Wednesday, April 15, 2009

I Must Stop Now

I can tell I need to stop thinking about technical communicators and journalism for a little while. I just had some more thoughts this morning that I added to the essay in yesterday's post. I still don't know if it's worthwhile. But it's done, at least in the rough stage.

3 comments:

carl g said...

This is hard to ignore, even for someone like me with no professional connection to it.

Another article for your hopper:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/15/opinion/15dowd.html?_r=1

Mister Fweem said...

"It's fair to say there will be no heroes," says Eric Schmidt. I don't know whether that's a rather liberating or a rather frightening thought, on the scale of leveling the playing field a bit or introducing us to a world of secret combinations. Thanks for this. It enlightens, yet eerifies, if I can invent a word.

Mister Fweem said...

Ooh, then there's this gem: "When I ask him if human editorial judgment still matters, he tries to reassure me: "We learned in working with newspapers that this balance between the newspaper writers and their editors is more subtle than we thought. It's not reproducible by computers very easily." I feel better for a minute, until I realize that the only reason he knew I wasn't so easily replaceable is that Google had been looking into how to replace me.

*cues the Twilight Zone music*

Absolutely weird. And absolutely on the money. Google is aces at tracking and measuring and seeing what can be replicated less expensively. You bet your boots they're looking into how to "replace" (any given noun/job description/molecule).

There's a lot of yammering about how bad Wal-Mart's growing "monopoly" is. What about Google's invisible monopoly here. Eerie.