Hasta La Gadget!

My son sits in the back of the car a lot. There’s the ride to and from school, the field trips on weekends, that sort of thing. I have an internal struggle on what he should be doing back there. Part of me wishes onto him the excruciating boredom I suffered through in my youth in the back of cars. I tell myself that his character will be built upon managing such boredom and not indulging his every whim with digital stimulus. In other words, I worry his iPad is rotting his brain (disclosure, during the day I work for Samsung, we make competitor tablets that I also worry may be rotting his brain). Still, I can’t take away his tablets. I can’t do that to my child. I understand.

Sometimes I make him turn it off and we talk. He’s a 4 year old, so he asks really deep questions and I get to come up with all sorts of crazy metaphysical answers that he’ll either forget or distort in his mind enough that there will be no negative repercussions.

“Where do we come from, Daddy?”

“We’re all made up of little tiny bits that used to be one singular little tiny bit but that exploded and spread all over and formed stars and then those stars exploded and smashed into each other and formed the earth and here we are. But the best part is those little tiny bits are actually made up of almost nothing at all. We come from nothing, and we’re made of nothing. Now, do you want Mexican or Pizza?”

“Let his mother play him that dreck”

In the background of this car ride I play music, which I choose quite deliberately. I never listen to children’s music. I can’t. I know there’s good children’s music out there, by quality artists and musicians, with interesting, funny, meaningful, educational lyrics. Blech. Let his mother play him that dreck. She’s got horrible taste in music. If she didn’t play kids music, his next best choice with her would be listening to boy bands and whatever song got 2,000,000 YouTube views last week. Me? I have taste. I have provenance. Best of all, I have a plan. At least, I thought I had a plan.

Since he was born, my son has heard the Beastie Boys’ “Paul’s Boutique” in its entirety at least once a month. I love my Sirius radio, and they play good music without commercials, which is a key component of kid-friendly listening. But I need to exercise a little control.

My parents got me into good music, but they have weird taste in music. My father has a collection of albums from great musicians, but he has the wrong album. He has the third album, or the album of cover songs, or the duets album. He’s got the Greatest Hits Part II. So, I grew up listening to Magical Mystery Tour, but not the White Album or Revolver. I know Born in the USA, but didn’t discover Nebraska until recently. My first Led Zeppelin album was not titled Led Zeppelin.

I made a mix for Noah. Considering I’m so immersed in gadgets and technology, you’d be amazed at how low-tech my car audio system is. I have no USB port, no 3.5mm input, and no stereo Bluetooth. It’s like I’m living in 2011. So, I made CDs. A mix on MP3 CDs.

Basically, I went through my library and pulled one song from all my favorite artists. I picked the song that got me interested in that artist. Not their best, or most famous. The one that got me hooked for the first time. I’m proud of the mix. There’s a lot of good music there. There’s a lot of emotion in it. After all, these are the songs that first provoked an emotional response to my favorite musicians, and music is important to me.

I was showing off my mix for a passenger recently who remarked:
“This sounds like a middle school dance.” Haha! I laughed. No, that’s just silly. Here, let me just . . .
“Ready or not, here I come, you can’t hide . . . ”
No, no, that’s just a . . . here, let me find something else . . .
“She was a fast machine, she kept her motor clean, she was the . . . ”
Oh no. No! What have I done?!
“Show me, show me, show me how you do that trick. The one that makes me scream, she said . . . ”

What happened? I pulled canonical songs from my library. There were plenty of newer songs, but the vast majority came from a period spanning around 1988 to 1996. Not quite middle school, more like music up until the middle of my college career. Still, there’s a huge gap there that I needed to figure out.

Did I not listen to music then? Was I simply ambling through life with my hands over my ears, never hearing anything new or unique? That couldn’t be true. There’s a dark period of heavy A Cappella use stuck in there. A Cappella is heavy on cover songs, so my musical growth was definitely stunted during that period. I had been strung out on vocal bands. I couldn’t find a single example of late 90s music in my collection. Nothing stood out.

