I think you’re highlighting two different problems here.
I agree that Gen Z and younger are, on average, far worse at basic computer skills than many seem to assume. It makes me reflect on my tech-learning throughout my childhood, as a Millennial. I think that part of it is that many erroneously assume that because Gen Z has grown up online, that this will lead to proficiency, but the kind of tech they’ve been exposed to is largely walled gardens and oversimplified UIs. That assumption of proficiency leads to scenarios where their lack of skill is only discovered when they enter college, or the workplace. I am astounded at the prospect of people not even knowing the difference between “Cut and Paste” and “Copy and Paste”. It’s grim.
The poor quality of journalism may be linked to this, but I think it’s larger than that. It seems like it’s not a great time to be a journalist at the moment (my writer friends tell me that increasingly, the only work they’re able to find is copy-editing AI shit). Private equity is fucking up so much of the world — journalism included. Polygon is an example of an outlet that was apparently sustainably profitable, before it was sold and experienced mass lay-offs; an individual company’s success doesn’t matter to the big conglomerate that owns it. I know that other journalistic companies have fallen to the same fate too.
It also seems that tech journalism ends up being especially shit. I didn’t start noticing it properly until I watched this podcast episode from “Tech Won’t Save Us”. The TL;DW of it is that tech journalists like Kara Swisher like to pretend that they speak truth to power, and fire hard-hitting questions at big tech people, when that’s patently bullshit and it’s clear that they only get the access that they do by playing softball with the powerful. We can’t blame a few individuals for the entirety of the tech journalism problem, but I reckon it’s a big part of it when so many of the established, big names in this space don’t seem interested in actually doing tech journalism (and smaller names who want to ask journalistically interesting questions don’t get platforms or access to ask those questions).
Our information ecosystem is not in a great place. I’ve found it tremendously beneficial to curate the news and information I’m exposed to (praise be RSS), but that has been a gradual process of actively working to notice good journalism in the world and build up my mental “rolodex” of people whose perspectives I trust to be worthwhile (even if I don’t necessarily agree with said perspectives). However, this is an area that I care deeply about, and thus it feels worthwhile to spend that energy to curate my infosphere. Most people won’t have the inclination or energy to do this work, which is unfortunate.
I almost entirely agree with what you’ve said here, I just didn’t feel like writing out all the nuances, and was trying to just do a surface level analogy.
The only part where I even sort of maybe disagree is… there are actually good tech news sources, they just tend to be either fairly or highly specialized, and/or pretty niche, literally just a guy, or a couple people, running a website basically like its still Web 1.0 days.
But absolutely yes, the broader audience that an outfit appeals to, the broader scope of things they try to cover… its a joke, doing comprehensive reviews of everything would take a whole bunch if teams of specialists, so… most don’t even bother, and just link to somebody else who did that, and try to summarize it … and thats a best case scenario.
It is truly horrendous with video game journalism.
Beyond the surface level stuff of seemingly arbitrary and nonsensical review scores, the incestuous access journalism aspect of it that turns most of them into just advertising…
Almost none of these people offer a meaningful critique of like, the business strategy, the corporate culture, the deals between companies, the astoundingly high usage of contractors and just endemic, obvious galactic levels of incompetence management shows all the time.
Again, there are a few exceptions to this, they’ll cover some obviously heinous shit like sexual harassment and absurd crunch seasons, they’ll report on unions trying to form, and there are a few actually decent investigators…
… but by and large, there is basically no investigative journalism into say, an utterly collapsed, decade spanning, $400 million dollar game that just flops in a month… not on the level that I feel is journalistically called for there, which would be roughly ‘this is Enron’, ‘this is Lehman Brothers’.
They live in this silly nonsense world where the gaming industry is fucking huge and important, but they still mostly cover it like disaffected former fanboys/girls, rather than taking it as seriously as it should be taken.
Because there is no meaningful dissection of how truly idiotic and evil just now routine AAA corpo game publisher logic works, at like a macro to microeconomic comprehensive analysis level… we instead get the masses dramatically oversimplifying things on that front, and then focusing waaaaay too much on whether or not its ok for characters to have pronouns.
Like, me, I am the only person I am aware of who has been saying:
Kernel level anti cheat is not actually necessary, it doesn’t even achieve what it purports to, thus, it just serves as a way to to maintain a corporate grip over the platform (Windows) of the PC gaming market.
Similarly, the entire real time ray tracing paradigm of Nvidia/Unreal Engine is also a fucking scam, though I am at least seeing more people do comprehensive breakdowns on why that is the case, of course the PC hardware reviewers are very fed up with this by now… but still only a few go into the massive economic impacts of that and thus broad societal implications.
…
There, your essay provoked my own rant-essay, lol.
I could write on this for days if my wrist was so fucked, bleck.
