Preferring real estate to architecture

Preferring real estate to architecture

It’s hard to understand web design when you don’t understand the web. And it’s hard to understand the web when those who are paid to explain it either don’t get it themselves, or are obliged for commercial reasons to suppress some of what they know, emphasizing the Barnumesque over the brilliant.

The news media too often gets it wrong. Too much internet journalism follows the money; too little covers art and ideas. Driven by editors pressured by publishers worried about vanishing advertisers, even journalists who understand the web spend most of their time writing about deals and quoting dealmakers. Many do this even when the statement they’re quoting is patently self-serving and ludicrous.

When absurd predictions die ridiculous deaths, nobody resigns from the newsroom; they just throw a new line into the water—like marketers replacing a slogan that tanked. After decades of news commoditization, what are amazing is how many good reporters there still are, and how hard many try to lay accurate information before the public. Sometimes you can almost hear it beneath the roar of the grotesque and the exceptional

And one tires of the news narrative’s one-dimensionalism. In 1994, the web was weird and wild, they told us. In ‘99 it was a kingmaker; in ‘01, a bust. In ‘02, news folk discovered blogs; in ‘04, perspiring guest bloggers on CNN explained how citizen journalists were reinventing news and democracy and would determine who won that year’s presidential election. I forget how that one turned out.