The answer is probably technological. I got my first CD burner around 1999, which was early for CD burning. I probably had a 2X burner, so 1 CD took 35 minutes or more. Even then, I was burning .aiff files, fully uncompressed. Nobody stored music digitally until the new millenium.

In 1998, I lived in student housing for Northeastern grad students in Boston. My apartment was broken into 3 times. During one break-in, the thief stole my sleeve of CDs. 200 CDs, a completely stuffed, massive envelope of music. I had renter’s insurance, and they told me I was covered to replace it all. There was no chance I could remember every single CD. I made a long list of 200 CDs I’d like, and they cut me a check for something like $11.99 x 200. I went on a binge.

“The best thing about Napster was the incredible catalogues of other users”

A couple years later, I was deeply entrenched in Napster, and my library was filling quickly. The best thing about Napster was the incredible catalogues of the other users. There was a much more personal connection with the anonymous peers with whom you were sharing. You could see their music, take ersatz recommendations, and fill in the potholes in your musical highway. I drank my fill, maxed out my hard disk drive, and never bothered to back up. See where this is going? This story ends with the 2GB 2.5″ laptop drive sealed in a static bag sitting in a drawer in my office to this day, waiting for the prices on data recovery to drop to zero.

It’s curious to think about whether a pattern is emerging. There’s a gap in my musical collection the size of a small decade. There are equal gaps in my photos, my writing, etc. There are hiccups in the imperfect digital collection of data, and it has erased some of my history. With my history, my memory disappears. I’m telling my own story but the character has selective amnesia and incomplete notes.

As we rely on digital data for our most personal memories, it’s important to ignore the caveat that everything on the Internet lasts forever. Quite the contrary. While it’s harder to scrub something from the Internet once it takes on a life of its own, it’s also impossible to find something once it has been disappeared. Hard disk drives die. Services crumble. Suddenly you’re driving around in your car thinking nothing great has happened in music since “August and Everything After,” and trying to convince your kid of the same.

IMAGE: Michelle Carl; Mathew Wilson

Where the Heck Was I in the Nineties? is written by Philip Berne & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2013, SlashGear. All right reserved.

I have been using Twitter continually for about three years now. I’m not sure of the exact date, or my first tweet, because Twitter still hasn’t given me the option to download my entire archive yet, though every time I check, the “Deactivate my account” option stares back at me from the bottom of the Settings page, where the archive option is supposed to appear someday. It taunts me, that deactivation option, because like all good things, Twitter occasionally makes me sick. There are days when I love it, and days when I can’t stand it. There are days when I can’t stand myself as a tweeter. To paraphrase a misogynist saying, show me a beautiful social network and I’ll show you a guy who’s tired of checking his @replies.

The problem is that I need to use Twitter. I don’t just mean I have a psychological need, though I probably do. I mean that an important part of my job takes place on Twitter. I joined Twitter to keep up with technology news and information, and to make sure I was hearing the conversation that people were having. It’s important to be up-to-date and relevant, and without Twitter that’s nearly impossible.

If you’re not a Twitter user, or if you haven’t integrated Twitter into your professional life, you probably think I’m a crazy loser. An explanation of Twitter to a layperson pales in comparison to the experience of Twitter. Rather than meditate on my addiction, however, I thought I would use this space to suggest some ways I’m going to change my Twitter habits to make the service more palatable.

These are my pet peeves of social networking, but I’m not going to make this a gripe column where I call out my friends for annoying me. These are mistakes I have personally made, and I’m only going to focus on changing my own behavior. As always, if everyone simply followed my example and could abide by my rules, the world would be a better place, but for now I’ll just concentrate on me.