I think you’re highlighting two different problems here.
I agree that Gen Z and younger are, on average, far worse at basic computer skills than many seem to assume. It makes me reflect on my tech-learning throughout my childhood, as a Millennial. I think that part of it is that many erroneously assume that because Gen Z has grown up online, that this will lead to proficiency, but the kind of tech they’ve been exposed to is largely walled gardens and oversimplified UIs. That assumption of proficiency leads to scenarios where their lack of skill is only discovered when they enter college, or the workplace. I am astounded at the prospect of people not even knowing the difference between “Cut and Paste” and “Copy and Paste”. It’s grim.
The poor quality of journalism may be linked to this, but I think it’s larger than that. It seems like it’s not a great time to be a journalist at the moment (my writer friends tell me that increasingly, the only work they’re able to find is copy-editing AI shit). Private equity is fucking up so much of the world — journalism included. Polygon is an example of an outlet that was apparently sustainably profitable, before it was sold and experienced mass lay-offs; an individual company’s success doesn’t matter to the big conglomerate that owns it. I know that other journalistic companies have fallen to the same fate too.
It also seems that tech journalism ends up being especially shit. I didn’t start noticing it properly until I watched this podcast episode from “Tech Won’t Save Us”. The TL;DW of it is that tech journalists like Kara Swisher like to pretend that they speak truth to power, and fire hard-hitting questions at big tech people, when that’s patently bullshit and it’s clear that they only get the access that they do by playing softball with the powerful. We can’t blame a few individuals for the entirety of the tech journalism problem, but I reckon it’s a big part of it when so many of the established, big names in this space don’t seem interested in actually doing tech journalism (and smaller names who want to ask journalistically interesting questions don’t get platforms or access to ask those questions).
Our information ecosystem is not in a great place. I’ve found it tremendously beneficial to curate the news and information I’m exposed to (praise be RSS), but that has been a gradual process of actively working to notice good journalism in the world and build up my mental “rolodex” of people whose perspectives I trust to be worthwhile (even if I don’t necessarily agree with said perspectives). However, this is an area that I care deeply about, and thus it feels worthwhile to spend that energy to curate my infosphere. Most people won’t have the inclination or energy to do this work, which is unfortunate.
I almost entirely agree with what you’ve said here, I just didn’t feel like writing out all the nuances, and was trying to just do a surface level analogy.
The only part where I even sort of maybe disagree is… there are actually good tech news sources, they just tend to be either fairly or highly specialized, and/or pretty niche, literally just a guy, or a couple people, running a website basically like its still Web 1.0 days.
But absolutely yes, the broader audience that an outfit appeals to, the broader scope of things they try to cover… its a joke, doing comprehensive reviews of everything would take a whole bunch if teams of specialists, so… most don’t even bother, and just link to somebody else who did that, and try to summarize it … and thats a best case scenario.
It is truly horrendous with video game journalism.
Beyond the surface level stuff of seemingly arbitrary and nonsensical review scores, the incestuous access journalism aspect of it that turns most of them into just advertising…
Almost none of these people offer a meaningful critique of like, the business strategy, the corporate culture, the deals between companies, the astoundingly high usage of contractors and just endemic, obvious galactic levels of incompetence management shows all the time.
Again, there are a few exceptions to this, they’ll cover some obviously heinous shit like sexual harassment and absurd crunch seasons, they’ll report on unions trying to form, and there are a few actually decent investigators…
… but by and large, there is basically no investigative journalism into say, an utterly collapsed, decade spanning, $400 million dollar game that just flops in a month… not on the level that I feel is journalistically called for there, which would be roughly ‘this is Enron’, ‘this is Lehman Brothers’.
They live in this silly nonsense world where the gaming industry is fucking huge and important, but they still mostly cover it like disaffected former fanboys/girls, rather than taking it as seriously as it should be taken.
Because there is no meaningful dissection of how truly idiotic and evil just now routine AAA corpo game publisher logic works, at like a macro to microeconomic comprehensive analysis level… we instead get the masses dramatically oversimplifying things on that front, and then focusing waaaaay too much on whether or not its ok for characters to have pronouns.
Like, me, I am the only person I am aware of who has been saying:
Kernel level anti cheat is not actually necessary, it doesn’t even achieve what it purports to, thus, it just serves as a way to to maintain a corporate grip over the platform (Windows) of the PC gaming market.
Similarly, the entire real time ray tracing paradigm of Nvidia/Unreal Engine is also a fucking scam, though I am at least seeing more people do comprehensive breakdowns on why that is the case, of course the PC hardware reviewers are very fed up with this by now… but still only a few go into the massive economic impacts of that and thus broad societal implications.
…
There, your essay provoked my own rant-essay, lol.
I could write on this for days if my wrist was so fucked, bleck.