Wired News headlines dissected
Posted on January 4, 2005
Filed Under /dev/null/ | 71 views |
Every day I read Wired News via RSS and I’ve come to realize that their headlines follow the same format every single day. Take this morning for instance:
- Some U.S. customer support lines outsourced to India experienced a brief failure in service following the deadly Asian tsunami, but economists say U.S. companies won’t have to move their call centers.
- California laws that went live on New Year’s Day keep cell phones unlisted and rental cars unmonitored. The effects could be felt nationwide.
- First he reinvented the way we get e-mail. Now he’s rounded up a bunch of radical thinkers to reinvent physics itself.
Or from the past week:
- A new portable service will allow people to transfer shows recorded by TiVo to PCs or laptops and take them on the road. But don’t try sending programs over the web.
- A new service promises cheaper mobile calls by exploiting VOIP, but it’s not going to be easy. The big carriers must be considered, plus customers will have to punch lots of extra numbers.
etc. See a trend? Statement of mildly-interesting fact followed by statement of wild conjecture/doomssaying/impending utopia extrapolated well beyond the original statement of fact, and always based on the claims of an “expert”.
It would be interesting to see if, in the history of publication, Wired’s statements of wild conjecture/doomssaying/impending utopia have ever actually come true. My guess: no. But it certainly does keep their “reporters” busy playing pundit.