research, and proposes a major increase in U.S. government spending over the next two years on highly relevant, targeted risk-based research to address critical research needs.

Link: Nanotechnology: A Research Strategy for Addressing Risk.

The Australian chapter of Friends of the Earth devotes the current issue of their magazine, Chain Reaction, to Nanotechnology risks.  From the editorial introduction:

It’s vital that we always question the bigger picture objectives of nanotechnology’s development when considering the potential for net social or environmental gain - nanotechnology’s development has so far been driven by corporate and military interests, and there is no indication that (without robust civil society intervention) its future path will be any different. [...]

[Governments] and corporations have so far failed to address pressing public interest issues surrounding nanotechnology. Ethical problems, the risks posed by nanotoxicity, socio-economic disruption and the erosion of democracy have to date been trivialised or ignored. Already firmly committed to nanotechnology, governments have been largely reluctant to initiate public engagement programmes; the little government communication on nanotechnology that has taken place has been firmly geared towards overcoming public resistance. Awareness about nanotechnology remains very low within both the general public and within many civil society organisations whose activities are directly affected by nanotechnology.

This issue aims to introduce the main issues surrounding nanotechnology, provide a brief overview of the key problems it raises, and serve as a call to action for its democratisation.

Link to pdf of the magazine: Friends of the Earth: Chain Reaction #97. (Via the pro-nanotech Center for Responsible Nanotechnology blog.)

I haven't read these yet, and am not very familiar with either Friends of the Earth or the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies.  At first glance they both look like high-quality contributions without a lot of spin.

Stem-Cell Oversight Needed

From a commentary by Richard Hayes of the Center for Genetics and Society in today's SF Chronicle:

In the United States, stem-cell research is being conducted in a federal regulatory vacuum. This stands in stark contrast to the situation in most of Europe, Canada and Australia, where comprehensive national systems of oversight have been established. [...]

Why has nothing like this been established in the United States? A key reason is that the major interest groups involved have resisted regulatory oversight. Religious conservatives fear that creation of regulatory structures could ease the way toward approval of practices they believe should be banned. Scientists, commercial biotech firms and fertility clinic operators have been reluctant to accept limits on what they see as their inherent right to conduct research and make profits.

But surveys show a majority of Americans support strong federal oversight of stem-cell research and other new human genetic technologies. These are powerful technologies that could herald dramatic medical advances. Without effective regulation, however, they could also lead to greater health inequities, harms to women who provide eggs for research, and misguided efforts to produce cloned or genetically modified children. It is imperative that our political leaders begin formulating bipartisan proposals for regulatory structures that will allow us to reap the benefits and avoid the risks that these technologies hold. Tuesday's vote in the U.S. Senate is a small, but promising, step in this direction.

Link: Does the Senate vote on stem-cell research matter? / YES: It’s a step toward needed oversight and regulation.

This was published alongside a counterpoint by Michael Tanner of the libertarian Cato Institute: Does the Senate vote on stem-cell research matter? / NO: Research will continue,with or without federal funding.

Six Arguments for a Greener Diet

Speaking of food, the Center for Science in the Public Interest has just announced a new book that looks interesting.  From the press release:

For 35 years the nonprofit Center for Science in the Public Interest has published hard-hitting studies exposing the dreadful nutritional content of movie theatre popcorn, fast foods, and restaurant meals. Its latest book is SIX ARGUMENTS FOR A GREENER DIET (CSPI, ISBN: 0-89329-049-1)—a meticulously researched examination of scientific studies that finds that eating more plant foods and fewer fatty animal products can lead to extra years of healthy living. Happily, explains lead author and CSPI executive director Michael F. Jacobson, that same diet also leads to much less food poisoning, water pollution, air pollution, global warming, and animal suffering.

Link: Six Arguments for a Greener Diet ~ Newsroom ~ News from CSPI.

The Missing Tail

Jonathan Rowe comments on the web's current favorite buzz-term "the long tail," and the book of that name by Chris Anderson.  Excerpt:

Long tail enthusiasts, like technophiles generally, see democracy in market terms. It’s selection, stupid. The greater the selection we get, the more democracy there is. So the long tail represents techno-dem in full flower. We all get to select exactly what we want – or at least, what we think we want. A niche in every pot.

Which is true, up to a point. Yet what happens to a community when every member has his or her head up their own little niche? One of the advantages of the old model – or paradigm, or whatever -- was that we sometimes had to listen to things we didn’t entirely agree with, or like. We had to moderate our annoyance and leave room in our psyches for someone else’s views.

Now people can crawl into their cocoons and spend their lives nursing their outrage at people who don’t think exactly as they do. Cf the political arena today. Isn’t "polarized" just another word for "niche-ized"? There’s something to be said for not always having exactly what we want.

Link: OnTheCommons.org | The Missing Tail.