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Technology And The Decline of Gonzo Journalism
johnny maelstrom writes "Pitchfork has an article on how being unable to write about technology has dumbed-down the media. It's quite interesting to see that the formulaic writings in the technology media and the assumption that we don't all get it has lead to a stagnant media. They call for the next Bangs or Thompson and a revival of Gonzo.
From the article:
'They [the audience] want a tastemaker, a voice of authority, who can put it all in perspective and knock our heads together with his or her crazy-yet-dead-on arguments.
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.'"
And if they could read.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
This shouldn't come as a surprise to *anyone*. We've known this for a long time.
What rubbish. Too many people with arts and media degrees pontificating about what they *think* technology should be.
It's a must read: "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved". Personally I blame the decline on the lack of good drugs. =)
"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity but they've always worked for me" - HST
"They call for the next Bangs or Thompson and a revival of Gonzo."
;-)
I just love the muppets !!!
It's important that people aren't sure how to interpret stories about technology. You can write an article about AOL hogging bandwidth, and while 20% of your audience scoffs at a lack of detail and your own lack of understanding, 50% of your audience doesn't understand. And rather than studying up or discussing the issue with their friends, like an average reader might do for a political or religious story, they completely lose interest.
I think this has very little to do with not knowing how to write technology, and much more to do with the fact that it is (IMO, provably) impossible to write a tech story that is understandable to even a significant portion of the population.
Maybe we do need a new kind of article, though. Perhaps we can display an article on the web, with a slider on the right, so readers can choose the level of detail and accuracy they're comfortable with. If they slide the indicator toward "troglodyte", then the article replaces certain nouns with aphorisms and factual statements with questionable analogies ("...a series of tubes"). If they slide it toward "industry insider", then all the technical jargon reappears and item names transform into well-known acronyms.
True science means that when you re-evaluate the evidence, you re-evaluate your faith.
But what about all those bloggers... They all have a brilliant grasp of technology, incisive and cutting wit, literate and cultured writing and devastating sex appeal. Surely one of them will step up to the plate and deliver the technology journalism we all dream of, just like they did with political discourse.
It seems like it is about time for another Stephen Glass incident in the Tech articles. The journalsts graduating now were pre-highschool (I think) when the last big one happened.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
> Pitchfork has an article on how being unable to write about technology has dumbed-down the media.
Now consider whether they can write about other topics, where you happen to be less capable of spotting any flaws.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Maybe it was a freash idea in the 1960s. But it got very old, very fast. After a while, a short while, you get one BS story, after another, after another. It quickly becomes pointless and tiresome.
A publication called "Rolling Stone" used to specialize in that sort of "journalism" - maybe they still do. After a while, you don't want read anything they publish, because you figure it's all crap.
It's a US cultural thing, look how geeks are reviled & marginalized. People expect technology to just work, with no effort on their part, and any failure in the execution of technology MUST be on the part of the technologist or the tool, never the user. People have been taught for the last 40 years that causality is just a conceit, that logic is optional, that feeling good about yourself is better than getting good grades, that fashion trumps form, and basically that brains are for losers. The able must serve the unable in our culture, so where's the benefit to being one of the able?
My only consolation is that your children will reap the world that you've built for them long after I'm worm-food.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I consider him "gonzo."
Beyond that, well, "gonzo" journalism was kind of a product of its time. Hunter S. Thompson, God bless him, was a completely insane drug addict with immense writing talent. His style is also very hard to emulate without ringing very false.
probably as just many members of the techno-gizmo brain-washed generation, I can't follow the historical part of the article. However I can read the Times, and Michael Elliot and the others still create pieces worth mentioning. It's maybe a part of the "old media" that couldn't be yet digested by the junior?
Anyway, the raised points are valid and makes you wonder: what is it worth writing about? Seth Godin (video)gives no clues, but makes you think about it.
cut this signatures madness. stop reading them now!
But I don't think he's qualified to talk about it and, personally, I'm not qualified to comment on it.
I reserve the write to mangle english.
...is that the media puts so much pressure on "getting the scoop." Journalism contributes to the speed of society by hyping everything in the hope of discovering the next big thing.
The stark reality is that all of these things - ALL of them - will be "mama's stuff" in about twenty years, give or take.
Just look at what happens here. Someone posts anything technical, and a flame war starts. If you leave out the details, it becomes unlikely that the flame war will start, because there's not enough there to decide if the author is on the opposite side from "you" and "your" tech ideology.
stuff |
pop culture today is primarily a technology story
Is it really? I think the problem is that we want it to be. Lester Bangs wrote about rock. Rock would not exist withoug electric guitar, tape recorder and analog amplifier. Could Lester Bangs fix a broken tape recorder? Was he a great critic because he understood how a guitar works? No. He wrote about rock music as a cultural phenomenon, not a technological one. I see crisis in videogame criticism precisely in the fact that there are too many technofetish geeks covering it. We read too many reviews focusing on technical details - what 3D engine was used, how many frames per second you get in given resolution, what are the system requirements etc. We read too few focusing on the storyline, character development or the background information. It's like art criticism focusing only on chemical composition of the paint used by the painter. Ever since Gutenberg, culture ALWAYS was a technology story, but what we need now are critics writing about stories and meanings, not about the 3D engines, pixels and frames per second.
