*Hmmm. Written almost a year ago, and I finally heard about it. That may be a good sign, actually. Criticism isn't the same as journalism, as the handy chart in this article attempts to demonstrate. Criticism needs to kinda marinate slowly and ooze around a little.
*If you wanna see more people around like Nicholas Carr, Evgeny Morozov, Sherry Turkle, Andrew Keen, Walter Mossberg, David Pogue, Neil Postman, and Walter Isaacs, this is probably the article for you.
"Towards a Constructive Technology Criticism"
by Sara M. Watson
(...)
Optimism or Boosterism? Early Days of Technology Coverage
Wired was criticized early on for its boosterism and its agnostic stance toward politics. Communications professor and former journalist Fred Turner, in his book From Counterculture to Cyberculture, details how Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly blurred the lines between traditional journalism and ego-centric thought leadership without a sense of duty to a code of journalistic ethics or objectivity.22 Turner writes: “Kelly meant for Wired to be a forum for the various networks in which he circulated . . . He thought of himself as ‘a convener of interesting ideas’—much like a conference host on The WELL. His job, he thought, was to stir up conversations and print them. For this reason, Kelly often allowed traditional professional boundaries to dissolve.”23. (((This is probably why I'm sitting on the ol' WIRED blog here, criticizing technology, instead of writing footnoted articles for the dusty old CJR.)))
As early as 1994, The Baffler tackled Wired’s thinly veiled gadget advertorials: “Wired is technology’s hip face, an aggressive apologist for the new Information capitalism that speaks to the world in the postmodern executive’s favored tones of chaotic cool and pseudo-revolution.”24
Leading technology commentators extolled the new access to information and platforms, celebrating their potential for advancing democracy and empowering people. Much of that enthusiasm spread from Silicon Valley into the academy and beyond. Positive messages of change were distilled into fifteen- to eighteen-minute presentations for TED conferences, turning them into “ideas worth spreading” and generating books and other media to go along with them.25 The dominant narrative around technology exuded optimism.
Investigation and Accountability: Technology Coverage Evolves
The summer of 2013 marked another turning point in the relationship between technology and society, which journalists covering technology had to address. Revealing the massive scale of coordinated, multinational government and corporate surveillance, Snowden confirmed privacy advocates’ worst fears: that the same technologies that connect us can also be used to monitor and control citizens without their knowledge or consent. Snowden’s revelations forced journalists, thought leaders, and citizens to begin untangling just how much of the tech industry was complicit in building a global surveillance network. It was also a “moment of broader cultural awareness about how much these huge mechanisms that have been built around us are affecting us now on civic levels,” says writer Elmo Keep of Real Future at Fusion.26
The few journalists and commentators who had warned about the power of data felt simultaneously vindicated and defeated, and a “general pall came over technology reporting,” notes Fusion editor-in-chief Alexis Madrigal.27 In the journalistic community, what blossomed out of this was an understanding of how much more the technology industry deserved investigative attention and journalistic resources. Since then, investigative efforts have exposed labor practices at Amazon,28 detailed Google’s extensive lobbying efforts,29 uncovered Uber’s means for dealing with harassment,30and surfaced discriminatory decisions and predatory practices of algorithms.31 Journalists have used both traditional reporting tactics and programmatic data journalism methods to hold technology companies and practices accountable, and there is room for still more investigative coverage. Senior editor of The Nation Sarah Leonard compares it to the way “we have financial journalists and labor journalists who look at Walmart, or look at collusion on Wall Street.”32...
