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Tech Reporting Is More Negative Now Than in the Past (betanews.com)
Wayne Williams, writing for BetaNews: 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. The ITIF attributes this shift to two main causes, the first being that "there has been a significant increase in the number of civil-society organizations and attention-seeking scholars focused on painting a threatening picture of technology," and second, and perhaps most pertinent, "news organizations are under increased financial pressure, and as a result, reporters may have less time and fewer resources to dig deep into technology issues."
When you're looking ahead, you often think of a bright positive future. You think of ways in which technology can make lives better.
It's when we're 'there,' when we're in the future, that we can look back and see the impact. It's a lot easier to analyze failure that has already happened than it is to anticipate the strange ways in which people work.
Back then, things probably seemed novel and exciting to a broader array of people. These days, I get the feeling that the people who were once excited about those things (myself included) now, often, see them as little more than faster and more complicated versions of the things they replaced. Another issue is people's preconceived notions about how the latest and greatest tech ought to be; I suspect that they feel let down by the slow progress towards the things they believe to be the way of the future. If these things are true, it's not surprising that people in all circles would tend to have a pessimistic outlook on technology.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
This can be easily explained by a corporate shift from offering innovative products that fulfill consumer needs to offering products that exploit consumers in innovative ways. 20 years ago what we consider mundane "information sharing" would cause congressional hearings and indictments of CEOs.
80 and 90s we get a great deal of consumer electronics and computing products that were sold on merits. Late 2000s and into 2010s we have dominance of software that spies and manipulates user behavior for profit. Mid 2010s and we started to see "spies and manipulates" getting pushed into hardware under ruse of IoT.
Negative tone is a result of "You can't fool everyone all the time" playing out.
So you're saying it's a holo promise?
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Nonsense.
Both left and right have anti-science wings, both basically religious in nature. They are both slowly losing power as reality is observed by real world humans.
I'd like to see actual deathmatches between bible thumpers and nature hippies, that would be cool.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Right now the lead article on Ars Technica is a highly positive review of the current state of VASIMR rocket engine technology: https://arstechnica.com/scienc...
But the author seems to be a frustrated SJW who couldn't resist a totally irrelevant slam at current US immigration policy, even though nobody has ever accused VASIMR developer Franklin Chang-Díaz of having sneaked across the border on foot.
We've almost reached the limits of physics and there's basically no viable competition because modern technologies require capex in an order of billions of dollars. What's there to marvel at or be happy about when, for instance, we've had a stagnation in the x86 CPU market since the introduction of Sandy Bridge (don't remind me of Ryzen: AMD has just reached IPC parity with two years old Intel CPUs)? Also GPUs don't grow as fast as they used to in the past, and even then in the past GPUs required passive cooling while certain modern GPUs have three slots cooling solutions with over 200 watts of power dissipation and have billions of transistors (NVIDIA Pascal Titan X has 12 billion transistors working at roughly 1500MHz).
However in my opinion it's astonishing what we've reached so far: certain modern computer games are just breathtakingly beautiful while not being too far off from being photo realistic: Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Battlefield 1, The Division, Quantum Break and others. Recently, I just gave up on playing in The Division for two hours and just roamed NYC and enjoyed the scenery.
Just look at this and compare to this.
Absolute agreement. Every since the Neanderthals on Wall Street started dictating policy to Fortune 500's (and small firms let it trickle down to them), we've been at a growing war with the 1%. Latest news says there are SIX people who have more wealth than the bottom 50% of population of the WORLD! Their interests are served first. And, yes, Marx predicted that. Now, it's our job to get vocal, get active, and take our Democracy back, including the fundamental Constitutional right to privacy that has been so eroded by lawyers (and politicians, who are mostly made up of the lawyer class) in the past decades. And, not just in the U S of A, but throughout the world. It's pitchforks time, folks, and time to bring the corrupt interests (Exxon, GE, Microsoft, and thousands of others, and their kin in other countries) to heel. We, the masses, need to hone our skills at defeating their self-serving game.
Read George Lakott's take: https://twitter.com/georgelako...
and https://georgelakoff.com/2011/...
If it bleeds it leads.
has been around for a long time.
Time to offend someone
Maybe because all the news is negative nowadays.