Most tech writers are unbiased, but, weather through laziness or knowledge that they'll never get caught sounding stupid, major news organizations don't even pretend to delve deeply into tech issues. They just pick a side, usually the extreme backed by the most money, and wage that side's battle.
The other problem is most individuals' propensity to avoid delving even superficially into technology.
They would rather remain blissfully ignorant than, say, learn how to use a mac with the same profficiency as windows, or try to understand a basic issue like net neutrality.
The end result is media directed outright fud campaigns are swallowed whole with little criticism. This hurts public discourse on technology issues and ultimately results in laws like the DMCA.
It's a serious problem, but its as much cultural as it is through willfull fud slinging. Particularly counterproductive is the discouragement of children asking questions along the authoritarian mentality that children are best seen and not heard, and the fact that authority figures like parents and teachers don't do enough to discourage the derision of intelligence at young ages.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
There's not a great deal of good tech journalism in the maintream press, but I'd guess that there wasn't a great deal of good drugs journalism in the mainstream press in the 60/70s either. That doesn't mean that it's not out there.
Look at magazines like Edge in the UK - 'serious' games journalism for serious gamers. They seem to 'get' gaming, and I rarely read an article in there that strikes me as dumbing down (and if you want Gonzo-style journalism, there's always the Biffovision or Jeff Minter columns). I suspect there's plenty of other examples out there.
The difference is not that there's no good journalists out there, it's more likely the opposite. It's very hard for an individual tech journalist to have the same impact as someone like Thompson did when there's a thousand tech mags and a million tech blogs out there.
Unfortunately, the only place you'll see this kind of writing these days are sources seen as fringe by the mainstream. You could either distill the .005% of blogs with so-called journalistic value, or you could follow things like Indymedia, or to a much lesser degree the bland-by-consensus Wikinews.
The only reason Hunter got published at all in his day was he sold media. Then as now, the elderly media corporations aren't taking any editorial interest in what they print beyond how many papers/ads/commercials it'd sell. In Hunter's day there was the old Rolling Stone magazine (not yet a totally hideous corporate parody of itself) which ate his work up as long as it sold well to its target audience of hippies, armchair revolutionaries, and other stoned people.
Unfortunately, the things that sell the most homogenized corporate papers and magazines these days usually mention "Brangelina" picking something out of their teeth or Britney Spears drop-kicking another baby while driving. Average Joe Sixpack doesn't want to be bothered with anything more than whether his favorite useless overpaid sports team won, who his favorite useless overpaid movie stars are getting it on with, and possibly a feel-good local piece about Granny Gums Magillicuddy who turns 103 years young this week and swears it's all thanks to a lifelong diet of yogurt and aquarium gravel.
This could well shift as more people turn to the customizable, user-publishable news sources on the Internet, but the old school are not going to leave quietly. One result of this is newspapers' web sites renaming their columnists' writings to "blogs" and setting up RSS feeds.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
We have John C. Dvorak.
Bangs, Thompson, O'Rourke, and now Dvorak.
There you go...no need to read any further, our borders are safe. Carry on.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
I really don't get his point. He's writing like Hunter S. Thompson was universally accepted and Gonzo journalism was some sort of popular revolt that was loved by all. Afraid to say that it has never been like that. Honestly, can you see the average American in the 60s or 70s clamoring for a copy of Rolling Stone to read Hunter's latest? Gonzo appealed to a certain group and Thompson was seen as the greatest by THAT group. Sure, a lot of people today love good ole Hunter, but most of that is just because he's trendy these days. Sort of like philosophy classes in college... people take them so they can feel educated not because of any REAL interest in dissecting the human condition. There are plenty of good (and an extrememly small number of great) writers out there who cover different aspects of "pop" culture. However, video games are not the same as music or movies... those writers who are great video game writers will not seem like great writers to music or movie critics as they deal with totally seperate subjects. Just like Gonzo would not appeal to the average person of the 60s or 70s.
A modern example of Gonzo journalism, an exciting trip around the world. Its quite well written with a flare of Hunter S. Thompson. http://www.moderngonzo.com/
The author of this piece isn't looking for a great technology writer, they're looking for a great gadget reviewer. That's a huge difference. There's no way a Thompson or Burroughs or Bangs could emerge by writing about TCP packets or water desalinization. The highly specialized nature of those fields means the background knowledge needed to frame a common allegorical or metaphorical experience just isn't there.
Maybe the reason nobody is able to discuss pop culture to the satisfaction of the author is due to pop culture itself, or more specifically its ever-shortening average attention span and its ever-increasing demand for the Next Big Thing. The fact that technical knowledge provides the objects of pop culture's current desire is entirely coincidental.
the coolest club on
http://www.jamescampion.com/ Comes close to a writing style like Hunter S. Thompson. Great writer.
Look back. The 60s were the "pop/rock decade". For a whole decade, teenagers wanted music that was, essentially, unchanged for the whole decade. Sure a critic could emerge, maybe even one that was a teenager himself when the decade began.
