Fill Ms. Fission And Charge Up The Flex Resistor

I want to assure you that I’m not going to talk about cars for a third straight post. This is about technology and media, and it’s only tangentially inspired by cars.

Earlier this week I wrote about the big rumour that Apple would buy McLaren. That was reported all over the net, but the Yahoo! article attracted attention for the wrong reasons. Their article referred - both in the headline and the article - to McLaren being vaulted to fame when their car was used as the time machine in Back To The Future. Of course, car fans, movie fans, children of the eighties, and pretty much everyone else, knows that was a Delorean. It’s hard to imagine that you could confuse the two: McLaren was only making race cars when the movie came out, but wouldn’t go into street cars until more than a decade later, by which time Delorean was long gone. Also, McLaren been pretty profitable, and haven’t yet had any cocaine scandals. Pretty much the only thing the two have in common is five of the letters in their names.

So it begs the question of how this could have happened. I mean, I think of myself as having a good memory, and I’m not getting paid to do this. Yet if there’s any chance that I’ve misremembered a fact, I look it up to confirm it. Why do I do this? Because it’s the Internet, and you can look up anything in five seconds. So it’s hard to imagine the mentality of someone who is evidently writing about topics they don’t know well, but doing it all from their flawed memory. In fact, the article somehow stayed up for at least another 24 hours with the incorrect reference (it’s down now.)

Of course, Yahoo! had something else on their mind for those 24 hours: news that they’d been hacked two years ago, exposing the information of the whole half-billion people with an account, and they didn’t even know about it until now. Many people asked how they could have made such a mistake, but I was thinking yeah, I can see that.

But let's not make it all about Yahoo!; Really, this is part of a bigger problem that the news media doesn't value knowledge. I'm not sure what exactly they do value, but it's clear that the people in front of cameras and keyboards don't know more than most people. It's also a good reminder of the work needed in Internet news. During the current election campaign, I've been increasingly believing that the current media establishment is doing more harm than good, and that I can't wait for new media to paradigm-shift it out of existence. Well, perhaps that new media isn't ready.