You may remember him. Long-haired weirdo. Crazy hair. Counter-cultural kind of guy.
Some 30 years ago he and another friend named Steve hung around with the losers at something called the Homebrew Computer Club.
They had this neat idea for a new kind of box, using a TV, tape recorder, and typewriter as interfaces for a self-contained computer. One of them (I think it was the other Steve) shopped the idea to Hewlett-Packard.
Which rejected it. Turned them down flat. Questioned whether it had "serious thought behind it."
Well, you do have to listen to your elders, after all. I'm sure that discouraged Steve. Probably discouraged everyone else around him. Their thing never saw the light of day, as I recall.
Whatever happened to that kid, anyway?
Yes, you know I'm being snarky here. (The pictures are of Steve Jobs, as he graduated high school and as he is today.)
The fact is that progress happens when ideas are tested, and stops when ideas are rejected.
Right now the journalism field needs re-invention as bad as the computer field needed re-invention 30 years ago.
In both cases the enemy is the same -- authority. Yesterday it was Hewlett-Packard. Today it's dead-tree journalism outfits like The Wall Street Journal.
They claim authority. They insist on obedience. They think these little guys, these "bloggers," aren't serious. And, as with the denizens of the Homebrew Computer Club some 30 years ago, many aren't.
The vast majority of bloggers won't amount to much. I might well be one of them.
But others will. Blogging is a great laboratory for change in many directions -- in journalism, in community, in Web development, in groupware.
Anyone who would limit us, call us "not serious," is on the wrong side of history's divide.
The case of "Apple vs. the Bloggers" was not decided on bloggers' rights as journalists. The decision was that "trade secrets" were, unlike state secrets, not fair game for journalism -- which is an abomination.
But Jobs' hint, at the Journal's D2 conference, that he wouldn't have filed had those papers reached, say, his questioner (Kara Swisher of The Wall Street Journal), was either sucking-up, poorly thought out, or (finally) the views of a man who finally has too much grey in his grey matter.
One more thing. Jobs and I are the same age. Not that there's anything wrong with that. This is not a question of age vs. youth. It's a question of have vs. have not. And once you side absolutely with the haves, and against the social mobility that got you where you are, you've begun to die.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for over 25 years and has covered the online world professionally since 1985. He founded the "Interactive Age Daily" for CMP Media, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, Advertising Age, and dozens of other publications over the years.
1. mike stone on May 24, 2005 02:25 AM writes...
The decision was that "trade secrets" were, unlike state secrets,
not fair game for journalism -- which is an abomination.
State secrets are fair game for journalism because, by its very
nature, the state demands the public's trust. The state can compel
people to surrender information about themselves that they wouldn't
give to anyone else. That elevated, compulsory trust creates a need
for a higher degree of transparency on the part of the government.
Besides that, there's the little matter that here in the US, the
state operates at the discretion of, and in the name of, the people.
We The People are The State, and the government is just a
committee we've hired to handle the paperwork. The government
doesn't have any inherent right to keep secrets from the public, the
public just agrees to let the government keep secrets if doing so is
in the public interest. But we view those secrets with suspicion,
and we reserve the right to reassure ourselves that they do deserve
to be kept secret.
Private companies, on the other hand, don't have the power to
compel. We're not forced to trust them, so there's no corresponding
need for them to meet the same high standard for transparency.
Their freedom to have secrets is the flip side of our freedom to
ignore them if we so choose.
On top of that, private companies don't pretend to act on behalf of
the public as a whole. They exist for the benefit of its owners,
whether those are private holders or shareholders. And we don't
have to give them our money if we don't like them. Our ability to
choose whether or not we want to give them our money gives us a
direct, effective, and self-regulating way to demand information if
we want it.
To call this state of affairs "an abomination" is to align yourself
with every Slashdot poster who decries the very concept of
intellectual property as evil. It boils down to the same, "freedom
must be absolute and unlimited.. but only as long as we're talking
about me," line of reasoning.
Real freedom is always limited. It has to balance between the
interests of everyone involved.
If a company's right to protect its trade secrets interferes with
your ability to get a scoop.. well, tough. As the judge in the
ThinkSecret case rightly pointed out, "an interested public is not
the same as the public interest."
To the extent that a corporate secret truly affects the public
interest, the law will hold that secret to be fair game for
journalism. But to the extent that a corporate secret does not
affect the public interest, the public has neither the need nor the
right to know it. Instead, the public has the freedom to use its
collective financial power to demand information from the company,
and the company has the freedom to choose between revealing the
secret and taking the financial consequences of keeping it.
If there are no financial consequences, then an economist would say
that the public must not care all that deeply about the secret.
So your "abomination" seems to revolve around information the public
doesn't need to know, doesn't have any legitimate right to know,
doesn't care about enough to bring financial pressure to bear, but
might be willing to acknowldge between checking Revenge of the
Sith showtimes and reading Dilbert.
If this is how you propose to transform journalism, I'll stick with
Permalink to Commentthe old school, thanks.
2. Jesse Kopelman on May 27, 2005 03:27 PM writes...
Mike, last time I checked Apple was a public company, not a private one. If you want to enjoy the economice benefits of being publically traded you need to operate transparantly. That members of the public don't buy into this idea is why we have problems like Enron and Worldcom. As for trade secrets: the physical design of a microprocessor is a trade secret, not the color of an iPod.
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