The 70s? Disco, Glamrock, and so on. And again, a whole decade was in Saturday Night Fever.
80s? New wave, Synthpop.
Sure, there were some counter-cultures, by-cultures, trends that went along and against the mainstream, but trends held their ground for years.
The 90s started to change things. Trends started to emerge, get hyped up and disappear just as quickly again. And it didn't slow down in the new millenium. Quite the opposite. Things that are on top of the coolness list are just SO outdated within a few months or even only weeks.
Who can keep pace? Additionally, what adds to the problem (for the writers, that is) is that today, more and more people detest the media hype and instead rely on "peer" reviews. What's hot on YouTube is not up to the editors of the RollingStone or some other pop culture magazine, but it's the other viewers. You could well end up with some crap video being the pinnacle of entertainment, because it is just SO crappy that it's rolled over to being cool.
Badger,Badger,Badger, anyone...? Hey, ow, stop hitting me! Yeah, sure, it's over. Been over for LONG. The French Erotic Film is over (in case it ever started, that is), but that's today. 2 weeks of fame. MAYBE three if you're really exceptional. If you land 2 hits right next to each other, you're a star. For the month they are known.
What critic could keep up that pace? The only thing this has to do with technology is that technology offers the means to spread it faster. The content as well as word about it, the ability to let others know about something cool you found, encountered or did. But aside of that, technology plays a minor role. It's just the development of pop culture, not something miraculously technological that pushes the writers aside.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
... and the first thing I thought of was Ted Nugent. The second was the Muppets.
I think Gonzo would be good journalist and commentator... certainly a lot more dignified than Dan Rather or Bill O'Reilly and a lot less shrill and cartoon-like than Sean Hannity or Katie Couric.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Whenever I see journalists talking about technology, I notice that most of the time they are completely wrong or way off the mark. When I think about it, I cannot recall any instance of mainstream media getting a technology story right. Whether it is ignorance or an overwhelming need to sensationalize, I do not know. But that is besides the point.
If they are getting all of this stuff wrong, what are they getting wrong about topics in which I am not well-versed? Could it be that everything they are reporting is as erroneous and confused yet we take it at face value because we know little about the subject matter? I think that if you find reporting on technology to be crap, you should be a little concerned about everything else you read and hear on the news. But then, you should be sceptical regardless.
Join Tor today!
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.
/. and all the other fine online tech-news sites.
That's why we read
Really, this is hardly a new problem. Print journalism has long had high-quality sources of scientific and other tech news, though most of them are now online. The fact that 99% of the general public, including the mainstream media (MSM), were unaware of them didn't change the fact that good information was available to anyone at all interested. We've had weekly publications like Science and Nature for more than a century, and note that both are much fatter than Time or Newsweek.
We do have a bit of a problem with the commercial consolidation in the MSM, which naturally goes with reducing costs by dumbing down. But anyone with access to a computer and the Net can easily spend their entire day reading good quality tech news. And that's probably where we'll find the next Hunter Thompson.
Or maybe (s)he's already here, blogging away. Anyone got any nominations?
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
When Thompson wrote Hell's Angels he went out and learned what the life of the Angels was like and he spent months doing it. Then he spent a long time writing a book that challenged people to open their minds in order to accept what he had to tell them. Why didint Thompson address videogames? I imagine he found the experience of playing Counter Strike to be too sterile and too far removed from the hum,anity of armed conflict.
Imagine...
So finally I've learned all the little tricks to surviving in this hellish desert village and I've just started to rack up some meaningful kills. The avatars of children and adults lay strewn everywhere with the walls painted red from the splatter of bullet impacts. I crouch down in a corner and plant the bomb when I hear a boom and the inevitable HEADSHOT. And it's over...until someone reveals to me that he'd been watching though the eyes of he who slayed me and that I had been cheated. My assailant had been using wallhacks and aimbots, prfire scripts and quick reloading tricks, speed hacks and he'd painted a dot on his monitor. What kind of rat bastard cheats at a kids game I thought? What kind of slimy son-of-a-bitch would stoop so low? I had MONEY riding on this for God's sake!
ok, stop imagining...
hunter Thompson saw nothing there because of the sanitized nature of the game. When you walk away NOTHING is changed. It's why I stopped playing RPG's. If I spent all the time I wasted pretending to blacksmith online ACTUALLY BLACKSMITING I would know HOW TO BE A BLACKSMITH BY NOW.
As for music criticism? Who needs it when I can LISTEN to the album and decide if I like it.
There is no gonzo journalism about games because games do not deserve it. Games are what you do between doing significant things. Where's the gonzo journalism about Monopoly?
And there's ons more thing. You cannot marginalize the far left and still expect to see crazy, status-quo shaking arguments.
'I hate that shit...' he muttered.
Not a man of technology ...
Politics , yes [sex, drugs] . Music, yes [ rock and roll]. Technology - no ..
Not medium for gonzo journalism.
I work for the British national press and, although it saddens me to say it, the last thing journalism needs right now is more people humping the 'gonzo' thing. There are so many kids out there who think that any thing that crawls into their ADD ridden brain is 'gonzo' and therefore worthy of print. Well, it's not. It's just verbal vomit.