Except that, by any objective measure, the news is NOT negative. The world is most peaceful. The worst war is in Syria, which is a minor conflict by historical standards. There is almost no chance of major power conflict. Living standards are improving across the world. Hundreds of millions of people are rising to the middle class, and in the last ten years, more than a billion have risen out of extreme poverty. Populate growth is falling almost everyone outside Africa. Literacy rates are going up. We are finding cures for diseases, and beating back HIV and malaria. We are making steady progress on solutions to pollution and climate change.
The major headlines in America today (Feb 23rd) are not about war, famine, or plague, but about whether school restroom usage policy should be decided by the federal government, or left up to locals. I don't mean to belittle the issue, but that is hardly an existential crisis for humanity.
If you think that the reality of what is happening in the world is mostly negative, you should reconsider your news sources, and get a more balanced perspective.
was largely positive, but this changed from the mid-1990s to 2013,
The thing to understand is, this is not limited to tech. There has been an assault for a decade or two now on the public being happy in any way. You are meant to be riled up and agitated.... to what end I cannot say. But the end effect is not good, you can tell this is bleeding into everyone's real lives, affecting relationships and general behavior.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
So you really think that these particular people are liberals first, and not wackos first?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I feel like almost all reporting is negative nowadays.
Yeah, it's totally negative. The worst. Really awful. How can people be so horribly negative. Sad!
Someone had to do it.
Between something 'negative', as in bias, and reporting facts that are not pleasant. Let's be honest: a lot if tech companies these days are engaged in ridiculous amounts of hyperbole, if not flat out lies about their endeavors and their potential, and engage in practices that are so unethical they make the head spin. Something millennials really need to absorb: just because the truth of a situation is uncomfortable does not mean you bury it. You can't change a situation by running away from it or trying to obliterate knowledge of it. Grow up.
If it bleeds it leads. If it doesn't bleed poke it a few times.
Except that, by any objective measure, the news is NOT negative. The world is most peaceful.
No. You are confusing what is happening, the facts with the news. At the moment, the news may very well be the worst of all times, even if the facts aren't.
If you think that the reality of what is happening in the world is mostly negative, you should reconsider your news sources, and get a more balanced perspective.
The OP's personal source of news is irrelevant in this discussion. Bad news sells better than good news, even for the NYT and the WSJ. As TFA puts it "...they have an incentive to pursue alarmist stories that generate clicks."
Did you miss The Guardian view on famine: sitting by as disaster unfolds? 20 millions may starve to dead within 6 months if we don't donate 4.4 billion dollar.
There is also the news about Morocco beating down protest in the Rif with violence and the talks about letting those Rif people move to Europe as 'refugees'. This while Morocco is looking to replace its economical ties with the EU with economical ties with Russia and China. Another potential open border is in the making while the EU doesn't show any leadership and will haply let NGO's with ferries import all those refugees while waving the finger at people who protest and letting the amount of people voting for extreme right parties grow in number.
Then there is Erdogan in Turkey who is starting his European campaign to demand European Turks to vote him as dictator. The last time he came on a campaign he ordered Turks to never integrate and to keep an eye on other Turkish people to keep them in line (social control). Next week he will probably talk a lot more aggressive. There have been a lot of problems between Turkish people already. Several stores and schools were destroyed last summer (Turkish stores and schools destroyed by other Turks). Erdogan also wants non APK supporting Turks to be arrested and extradited to Erdogan's Turkey. He is very popular among European Turks and many will blindly follow his commands. Knowing European leaders they will say 'free speech ', 'don't be islamophobe', 'don't be racist' and just let Erdogan speech hatred in front of 80,000 people again.
Of course the main news is only about Donald Trump and his tweets and the tweets of some celebrities I've even never heard off against Trump. It seems that the only thing that happens in the world is Trump sending a tweet, and if my European country already neglects other world news in favor of stupid tweets, I guess in the US it's even worse.
I mean come on, really? They're trying to draw a conclusion from a 27-year period and only sampled a pitiful 250 articles, or just nine articles per year -- and from only three publications at that? What we have here is an analysis of the methodology used to select the incredibly tiny pool of articles surveyed, not anything meaningful relating to the press' coverage of technology as a whole.