1. Stop complaining

I’m going to stop griping on Twitter. It’s so easy to make Twitter a sounding board for all of the petty annoyances in my life. I already have a rule in place that I never complain about travel. Travel sucks. Hotels suck. Airports are horrible places filled with stinky people whose habits and transgressions are completely unforgivable and worthy of report. Airplanes are cramped tubes of farts and knees and trash and screaming wet things that punch you in the back interminably for hours on end. It’s all horrible. So I don’t complain. I just tell you where I’m going, and you can assume it was a nightmare getting from point AMS to point BWI.

Travel is only one thing I complain about, though. I also complain about bad customer service. I complain about stupid, poorly researched stories that lack the omniscient perspective of the mobile technology industry that only I seem to possess. I complain about Republicans, right-wingers, gun nuts, and anyone who disagrees with the way I want everybody to live their lives.

I haven’t done the research, but I think I complain a lot. So, now I’m going to try to stop. I can’t imagine it makes for interesting tweeting. I know that I can’t stand when people complain on Twitter, unless I can completely empathize with their complaint, but even then complaining only serves to make me relive some horrible incident. No more complaining, and that alone would probably make my Twitter a much nicer place.

2. Stop tweeting the obvious

Raise your hand if you wanted to kill yourself on 12/12/12. Good, because I probably wanted to kill most of you, too. After the assassination of Osama Bin Laden, I’m guessing that 12:12 PM on December 12th of last year was the most tweeted moment in Twitter’s history, at least if my feed is any guide. It was insufferable.

I have a rule about sharing YouTube videos. If a video has more than 1,000,000 views, I’m assuming most people I could show it to have already seen it, so I don’t bother sharing. At least I don’t expect that I’m exposing you to something new if I share such a video. The same should apply to tweets. If I can guess that a million people know something, I don’t have to tweet it. I’m not on Twitter to report the news. I’m especially not on Twitter to report about natural disasters, or human disasters, or to be the first to spread some general information around.

“I guess the Mayans were right”

I’m also going to avoid making the obvious joke. Hey look, Honey Boo Boo got renewed for another season. I GUESS THE MAYANS WERE RIGHT!! Oh my, it’s snowing here in Texas. SO MUCH FOR YOUR GLOBAL WARMING, AL GORE!! Nickelback is releasing a new album. I GUESS THE MAYANS WERE R… oh, I already used that one. If I had a dime for every stupid Mayan calendar joke I read on Twitter, I’d throw them all at your face for making stupid Mayan calendar jokes.

3. Stop retweeting compliments about myself

It’s rare, but every once in a while someone says something nice about me on Twitter. I’m somewhat irascible and prissy, so it’s quite unlikely, but every now and then I’ll get a new reader who doesn’t know me well enough to know I don’t deserve a compliment. Sometimes I’ll say something funny. Once, I got a #FF follow friday tweet with my handle in it.

I probably retweeted most of those things. Then I realized how I feel when I read similar retweets from my friends and folks I follow. I think they must be lonely, desperate shmucks to have to brag about themselves that way. It’s worse than a humble brag. I can handle a humble brag. I actually think humble bragging is kind of nice. I like hearing about my friends and their accomplishments. Humble bragging is a way of saying “hey, I did something kind of cool that I want to tell you about, but I don’t want to seem pompous.” It’s taking a step toward the edge of the stage during an ovation, then taking a big step back to stand with the rest of the cast for the final bow.

Retweeting your own compliments, however, feels different. It’s complimenting yourself in someone else’s voice. It’s tricking someone into making an advertisement for your talents.

There is a big exception to this rule. When the person complimenting you is so famous and popular that their compliment is more interesting than your achievement, feel free to retweet. If you write a book, and Stephen King tweets about how much he liked it, please retweet. If you volunteer at a soup kitchen, and Mayor Cory Booker mentions your heroic efforts in his feed, please let me know. That’s cool, and I wouldn’t want to miss that sort of thing. But if you have 15,000 readers and someone with 28 followers tells you how much they liked that stupid photo you took of your cat on a cheeseburger at sunset, you’re wasting my time.

