My daily trek from home to office and back tend to be fairly educational. Between the likes of Buzz Out Loud, gdgt, and TWiT for tech with American Public Media and The Economist for news, I listen to a whole collection of podcasts, though with a fair amount of coverage overlap.
Occasionally, a host will acknowledge the presence of an echo chamber – that is, a number of media outlets express the same viewpoint without much critical thought, sometimes repeating the PR selling points without rebuttal. More often, though, journalists sound like company fanboys, especially some tech podcasts; they give really positive (sometimes, also negative) testimonials of features or products from the “cool” companies, convince themselves that something useful to them may very well be useless to the listening public, and repeatedly route conversations back to the same hot topics.
We geeks are a loyal and long-winded bunch.
Being around complex pieces of machinery and software all the time, it’s pretty easy to lose touch with what a general user wants. I know that my requirements for a piece of hardware vastly outweigh what Sui needs; I obsess over tiny features (the fonts have to be anti-aliased properly, dammit), while she just wants a light laptop that can open a Word document. The power user’s list of wants should be different from the common user, and most companies are designing and selling their products to the latter.
So it’s a bit off-putting when so much time is dedicated to stuff like:
How big of a deal it was for the iPhone App Store to reject Google Voice. There’s a battle to be fought there from a principle standpoint, but from general utility and usage, GV didn’t add much value and most didn’t know or care about the service. Then there was
The non-removable batteries on the new Macbook Pros. Techies made a fuss about the inability of bringing a second battery or replacing it 5 years down the line, but of course the typical laptop user keeps the device plugged in anyway. Such a small design change headlined the news about the product, and geeks found a way to complain. And what of
Media-hyped Twitter? Finally, a way for the media to maintain their viewership indefinitely, radiating their persona at all hours of the day. It has become such a hot topic that completely unrelated subjects are directed to the site (Can I Twitter that? Is that as good as Twitter?), even when studies have shown that a lot of it is pointless and the majority of new users don’t stick around.
I’m not even sure what my point is; geeks are just like everybody else, and it’s simply natural to project their own needs and wants onto others less technically savvy. I suppose I hold my fellow geeks to a higher standard, and just wish that they’d take the time to understand the general audience and provide the appropriate perspective. I get disturbingly excited about a 30″ monitor outputting every one of its 2560×1600 pixels, but I imagine it’s more of a “my face is being radiated off” experience for others.
Then again, society as a whole has made tremendous leaps in geekification: World of Warcraft is in popular culture, iPhones are rampant, everybody has a Facebook account. In the networked, digitalized, computerized world, geekism is emerging as standard fare.
Gotta find a new field of expertise to keep out the riffraff.