In the current media climate, what journalism needs is FACTS backed up by well researched and thought out opinion. Not ten million myspace blogs.
Anyway, that's my 2c.
Cheers
Rob
PS : in my humble opinion, Matt Taibbi [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Taibbi] is doing an excellent job are carrying on the beat/gonzo thing.. check out his article in the Stone on Iraq [http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/106871 89/fort_apache_iraq/] . It's well researched and well written..
PPS: if this post doesn't deserve a modding up - I don't know what the hell does.. Also, my nickname was chosen years ago - before becoming a journalist. (to stop the trolls calling me a hypocrite ;) )
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=27 139
'They' just don't know where to look.
-Charlie (who is off to Vegas, coincidence?)
"One of god's own prototypes, to weird to live, too rare to die"
Gonzo Journalism lived and died with HST, what is needed is someone to come up with something original, not copy what he did.
Blessed are the 1337, for they shall pwn the earth.
I was a Gonzo writer in college. All of my papers involved drugs, the abuse of social norms and college girls. Some of my professors found it interesting and insightful writing and others were deeply offended. When ever I wrote a live music reviews for the school paper I had to write 2 versions: one was what actually happened and the other was what could be published. I really don't think that the Gonzo writing style and technology mix at all. Tech articles are about how to get things done or how someone else got something done. Gonzo, in it's true form is about pissing off the roof of society while drinking rum from a grapefruit and ranting about the injustice of government involvement in the media. So why aren't there any Gonzo writers? Be we American are so uptight about what others will think of us that we walk the center line of being a good citizen and never tell people how we truly feel. And I am just as guilty as the next person. Oh and here's a real world example: I reviewed an album by a local man-hating female singer. I then proceeded to write about how much I disliked the new album and how each song was about how much she hated men. A few months later I showed up at one of her shows to interview her and she refused to even speak with me. Oh well. Back when HST was ranting and raving people weren't so up tight and could take a joke or criticism. But today people get offended if you fart in their general direction. Pussies. Last week I had a few beers in me so I decided I'd do a port-scanning on some computers in my sub-net and the next day I blogged my adventure. And what do you know some jerk sends me an email telling me that I shouldn't do things like that because it's against the law. See Gonzo and technology do not mix.
I like-a do-the cha-cha.
Let's see, off the top of my head, Gary Brecher, Matt Taibbi, Mark Ames or John Dolan.
Of course, those are all eXile alumns, and one of them is probably a Nom de Guerre, but I'm sure others can be found if you look hard enough.
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
The problem is I have to insert myself into the story like HST did. That turns people off and annoys them. Which is why Gonzo Journalism isn't that popular anymore. I write it on various forums, scoop sites, etc. I do cover technology and other things.
While not on drugs like HST, I do suffer from mental illnesses that give me a HST type style.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
I may have gotten this link from /. originally but it's apropos here - Ten unmissable examples of New Games Journalism
These articles are written in a chronological, personal style that you might call Gonzo, though I'm not sure I'd call it all "journalism". My favourite is the insanely long but utterly fascinating account of an enormous heist in Eve Online, The Great Scam by Nightfreeze, which will be a hit with the Slashdotters. Any roaming Diggers will want to skip directly to the also well written Sex in Games: Rez + Vibrator.
But in the end, is this the correct journalistic voice for technology? Gonzo journalism is a very human format and that may not be interesting to read when describing technology (unless the gadget works very well or very poorly).
Really, I think this is a multiple part problem and I believe most of the solution will come with time. Some of these have already been pointed out by others, but I'm going to re-iterate them anyway. Keep in mind, I am not saying these are facts, though they are more or less stated as such, these are just my feelings on what's going on.
1) It's hard to write about technology. If you write about it in a way those who understand the technology will appreciate, the majority of your audience won't get it. If you write it in a way that the majority of your audience can understand, it's too watered down to actually say anything important. As has been said, perhaps this is because they're writing about the technology itself rather than the effects of the technology on society.
2) I think problem 1 is made greater by the choices and general personalities of the types of writers. I'm going to stereotype a bit, I realize there are exceptions and varying degrees of all of this. The geek, the one who understands the technology to be able to write about it in any meaningful way, is frequently going to be more interested in writing a technical paper about it than writing something for the masses or just working with the technology rather than being a journalist. Your average journalist is not a geek and as has been said, doesn't necesarily understand the technology, many people here I think would argue that to be true even about most of the technology journalists.
3) Older management. The people in charge of the magzines, newspapers, etc. are in the older crowd, the ones who didn't grow up with and don't necessarily understand the technology and see it all as a bunch of toys that aren't really needed. They don't want an accurate, thoughtful, article about video games or ipods or the internet because they don't understand or don't care about it. So, rather than getting good writing about it, they demand writing that will bring in money from those who give us the technology (as we frequently see dicussed regarding video game reviews).
4) Tied to number 3 is that most of the magazines are part of "Corporate America". You write what earns the money by making your customers happy... not your subscribers, but the people who pay big money to advertise in your magazine or give you kickbacks for a good review. We all know what big corporations are about, and it's rarely gaining customers by producing a quality product.