4. Cut my Twitter time in half

“I don’t need to know every time someone mentions my name”

Here’s the toughest one. I’m going to try to stay on Twitter less. I’m going to check my feed less often. I’m turning off notifications for mentions and retweets. Direct Messages are more like email, and some people prefer to contact me via Twitter, so they still bubble up to priority status; but I don’t need to know every time someone mentions my name. I obsessively check Twitter dozens, if not hundreds of times a day, flicking between the news feed and the @replies column, looking for a reaction, a connection, a personal public message. That needs to stop.

I thought about instituting an odd/even policy on Twitter. I’d only check Twitter during hours that begin with even numbers. That seems silly and complicated. I would never remember to check the time before I check Twitter. I don’t make resolutions that I know will fail, so I’m not holding myself to that standard, but it will sit in the back of my mind so that I will force myself to be a bit more aware of the time I spend refreshing my social feed.

5. Do not hold others accountable to these rules

Strangely, one of my biggest pet peeves on Twitter is when people complain about another person’s tweets. This is especially true when there is some massive event that captures the public’s attention, for better and for worse. After a violent incident, there is both an outpouring of emotion and hand-wringing and grief, as well as a negative response to that outpouring. Half of my feed is crying out “Why is this so?” while the other half rebutts with “What are you going to do about it?”

This is an off-shoot of rule #1, No complaining, but it deserves a special mention. Let people act naturally on Twitter. They will be tedious and boring. They will say the obvious and complain. They will make empty promises, empty threats. Eventually, they might surprise you. If they aren’t worth sifting through all the chaff to get to the wheat, unfollow them. I just culled 100 people from my Twitter following list, and all of a sudden I’m happier with my Twitter feed.

I don’t expect everyone to follow these guidelines, but I’m going to make a personal effort, and hopefully I’ll produce a better, more compelling feed. The true secret to Twitter is that the people you want to follow the most are usually the ones who say the least.

Being a Better Tweeter is written by Philip Berne & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

It’s probably too late now, but for the last week there may have been an unusual window of opportunity in which I could have embedded something cool into the tip of my finger. I lost it recently. The tip, that is. Of my finger. It happened in a freak office chair incident at a posh hotel in New York City. That’s pretty much all you need to know, except that I lost about a centimeter of finger. I mean, I found it. The fingertip, that is; but it could not be reattached. It was not stitched. It was left agape and healing of its own devices. If I’m going to stick something in there to extend the capabilities of my digit in perpetuity, now is the time. Rarely is one greeted with such an open opportunity, literally, so of course I wonder what sort of technical marvel I could implant.

It really wouldn’t have to be much. A programmable RFID-type key that I could then use for a variety of purposes. I could tap my finger on the electronic gates to get into work. I could get into my car and start the engine simply by touching the door handle, then the steering wheel. It could be fun to pay with a finger. Just magically tap upon the NFC reader at the register and I’m good to go. Wave my bare hand at the gas pump. The possibilities are endless.

Also, a little dull. I love NFC in my phones and I guarantee I use it more than almost anyone else you know (spoiler alert: my day job is with Samsung). I’m talking about implanting something in my finger. It needs to be a step beyond the latest and greatest.

An LED would be fun. Something multicolor that I could control. I wouldn’t need mind control to change the hue or brightness. Bluetooth would be fine. I program my finger on my phone and when I tap against something it lights up. The E.T. effect alone would be worth the price of admission. I wonder if my son would laugh when I touch his bumped head with my finger and as it glows softly I whisper “Oooooouuuuchhh.” Probably he’d run screaming from the room, because Daddy’s fingers aren’t supposed to light up, and he hasn’t seen E.T. yet. So, maybe light-up finger is not the way to go. I need something more personal, less showy.

