Last year I read a very interesting book by Nick Davies called Flat Earth News that described in gory detail the demise of the journalistic profession.
Sadly technology was one of the major reasons for this loss of integrity. The relentless need for speed has been caused by the pressures of the Internet. We see evidence of this constantly in our daily doses of media.
What Nick explains is why we have arrived at this place. Publications still have an insatiable desire for copy (and the attendant advertising) but this is massively outweighed by a total lack of time for journalists to prepare anything. The only option is to turn to the complexity generators who are churning out the copy by the train load.
There is no better example of this than the IT press. Almost all information we receive is based on the result of some company's press release about their new product. Most commentators column inches are the result of either a product launch or visit to....
Those words Dave Smith's trip to....were paid for by.....are always a bit of a give away.
Added to this the quality of journalism has been plummeting, a fact that is pretty obvious when you first sit down with one and try and explain your message. And let's face it how can we expect anybody to have a full working knowledge of the labyrinthine number of technologies that fall beneath the IT banner.
All we end up with is endless "gadget reviews" and needless to say they are all "so simple to use"!
The lack of informed comment in the IT press adds to the desire to "keep up with the latest technology" and contributes to the ever expanding complexity we experience in our daily lives.
The really hard thing to do is ignore all this rhetoric and focus on what are the real issues affecting the delivery of IT services.
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