5) There are "hard hitting" technology journalists out there. They are writing the higher quality blogs, web comics, etc. They are not well known because they are part of the geek culture, which is still, technically, an underground scene in a sense. They are likely to stay this way for a long time due to language that is generally considered not suitable for the mainstream and talking about things most of the world doesn't currently understand or care to understand.
I think most of this will work itself out over time. As people are growing up with computers, the Internet, and video games society as a whole will at least have a better understanding of it all, if not the understanding us geeks have. When that happens we'll see articles written to a higher level. We'll have people writing about the technology and running the magazines and newspapers that cover it that grew up with the technology and have an interest in it because it's what they grew up with rather than just because it's the next big thing to cash in on.
Apologies, that Nightfreeze link is broken. Here's the Google cache.
We're taking advice from Pitchfork now? In my experience, it is in Pitchfork's nature to think they hold the best opinions, and that nobody can live up to them. As soon as we have the "next Thompson," I bet Pitchfork would be skeptical and call him a sellout copycat. We'd also have a reporter who commits suicide, which I suspect is where the glamour really comes from. This is the answer?
Gonzo journalism inolves blending fiction with non-fiction. Maybe this worked for Hunter Thompson (or maybe it didn't; I never read anything by him), but I don't want other reporters not reporting the facts.
Pitchfork's objective is to hunt down the elusive "cool." Keep your "cool" out of my Journalism. Journalists have important things to report on; it's not all opinion pieces and record reviews for them.
Perhaps you meant this solely as a joke, but I think you hit the nail *right* on the head. It's something we don't like to talk about in our society, with its War On Drugs. For many people, drugs are recreational; for others, they're dangerous; for a few - like HST - they are cathartic and catalytic. For all of our history, we've sought altered states of perception for inspiration, whether it was the sweatlodge and peyote, wode, self flagellation and trance, alcohol, you name it. The shaman has always walked 'between the worlds' and come back with a perspective the rest don't see. In the case of acid - we've all encountered the old saw about "Anyone who's taken acid more than [insert number here] times is legally and clinically insane"... but the fact is that the result, for people like HST, seems to be a perspective separated from the 'norm'; a 'new view', if you will, and we experience their viewpoint second-hand, through their self-expression.
But the WOD has been 'won'; the vast majority of the people of HST's literary and intellectual caliber are 'too smart' for drugs, and would never even consider mind-altering experiences. And if they did, they'd likely fail the piss test that every employer seems to require. It was, IMO, the common nature of altered perception that gave rise to the electricity of the sixties. Anything that follows, bereft of unique experience, must seem prosaic and boring by comparison. As Bill Hicks said - "All that cool music they made in the 60s? *real* fuckin' high!"
Thinking outside my Head
"...the real problem with the media today - they think everyone is an idiot."
In the case of Fox News it is just a matter of they know their audience.
"You'll never go broke underestimating the intelligence of the American Public" - Attributed to PT Barnum
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Who needs the gonzo writers anyway? They served a role when access to the public was channeled through magazines, books, and tv. Now (for better or worse) anyone can put their writing on the web. It has become much more democratic. Why do I care what some guy named Hunter Thompson thinks any more than some guy ranting on "Answer Me!". Thompson became popular not just because he could write but because Rolling Stone and others published him while other potential good writers weren't. Now the web has an endless stream of writers and opinions, some better than others but that's always been the case.
Just like cable and satellite TV knocked the big three networks from their lofty perches by giving us far more options so has the web made having only a few voices less vital. We aren't dependant on being fed by a few sources anymore.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
1. grow beard.
2. Wear caridigan
3. Punch cards = how romantic
4. Complain about stuff you have no idea about because your not bothered about doing it properly to start with
example http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/5203256.stm
5. Profit...
This is one of the MANY good reasons slashdot has boomed!!
Sherm
Can You Hack it?
Collector's Edition
The MSM aims for the lowest common denominator. They do not aim for the top 5%, or the top 10%, or even the top 50%. They dumb down their material. They don't take risks. That's one reason why the Science Channel, Discovery Channel, and so many other in-depth channels have done so well. They're not aiming at the complete idiot.
Another point: Most teachers couldn't explain this stuff to their school kids the next day well enough for them to pass tests. And if they kids can't pass tests, then the school isn't getting any state or federal funding, and school administrators won't allow that to happen. They will do whatever it takes to make sure they don't lose their funding. So, kids don't learn anything extra. And the dual-income parents don't care. They get home at 6pm, just want to eat, relax, and get ready for the next day at work.
I've blogged about tech stuff, like the digital cinema spec when it went version 1.0.
A lot of readers didn't pick up much on the technical detail. Not only is it only interesting to a narrow audience (cinema fans who are also interested in digital video) but because it's reasonably boring even to a hardened geek who just doesn't happen to have gotten into MPEG standards.
Even outside of the technical field, journalists dumb everything down to a lowest common denominator. If they're in a specialised field, that denominator might be a bit more technical than the regular press, but that's life.