Therefore, laser pointer finger is also out. This is unfortunate, because the minute I thought of it I knew it had vastly more potential than LED finger. If it’s going to be my finger, I’d spring for the 1W blue-laser type, the one that can pop a balloon from less than 1 foot. I’d need a way to dial it back on command. Bluetooth again, perhaps, or a touch sensitive control. After all, you don’t want to fire off an astonishingly potent laser from your fingertip at the wrong time. You could be wiping an eyelash out of somebody’s face, or picking your nose, or dancing in some sprinkler-like fashion and end up causing serious harm. Sorry, closest-I’ll-come-to-having-a-real-lightsaber finger, it just isn’t meant to be.

“How about finger-cam?”

I need to think more creatively. How about a camera? There is great potential in a camera that is a continual part of my body. I’ve occasionally imagined replacing one of my eyes with a camera – haven’t we all? I’ve never considered replacing one of my fingers. It would be easier to control the shot with a finger cam. The eyes are somewhat involuntary. If something crazy catches your eye, it will rush to the scene immediately. A finger, on the other hand, can take some direction. There is control and flexibility. I could control the perspective, the angle, the aperture.

Unfortunately, there are also many places a finger goes that should not be filmed. I’m going to let that last statement float in the air until you get my meaning. Actually, I didn’t have any specific meaning in mind. There are a ton of disgusting places you would stick your finger that should not be filmed, but you just thought of the worst of them. You are a sick weirdo. I was thinking of when I’m cleaning out a whole raw chicken. You, on the other hand, are a disgusting person. That is exactly why fingertip cameras will never work.

If not a camera, a speaker, perhaps? A small wireless speaker? There’s a lot of useful potential in a speaker. I could play music, then stick my finger in my ear to hear it. I could make a phone call, then stick my finger in my ear. If I wanted to whisper something to you without being obvious, I could record a quiet message, then stick my finger in your ear. Basically, what I’m saying is that my finger is going in an ear, like it or not.

What you’d really want with a fingertip speaker, though, is volume. Like enough power to get your groove on. I would love to point my finger at a crowd of people standing around at a bus stop and have my tiny speaker blast the opening from C+C Music Factory’s song “Everybody Dance Now!” If you’re too young to remember that one, it was like the 80′s version of “Harlem Shake.”

I also thought it would be cool to use my finger as a megaphone. I could talk into my phone and my voice would come booming from my hand. Unfortunately, when I think of practical applications, I only imagine myself shouting “Muad’dib!” over and over again.

In the end, if I could implant something, I would implant a whistle. That’s it. Nothing electric, just a simple whistle. Perhaps a slide whistle. Because the best part of having something implanted in my fingertip would be showing it off to kids. It would be friendly and unintimidating. Fun at parties. Great for impromptu sound effects. I imagine my son telling his friends about the cool trick Daddy can do, and then I use my finger to make a brilliant whistle, and watch while a bunch of 4-year olds stick their fingers in their mouths and blow heartily, trying to make a sound.

What Should I Stick In My Finger? is written by Philip Berne & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

I can’t believe I’m going to do this. I’m going to defend the right to own guns. You see, I’m a liberal. I’m more liberal than you are. I don’t care how liberal you think you are, I’m more liberal than you. But I also pride myself on my ability to change my mind with a reasonable argument, so there are a few positions on which I agree with conservatives. Teacher’s unions, for one thing, are pure evil. I know that from my experience working in public schools, where my job was made much harder by teachers who were resting on union protections and doing a horrible job. On gun ownership, as well, I’m confounded to say that I tend to agree more with the right-wing than the left.

[Image credit: Andrew Becraft]

Joe Brown, chief at Gizmodo, penned a brief editorial about how guns are a gadget too dangerous for normal civilian use. He makes an excellent point for geeks, mostly concerning time machines. But his column is too brief for the topic at hand. Joe, let me show you what a thousand words looks like, because it would be impossible to flesh this out in the space you’ve allowed yourself.

