Another possible problem, occasionally identified in the scribe’s idle imaginings, is that a couple of generations of journalists are emerging who’ve had no exposure to having to glean their basic information from yellowing files and stray flecks of fading memories. What would happen should someone snip Google’s crucial cable? Are there people doing journalism now who wouldn’t have a clue how to set about a story in the absence of electronic data assistance?
Oh for days of yore when I had six weeks to file | The Australian (via somethingchanged)
Guilty as charged. I have to admit, I find Google an invaluable tool for backgrounding stories, although my present academic training is pulling me away from this (a little). Don’t use Google at all (well, almost at all) for the thesis!
I’m looking forward to reading the Nicholas Carr piece (in my newly arrived edition of The Atlantic) the spurred this latest bout of Google bashing.
Also from the Errol Simper (linked): “Sullivan touched on some internet-Google drawbacks, as quoted earlier. One he didn’t mention is the potential danger of journalistic uniformity. It has often occurred to the scribe in recent times that when journalists from News Limited, Fairfax Media or from the Seven Network set out out to do a story about essentially the same thing, then they’ll probably all perform the same research. Unless you’re formidably familiar with the background to a particular topic it’s become second nature, an automatic reflex, to Google up stories relevant to what you’re examining.
“What you find will very probably influence the questions you ask and which individuals you seek out for comment. It’s as though the internet has crafted a little journalistic suburb within whose boundaries the stories will largely be confined. The only thing that’s going to make one story different from another is the varying thought processes of the human condition. A potential problem, as Sullivan suggests, is that those processes may now be similarly conditioned.”