"Tech Writers" Need to Chill Out

You probably remember WeWork, a company that is technically still around but buzzing a lot less these days. It’s largely branded itself as a “tech company” in spite of dealing in office real estate. That’s literally their business.

And people have commented on this before—Forbes and Harvard Business Review, for example. Even the Washington Post, ironically, has jumped on this band wagon.

I say ironically because “For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you.” The Washington Post (and others in their industry) are in the business of doing the same thing, just subbing out “company” with “journalist.”

The “tech journalist” is a proliferating breed that likes writing about such very techy topics as social media and the occasional algorithm. The problem is that the overwhelming impression I get from the typical “tech journalist” is that someone used the Internet* a lot and wanted to write about it and the figures who control it. Then, to distance themselves from the image of someone who used the Internet a lot, they dignified their work with the term “tech journalist.”

I’m not naming any specific (Washington Post reporters’) names here because I think this problem is more systematic and typical than the malfeasance of any single errant Millenial/Zoomer. People are running around calling themselves “tech reporters” when their knowledge of actual tech is comparable to the ordinary person’s and when even their subject matter is more often than not profiling personalities or human interactions.

And I acknowledge the talent stack problem: actual computer nerds are famously awful at communication. (I’ve seen really interesting and fair breakdowns of the body language of geeks who incubated their coding and social skills in their college dorm rooms, like Mark Zuckerberg and video game developer Sean Murray.) And to compound the problem, journalism work is generally harder to come by and pays less than the engineering internships a lot of these professionals were working by their college summers, let alone their day jobs.

But that doesn’t mean the solution is to hire a bunch of crackberry addicts to write human interest pieces and pedestrian social/political commentary and call them “tech writers.” It reminds me of the opening of C.S. Lewis’ The Abolition of Man when he criticizes an “educational” book that purports to teach children how to write but winds up spilling their ink smuggling in a values system about subjective emotion and actual fact. The English textbook says nothing about good writing and instead offers shallow criticisms of anything expressing ennobling emotions. Lewis skewers them: “literary criticism is difficult, and what [the authors] actually do is very much easier.” Indeed.

To be so bold as to draw a line in the sand: “tech writers” must have familiarity with tech. They must have spent some decent amount of time on the back end of things working to build, or at the very least being educated about, the tools that everyone uses. They must be something more than what a previous generation would have called a “luser.”

People hype “tech” a lot these days and I think that’s counterproductive. Children learning to be users of smartphones or social media apps are not getting a leg up in the world by doing so. Even tabling all of the harms that that world provides for children, people are deluding themselves when they think training children to be users and consumers gives them some sort of an edge when that edge belongs (by reality) to creators and engineers.

And this goes for journalism too. It’s counterproductive for journalists who don’t understand how a SQL injection hack works or who don’t know elementary computer architecture or who, frankly, were scared of every math class they ever have to take to style themselves as a “tech” reporter. They do so to glorify work that’s somewhere at the intersection of tech company PR employee (talking about updates and features in new products), amateur political commentator, and human interest (gossip) columnist.

And it should never—OK, I’m going to single one culprit out here—it should never happen that a “tech/science reporter” notes that WhatsApp changes the group size limit to 255 members and comments that it is “not clear why WhatsApp settled on the oddly specific number.”

But maybe I’m being too harsh singling out the tech reporters. Maybe the norm for the reporter industry is giving people the most prestigious adjective they can get before the word “reporter” in spite of having not a lot of depth with what they’re reporting. After all, as the observation goes, if you read the news about the thing that you know best, it seems like they hardly know what they’re talking about and get it all wrong. Why would you expect them to only be wrong about your expertise?

~

*As of 2019, style guides declared that the Internet was no longer considered a proper noun and did not have to be capitalized. But it will always be capitalized in my heart.