So, Joe’s basic premise is that every sci-fi movie that involves time machines basically concludes that time travel is too dangerous for us normal humans. Except he forgot the canonical time traveling opus, Doctor Who. If anything, Doctor Who proves quite the opposite. The good Doctor emphatically solves his problems with little to no violence, and usually folks he encounters leave all the wiser for being in his presence. Sure, he’s not human, but the show’s writers sure are, and that’s what we’re really talking about. Joe thinks it’s impossible to even imagine a scenario where such a dangerous technology should be left in the hands of humanity. Our greatest thinkers, Joe implies, cannot conceive of a world order preserved with time travel as a natural part. But that’s just not true. Doctor Who. Marty McFly. That one Harry Potter book, the really good one (the best one, in my opinion). All involved time travel, and everything worked out for the best.

“Guns offer maximum damage for minimum intelligence”

So, let’s leave the fiction world behind. It is impossible to argue that guns are not dangerous. They are tremendously dangerous. They offer the maximum amount of damage for the minimum amount of intelligence. I could put my 3 year old behind the wheel of a car, and he would have trouble figuring it out. But if I hand him a semi-automatic pistol, I’m sure he could kill something with ease.

I should also assert my liberal bona fides. If all guns disappeared tomorrow, I would not shed a tear. If the government somehow came to its senses and banned all firearms, from automatic assault rifles down to black powder muskets, I would applaud the decision and vote for any representatives supporting it. However, as long as guns are currently legal, I think there are solutions to maintain the status quo that do not involve a full-fledged ban.

That ship has already sailed, after all. The guns are out there. They are easy enough to get. A gun ban would certainly stop some criminals from acquiring firearms, but not all, and probably not even most. Other countries still make guns. Heck, anyone with a 3D printer at home can now print working guns for themselves, without a license or waiting period. I can’t think of any technological development more frightening than that. So the genie is already out of the bottle. Guns are here, and guns are easy, and we have to deal with that fact.

Exactly one week before the shooting at the movie theater in Colorado, I fired an assault rifle for the first time. It was an AR-16, the same weapon the shooter used (one of many, in fact). The rifle belongs to a friend of mine here in Texas, a very sweet and gentle family man who grew up in rural Idaho. We had planned the outing to the shooting range for a while. When the day came, I asked if he needed to stop home after work to pick up his weapon.

“Nope, I have it already. It’s in my trunk.”

“Do we need to buy ammo?”

“No, I’ve got about a thousand rounds already.” Hollow point rounds. You need to use hollow points at a shooting range so you don’t obliterate the targets. When we got to the range, I had to buy a membership and watch a 10-minute safety video. The range took safety very, very seriously. When I heard the tremendous report of the guns being fired, I asked my friend if he had earplugs he could lend me.

“No, but you can just use a couple bullets.”

“Bullets?!”

“Yeah, just stick them in your ears. I used to do that all the time when I was a kid.”

Instead of sticking live ammunition in my ears with the bullet facing my brain, I convinced him to give me a couple bucks to rent a pair of ear covers.

I have to admit, it was an awesome experience. For a first-timer, I did fairly well from a scant 50 yards. I chalk that up to extensive video game experience. Firing an assault rifle is exhilarating. It’s tremendously powerful, but smooth at the same time, thanks to the large spring that runs through the stock and catches much of the recoil. It took concentration and precision. It involved a loud bang, smoke, and heat. There’s a slight element of danger, but also the reassurance of knowing that if you follow the proper rules and procedures, nobody will get hurt.

“Should we ban everything that could possibly hurt us?”

Should we ban everything that could possibly hurt us? Should be ban only the things that could hurt us the most, with the least effort? Our laws currently establish a right to own guns, and I, as a responsible and intelligent citizen, have no problem exercising and enjoying that right. I don’t want to hurt anybody. I don’t want to see anybody get hurt.

I think gun opponents are going about this the wrong way. We do not need gun control. Such a thing makes little sense. We need human control. We need to control the humans who have access to guns, the way guns are used and stored, and places in which guns are accepted. But mostly, we need to change the way we talk about the issue. When you tell a gun enthusiast you favor gun control, they think you are taking away not only a favorite pastime. You are also taking away a form of protection and safety.