Heck, even an article with a wide vocabulary in the general press brings readership way down. A lot of people only read headlines...
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
I have one major problem with TFA: the assumption that Thompson - and Gonzo - is just journalism about drugs. Anyone who has read Thompson beyond the copy Fear and Loathing they bought at their bong shop knows that Thompson's work was never about the drugs (Burroughs had already exhausted that boring genre). Sure drugs were there - because they had to be there - but what made Thompson great was his clarity of language and use of creative exaggeration in what a supposedly 'neutral' media. He wrote about politics, journalism, sports, and the American Dream, but rarely drugs. Most of F&L was highly exaggerated to prove a point and it wasn't that drugs were cool. It was - mostly- about the fact that the Old Generation couldn't understand the New, that there was a generation 'forever thinking that just behind some narrow door in all his favorite bars, men in red Pendleton shirts are getting incredible kicks from things he'll never know.' That is why we need another Thompson. We don't need someone to write about technology, we need someone to write about the things worth writing about and weave technology into the fabric of their work so that a new Generation can understand it. The media is still run by people who can remember a life without computers and video games. But for the new generation, that technology has always been around so don't care - they are appliances. It was the same with the drugs in the 70's. That's what made Thompson so powerful - he could write about Nixon, mad from gin, roving the halls of the White House in a way that made sense to a new generation of people. He never wrote about anything new or innovative, he just did it all in a way that made you believe he wasn't another cog in the media machine, even though at many levels, he was. All flows according to the whims of the Great Magnet.
- Rarely makes mistakes, or simplifies a subject to the point of inaccuracy
- Values in-depth discussion over sound-bites
- Is concerned with facts and evidence, rather than rhetoric and opinion
- Seeks genuine debate and inquiry rather than encouraging conflict and mudslinging
- Asks interviewees sensible questions that they can be reasonably expected to answer clearly, and avoids accusatory or leading questions
- Is more interested in informing the electorate than nailing ministerial scalps to the mantlepiece
- Waits until the rubble has stopped rolling before broadcasting the number of casualties
If you want to see the same standards in technology reporting as (e.g.) the reporting of politics then get An Industry Leader and An Open Source Guy in a studio, ask Indurstry Leader whether throwing furniture is a good management tactic and ask Open Source Guy when he is going to stop encouraging people to illegally copy software. It'll be lively, and do wonders for ratings, but nobody will learn much and technology experts will learn how to avoid answering questions.In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
..... I thought that gonzo was a porn related trend.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
John Dvorak!
Hunter S Thompson was no journalist, he wrote wild stories concocted from his own substance abuse. Journalists don't write "stories" they write reports in a clear concise manner following the "WWWWW" principle. [What, Why, Who, Where & When]
Sadly, most people get pulled around by the nose with "stories" being touted as journalism. Want to make it interesting? Feature only tech stories on "Naked News" (if they're still around) and then you can have naked journalists running featurettes on the porn in IT. Now that's news!
God: When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.
"Gonzo Journalism" was the logical, and final, step in the evolution of print reporting. HST, and some others, attempted to expose their readers the immediacy of events. "F&L on the Campaign Trail '72" is the most remarkable work on American politics I've ever read. Thompson was able to avoid the filtering process of PR men and editors, and brought to life the actual process of selecting a candidate.
Now, with even CNN and the NY Times offering reporters' blogs up for perusal, Gonzo has lost its reason for existence, at least in theory. If HST was hitting the scene today he'd be "The Daily Gonz", or an editor at "SlashGonz".
The next evolutionary step in journalism is the one we don't see coming.
This reminds me of something I wrote in 1998 after Harlan Ellison announced that there was something particularly broken about journalism on the Internet.
My perscription drugs are already as much as I'm willing to put up with (muscle relaxers don't play well with others), so maybe I'd be more Animal than Gonzo ("Gonzo" comes naturally to Animal). Where do I sign up? Who wants to hire me?
If people dropped $20k on a computer, paid $1k/year insurance (covers spamware, etc), and paid thousands if anything serious went wrong with it, had it serviced 4x/year and took it in for a quick "fill-up" of patches and antivirus every week I bet they'd "just work."
Man, you really need that seminar!
adding one more tech orientied internet writer to the pile, Burton MacKenZie at http://burtonmackenzie.com/ often writes about technical material, usually with some comedy to help digest it. YMMV
If "the media" doesn't know how to write about technology, that's probably a good thing. I'd rather them not have the knowledge than have something like the equivalent hype and constant screaming of say, Fox News or MSNBC on the TV... I'm not mentioning those two channels to flame them, just that I'd rather have what is written to be straight forward.
Real life blacksmithing is incredibly fun. I started out when I worked at Philmont. I even made my own knife. It's really not that hard. There's a bit of a learning curve, but as long as you know someone who's done it before and can answer questions when you have them, it's not hard at all.
