Now they just try to win the race to post news during the tiny window when it's relevant before everybody moves on to the next context-free, consequence-free story. And they were also responsible for researching claims to provide context. Until the real-time obsession started dumbing us all down, reporters were held accountable for following up on the stories they wrote, especially those involving promises made by politicians.
By ignoring the past and future they mislead the public. If they cared about the future, they would find a way to follow up on the claims by setting a reminder to see if key publicly announced deadlines are met.īut they care about only the present. If news media cared about the past, they would do some research and discover that such announcements in India never result in actual devices. The delivery of actual, cheap learning computers is taken as a given by these stories. Whenever the announcements happen, literally thousands of mainstream media outlets, from The New York Times to CNN and BBC cover it with breathless reports. Every year or two, some high-ranking minister in India announces a "breakthrough" that will result in millions of Indian school kids being given $10 laptops, $35 tablets or something like that. My favorite example is the recurring cheap Indian laptop or tablet story. And second, hardly anyone follows up on whether these speculative or provisional events ever take place in real life. Two problems: First, there's often little research to place news in context - to find out if the idea is really new, or just a new spin on very old news. In the fickle universe of technology media, every breathtaking new claim, idea, hardware concept or prediction is massively and redundantly covered by literally thousands of news outlets and blogs.
Let me give you one example from my profession. The so-called "real-time Internet" of Twitter, Facebook and Google's shiny new social media-obsessed search algorithms artificially elevate the importance of information being posted right now, and de-emphasizes the importance of information posted in the past or yet to be posted in the future. Virtual time travel is now more important than ever. The reasons you would want virtual time travel are identical to the reasons you might want to actually time travel, if you had a real time machine: to satisfy curiosity, to learn and gain intelligence, and to give your career an unfair advantage. These services, listed at the bottom of this column, let you peer into the past and take action in the future.
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