technology vs. business
I was watching BBC news this morning and saw a story about the next big thing in DVD players (have a look at the video or some BBC user comments). Apparently there's going to be a format battle between Sony and Toshiba's new types of high resolution DVD players: similar to the BetaMax VHS stand-off twenty odd years ago (I can't remember it either...). New discs are incompatible and the systems extremely expensive.
Well, that's all well and good and maybe useful to those people who don't mind spending a grand to watch movies in exquisite clarity. But what interested me was that it was their business correspondant who presented and led the package (even though it's on their technology webpages). The emphasis was on the consumer and what it meant for them, and as a result you didn't get much of the science of the new systems at all. (Which is fair enough by me - I think 7.30am is pushing it for laser technology.) I'm guessing you saw a fair bit of this kind of thing when you looked at science in newspapers yesterday - science stories being presented via a completely different, non-scientific, angle. Because, ultimately, I don't need to know how a new technology - or medicine, or whatever - works to decide whether to buy it/support it or not. I just need to know what it means to me.
Is this good or bad? Should the media be telling people how stuff works? And how does this kind of thing affect the boundary work that science does?
2 comments:
You said it... you just need to know what it means to you. I had to give an oral presentation on Friday on a scientific/engineering topic of my choice and I picked the story of the solar sailboat that ran in last week's NewScientist. The article itself seemed to try to sell you the idea, as opposed to give you more than just basic detail on how the boat moves. However, because it is a way we can save energy it does not bother me so much that they were giving a sales pitch. I just wish they ran this article in a publication that everyone, and not just science enthusiasts, would read.
Interesting that New Scientist - written for an audience of science entusiasts who presumably are interested in how stuff works - does this as well. Maybe they think their audience are science literate enough (ie are all scientists...) to go and look up the original research they report?
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