(Flickr set of all my Philmont photos)
Gonzo journalism is a catch word for lies and half trues about things they don't know to make money and NOW it catching up with them as fun technology and real media shows their true colors
It's just not possible anymore. I've been an adult in the pre-internet, pre-tech-explosion world and the post. And I'll tell you this: that world is gone, never to return. The outsider who has an overview is a thing of the past. The massive communications and tech explosion that started in the 70s and accelerated thereafter every year has added so many layers to the onion of life that no one can possibly pull it all together, even in the superficial sense of clever and entertaining social commentary. He won't understand enough to do so, and the audience is so fragmented now that he would be unintelligible to most if he could. The burden of knowledge needed to be "in the know," or "in on the joke" is just too great. In a world in which generationalism is dead due to the many different choices that can be made withing a group of people of the same age, how can you say any generally understandable truth about society or technology? Does such a thing exist any longer? I don't think so. Your truth and insight is not mine is not his. We live on our couple of thin layers of the onion of life now and feel fortunate if we can reasonably understand those.
Don't continue to look for some journalistic messiah to pop up to "make sense" of it all.
E Proelio Veritas.
When tech journalists stop regurgitating press releases and actually engage in some real journalism. 'nuff said.
Ah, the pitfalls of a consumer-driven economy. We don't care who's writing the news, we just want to know. Quality is tertiary to primacy and radicalism. And most people simply stop at primacy, the first article they read is all they want to know about the subject.
Someone mentioned the lack of tech understanding, and I think that's another big reason for the lack of good tech writing. How many tech journalists can discuss at length and in depth the difference between AAC and mp3 file formats? Or the advantages of DDR RAM? Game critics seem to spend too much time gaming and not enough time practicing their trade. I've never read a game review that delved deeper into the technology driving the game than a general description of the gaming engine; quick! what are the distinguishing characteristics of the Unreal 3 engine? You may not use google. Of course, none of this matters as the average person doesn't know what those terms mean, and won't read jargon-filled articles. Article A comes out first and uses little jargon, article B comes out later and uses some jargon. Guess which article gets read.
At some level, people understand how technology is changing their lives. We see it everyday. As the article said, "Technology is the province of geeks, a sterile, above-board, carefully marketed phenomenon; drugs are underground, illegal, and risky." We know what we're getting into when we buy a new computer, but have no idea what imagines and planes of existence we'll encounter with this new acid formula. No journalist is going to take home an Alienware machine and achieve a higher state of consciousness through it (well, maybe with an Alienware machine, but not the standard PC). The plainness of technology ensures that articles will be bland, and that people will look to primacy and radicalism before quality: people won't seek out great tech articles just for the reading as they'll already know what they want to know.
All of this assumes people want to read articles for reading's sake. In fact, most people read reviews to see if they should buy tech gadget #1192 or #1193. They're searching for information, not pleasure reading. Unlike with drugs, which the average person can't obtain and thus experiment with, technology is available to anyone with a decent cash flow. I'd rather know quickly if something's worth buying then play with it myself than read about someone playing with it.
The survey didn't say Daily Show made them better informed (about the 2004 presidential campaign), just that they were better informed that people surveyed who did not watch The Daily Show. It's definitely correlation, not causation. People who watched any late night comedy show (Leno, Letterman) were also better informed but not as informed as Daily Show watchers.
I don't get Comedy Central right now but I love both Daily Show and Colbert Report. I would say they inform me of issues in a way similar to scanning headlines does.
Daily Show Viewers Knowledgeable About Presidential Campaign, National Annenberg Election Survey Shows [PDF]
Google HTML version
80s? New wave, Synthpop.
The 80s came in with disco, had a huge dose of hard rock/heavy metal/glam metal/pop hard rock and turned to new wave and then past that to alternative & "college rock" (REM, U2, etc.) and a subcurrent of industrial and dance industrial.
I'm not as familiar with the 70s, as I was a lot younger then. But the early 70s had folk, the Beatles and the leftovers of the summer of love. The middle 70s moved to guitar rock and black R&B (Earth, Wind and Fire FTW) and then the later 70s were dominated by disco and other electronic stylings.
Even the 50s had the simultaneous popularity of crooners like Sinatra and rockers like Jerry Lee Lewis.
I think you just see the past as homogenous becuase you didn't live through it.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
I thought it was a war story right now.
And the bonus-round jackpot answer iiiisss: "Not behind your desk, Mr. Dahlen!" But rest assured, the counter-culture press is thriving like a pot-garden in South Central. You just go back to ignoring it and we'll do fine! And I'd be careful bandying Hunter S.'s name about with such wanton ignorance. Hunter may be miles above you on a cloud in Heaven, but the man always had damn good aim.
Gonzo journalism was a fluke of Thompson's genius. It'll be back when there's another great writer in the papers.
Mark Twain was gonzo in his day...
Chicks Have All The Fun
:)
Listen p*ssy. I'm sure your the same homo that posted earlier about alf's boner and you just want to remain anonymous fo
Writing isn't all that hard, though doing it while fronting a day-job will make it interesting. My problem is that I won't be able to write bleeding-edge reviews. All the stuff I can afford (and have a taste for) is a few months to a few years old. The real issue is venue. We've passed the age of 'zines. And Blogs won't really work for this. We need good old-fashioned paper publication. Something suitable for reading while making your ears bleed with an iPod at eleven on the subway. Rolling Stone should step up and see if they can do something with this. Not a "regular feature", but a bizarre and off-the-wall featurette that gloriously bathes in product placement and craptastic subject matter.