My friend with the assault rifle owns 10 30-round magazines. He could carry 300 rounds on him without having to reload a clip. When I asked him why, he said

“Well, I was buying only a few clips, and the guy selling them to me explained that a clip is inexpensive compared to the price of the rifle itself. So, you might as well buy a bunch. Because when the s*** goes down, you’re going to want those extra clips.”

When it goes down, indeed. I have no statistics to back up whether gun ownership results in safety or tragedy. But I do know that gun owners legitimately feel their safety is being compromised when you suggest taking away their guns. And if they have never used their guns improperly, or in a harmful manner, why should they have to sacrifice their right to ownership?

Instead, let’s put technology on the case. Let’s stop calling it gun control, and start calling it criminal control. Nobody will defend making it easier for dangerous criminals to own guns. Let’s extend waiting periods dramatically. Take the passion out of gun purchases. Leave time for a proper background check, using all the tools of the Internet to get a clear picture of the person purchasing the weapon.

“Let’s see the NRA put their money where their mouths are”

Let’s accelerate the development of biometric gun locks. Only a registered owner can use a gun. Let’s develop new ways to keep guns locked, secured, and only usable by trustworthy owners. Targeting systems that recognize a clear threat. Chemical tests to make sure users aren’t drunk or high or otherwise chemically imbalanced.

The NRA and its associate organizations like to say that guns don’t kill people, people kill people. It’s an inspired slogan, so let’s see them put their money where their mouths are. If we can’t take away the guns, let’s do more to stop the people. Let’s do everything possible. If guns are the most dangerous gadget, it is time to treat them like a gadget and spend more time developing features and improving security.

We may never be able to completely end the gun violence insanity that has plagued the U.S. in the past few weeks, but at least we can inject some technological intelligence into the gun ownership body, and bring this fever down to a manageable level.

Fixing the Deadliest Gadget is written by Philip Berne & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

There is an alternate universe somewhere in which I am a lexicographer. I write dictionaries for a living. This is not the pipe dream of a grammar-obsessed former English teacher. Right out of grad school (Master’s in English), I turned down an opportunity to work for the Oxford English Dictionary. The job was for a specialist in Caribbean dialects of English. It sounded fantastic. The OED recruiters made clear this was not a stepping stone job for editors and writers. Being a lexicographer leads only to being a better, more experienced lexicographer. Instead, I took a job that involved writing and technology and pop culture, and my life was set on its course. But in an alternate world, I made a different choice and took the dictionary job, and now I sit in a dark apartment in Manhattan mumbling to myself about the horror of language on the Internet.

I’m not talking about the commenters. I’m not talking about laypeople. I’m talking about professionals who are paid to write for a living. Especially technology journalists. There are many, many excellent writers out there who work in technology. I hope they do very well, and I hope you read them thoroughly. But there are also many, perhaps a slim majority of writers, who write with prose that is simply messy, imprecise, and overwrought. I think it is a problem endemic to more than just their technology stories. The problem, at its core, is a way of thinking about how to publish on the Internet.

On the Web, you need to publish quickly if you want to succeed. This isn’t because readers remember who broke a story. Ask the average reader who got the scoop on the latest piece of iPhone jetsam to emerge from the Chinese black markets, and you’re likely to be met with a blank stare.

Even Techmeme gets it wrong, often. Techmeme republishes the most popular technology stories on the Web. Ideally, the writer who reported the story first will show up as the top link. All the Web sites who sourced that story get pushed beneath. That’s how it should be. But Techmeme often puts third-hand stories above first- and second-hand reporting. Techmeme offers a ton of traffic, especially for the top links in each topic. But publishing first does not guarantee those clicks.