Question is... will it happen? Probably not. It's just too Boomer-esque to explain video games and tech as the drug of a new generation.
You wouldn't be able to even pick up the cell phone to answer it! The guy was into LSD for like 20 years!!! Did you ever read his books???
"Gonzo journalism" isn't. When one mixes fact and fiction, the result is fiction. By definition, journalism is " the style of writing characteristic of material in newspapers and magazines, consisting of direct presentation of facts or occurrences with little attempt at analysis or interpretation."
Too many so-called journalist twist facts and inject their own baises into stories. The result is not journalism but rather propaganda.
This world could use some real journalism.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
eot
Well spotted, give yourself a silver star. I also used the word armatures when I meant amateurs.
As for "soleless", I was implying that they're into some kind of kinky verruca fetish which involves walking around wearing shoes which don't have any soles. Why they would do this is beyond me, but then again, who knows what atrocities these people are capable of?
It's funny you say that. Over the weekend I saw the Tom Brokaw piece about global warming. While some of the information in that program was fact-ish, it was hard to pick out the actual facts for all the opinion around them. What I really want from my news is just the facts and to how many decimal places. I don't need opinion.
I'll go even further and say that in this day and age it is a journalist's sacred duty to present the facts just as the are, trying their damnedest not to allow their opinion to seep through. People don't have the time and the resources to go out and do the research necessary to understand a situation and find the facts for themselves. Rightly or wrongly, we trust journalists to do so for us. Reasonable people don't need to be told what to think.
It is my belief that far too many people never hear the facts, only factoids designed to reinforce the opinion that the media outlet already presented. This happens on both sides of just about every controversial issue. One side's opinion is that global warming is already happening and we're doomed. The other side says there's no proof of global warming and everything is fine. They both have purported facts to back up their opinions, and clearly they can't both be right. Now instead of having the necessary facts to make up my own mind, I have to decided who's opinion I'd rather trust, or would rather back if I'm looking at it from a purely political-economic viewpoint, as some do.
Especially in the US, people seem to pick up more on the lies and innuendo than they do on any actual facts. A talk show host says, "The economy is booming!" No concrete evidence supporting this statement is offered, beyond a few carefully selected factoids that back the host's position. It is repeated daily for weeks, even months. When I speak to people who listen to the show, and ask them about the economy, more often than not I get the exact works of the host repeated back to me. Even if the person isn't doing well financially, they still say, "The economy is booming!"
So, please, journalists, keep your opinions to yourselves. Those of us who's aren't journalists don't have time to parse the facts out of your opinions any more than we have time to seek out those facts for ourselves.
it really boils down to the fact that- these things are distractions and who wants to write about games.
Would it still be mind blowingly interesting and a timely comment if hunter wrote about the game operation, and critiqued it? No. Would an baseball game on a online role playing game ever make sports news? NO. Never. Why? Because when you shut of the computer or the internet breaks down. You are still you, and most likely you are alone. There are no collective consciences that will be meaningful in real life learnt from an online game experience.
The problem is simple. Tech is specialised. In some niches it's insanely specialised and those who think it's a matter of underestimating the average reader are in cloud-cuckoo land. The average reader couldn't give a flying fuck about your jargon, your OS wars, your graphics card zealoutry, your free software vs proprietary arguments or anything remotely similar. What they're concerned about is the experience itself.
And that experience is at the surface level. At the direct interface between the device and the user. The problem with tech people is that because they see the inner workings of the magic, they presume that other people also care about the inner workings. Wrong. Only fellow tech people do.
Tech commentary feeds a tech audience. If a commentator wants to reach the majority of the people, he has to dispense with caring about the tech wizardry. It gives depth to his understanding but it also gets in the way of communicating with people who simply don't care about the details.
It's not a matter of dumbing it down, it's a matter of focusing on the experience itself. When dealing with his IPod, does the average consumer care that he's used 4,147,232,232 bytes out of 5,368,709,120 available?
Fuck no! All he cares is that his IPod is about 80% full and he can probably fit another 300 songs on it. That's operating and communicating on the level of utility and experience. When someone finally gets with the program and starts relating tech to people at the user experience and impact level, then we've got potential for one of those voices to emerge. Until then, a lot of tech writing can probably be viewed as a bunch of intellectual masturbation.
/. editors miss the issue that gonzo journalism is not journalism at all but just historical fiction abet set to recent events.
The author of the article, however, is not really interested in "technology", he's really just a gamer dork, and he's having trouble grasping the idea that maybe the heavy, cool, intelligent, ground breaking writers are saying a lot about gaming because they think it's trivial bullshit. Bruce Sterling, for example, has spent a decade or so trying to deal with global warming. Can someone here say with a straight face the world would be better off if only he was reviewing computer games?
As Isaac Asimov demonstrated, writing clear entertaining informative articles about science and technology is possible, but it is HARD. Even for a genius like him.
We may have to wait a while for another IA or HST to come along.