“Why publish so quickly? Google knows”

So why publish so quickly? Why rush the story out the door without a proper copy edit? One word: Google. Even when Techmeme doesn’t know where a story came from, Google knows. Google search results tend to prioritize stories that came out first. Even better, Google takes into account how many other stories are linking back to the original. So, if you report on something first, even a minute earlier than the competition, you might get better Google placement.

If you want to make a living running a technology blog, you need to appear on the first page of Google search results. Return readership and feed subscribers certainly matter. But to many sites, especially smaller, up-and-coming sites, the search results will pay the bills for years while the site builds a following.

Speed is therefore of the essence. This comes at the cost of copy editing. Copy editors make everything better. They polish the prose to make it shine, without losing the author’s voice. They write headlines that are engaging and accurate. If you read a story about a gadget that is based entirely on a leak or rumor, and the headline says “Confirmed,” you can guarantee no copy editor wrote that. That was written by an editor focused more on clicks and dollars, not words and meaning.

For a very, very brief time I was a copy editor for a Web site run by the editors of PC Magazine. This was at the height of the dotcom crash. I was told that our unique project was funded for at least a year. Then I saw copy editors in other departments getting laid off. Some were rehired part time, on an hourly scale and without benefits. Finally, on a Friday afternoon, a payday in fact, I was called into a meeting with the boss. Friday afternoon meetings are always bad news. When they happen on a payday, you should probably pack up your desk before the meeting starts, just to save time. Trust me, I know from repeat experience.

The real problem is that many sites care much more about clicks than content. There are some sites I read that are simply wrong. They get everything wrong. They report rumors, then “confirm” those rumors, and by the time those rumors have been revealed as false, they have already moved on to the next big thing. I see these sites quoted and sourced over and over again, even though their accuracy percentage hovers in the low single digits.

Why are they still thriving? Speed. Clicks. Why bother asking a company for a response to a query? You usually know what they will say, especially when it has to do with unannounced devices. (Disclosure: In my day job I work in PR for Samsung Mobile). Wait for a response and you’ll be passed by all of the sites that didn’t bother. Take the time for accuracy and you’ll be out of business, while smaller sites report whatever they like with impunity.

If accuracy is a casualty of the need for fast posting, then grammar, usage, and spelling concerns are barely an afterthought. I know quite a few writers who complain frequently that their warnings about proper English and good writing go completely unheeded. Heck, I was one of those writers. I wrote for a site run by a very intelligent Norwegian who spoke a confused and somewhat garbled English as his second language. We never edited copy, I just did my best to get it right the first time. But management explicitly placed no value at all in proper English. Now the site is gone, vanished into the ether. Old stories don’t even show up in Google search results. There’s irony for you.

“Poor writing will fall heavy on your ears if you cherish the language”

How do we fix the problem? Easy. Avoid the worst offenders. Hopefully your instincts have already pushed you away from them. Even if you aren’t a grammar professional, poor writing will fall heavy on your ears if you enjoy and cherish the language.

Point out mistakes. Always. As a writer, I hate it when readers point out grammar errors in comments. But I’m mostly angry with myself for letting a mistake slip through. Harp on poor grammar on your favorite sites long enough, and they will start to take the problem seriously on an institutional level.

Most of all, though, reward good writing. Read the longer stories. You probably read 3-4 stories about the same topic, anyway. Instead, find the Web site that writes the longer version, and stick to that one. Tell them you appreciate their command of the language. Everybody reads comments. Writers, editors, bosses.

Finally, if you’re a writer, reread your own work. You would be amazed how many writers ignore this. When seconds matter, and delays cost money, it seems a waste of time to proofread. Here’s how I motivate myself to reread. I tell myself that if I can’t bear to read this story again, a story I wrote, how could I expect a stranger to read it even once? I cannot.

We all make mistakes. I’ve made plenty. English is a malleable and forgiving language. I’m not asking for perfection, I just think our profession would be a better place, with more accuracy and less nonsense, if we took the language as seriously as we take the topic.

Grammar Police, Arrest This Man is written by Philip Berne & originally posted on SlashGear.
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