Sky News: Dumbing Down
Monday 8th January, 2007 14:52 Comments: 0
According to the Sky News website: "Major medical breakthrough may end ethical debate over stem cells. Scientists claim to have found cells in fluid which protects babies in the womb". Wouldn't it have been easier to write the second sentence as "Scientists claim to have found cells in amniotic fluid"? Perhaps they're worried that their audience might not understand what amniotic fluid is, but presumably they assume the audience knows what a stem cell is, and why there's been an ethical debate.
I was reading earlier an article by a BBC Technology Correspondent that was complaining about how he was struggling to understand all the technical jargon at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. He said: "there's a simple message to the thousands of companies hawking their wares here - if you want to get into my reports, you'd better speak English, not geek". Well forgive me for having little sympathy, but surely a) you're meant to be a technology correspondent, so you should understand the language and b) it's your job to dumb down... I mean make the information available and understandable to a wider audience. I also think the last place you should bitch about it is online, as the people that don't understand the term "broadband" are unlikely to reading a blog entry about a consumer tradeshow. Even if they are online (on dialup*... eek!), they're probably too busy checking out what's on Eastenders tonight than browsing the BBC News website.
For those that are wondering, he didn't make up the phrase "simultaneous Gigabit ethernet and IEEE 1394 connections over Coax" as there is a product called CWave that will apparently do it.
Perhaps instead of dumbing down all media content to "appeal to the masses", we could use the proper words instead? If people don't understand them then perhaps it'll be an incentive for them to find out for themselves, to educate themselves. If they don't know what amniotic fluid is then perhaps they don't care or simply aren't intelligent enough to deserve to have a say in the matter. To a certain extent, democracy (as much as I like it) is somewhat flawed, because the voters don't know how to run a country, yet they're allowed to vote for the people that will run the country for them (or typically the person that lies the most and has the best "executive style" hair. It's like asking a tone deaf person to audition singers for a West End musical: you're only going to get the best person for the job if the right people are making the selections. Thankfully, like all the old women that turn up to sing at church on a Sunday, if you get enough people together you'll usually end up with a close enough approximation of what you're after. You won't get the best, but if you're lucky there'll be enough people singing the right note to drown out those that are flat or sharp (or just plain wrong).
The sad thing is that many of the most intelligent members of society are often the ones that don't produce any offspring, but pay the most in taxes; the lower end are the ones that seem to reproduce like the energizer bunny, are a drain on society, typically unattractive, and (ultimately) appear to reduce the quality of the gene pool. I'm not saying we should slaughter anyone with a low IQ, dodgy personalities, or chavs (hmm, maybe I'll rethink chavscum...), but perhaps we should do something to discourage them from reproducing. We can't ban them from having kids, but we could perhaps choose not to support them if they choose to have more than, say, 2 kids. The alternative form of support would be to offer free hysterectomies and vasectomies to anyone that already has 2 kids and doesn't want any more. I'm not saying they can't have more kids, but they'll have to rely on someone else other than the government.
Perhaps I should stay well away from politics.
* I tried connecting to the net with my mobile the other night, it worked fine, although it was only 9.6kbps, which takes me back to my days in the Now Media office back in 1996.
I was reading earlier an article by a BBC Technology Correspondent that was complaining about how he was struggling to understand all the technical jargon at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. He said: "there's a simple message to the thousands of companies hawking their wares here - if you want to get into my reports, you'd better speak English, not geek". Well forgive me for having little sympathy, but surely a) you're meant to be a technology correspondent, so you should understand the language and b) it's your job to dumb down... I mean make the information available and understandable to a wider audience. I also think the last place you should bitch about it is online, as the people that don't understand the term "broadband" are unlikely to reading a blog entry about a consumer tradeshow. Even if they are online (on dialup*... eek!), they're probably too busy checking out what's on Eastenders tonight than browsing the BBC News website.
For those that are wondering, he didn't make up the phrase "simultaneous Gigabit ethernet and IEEE 1394 connections over Coax" as there is a product called CWave that will apparently do it.
Perhaps instead of dumbing down all media content to "appeal to the masses", we could use the proper words instead? If people don't understand them then perhaps it'll be an incentive for them to find out for themselves, to educate themselves. If they don't know what amniotic fluid is then perhaps they don't care or simply aren't intelligent enough to deserve to have a say in the matter. To a certain extent, democracy (as much as I like it) is somewhat flawed, because the voters don't know how to run a country, yet they're allowed to vote for the people that will run the country for them (or typically the person that lies the most and has the best "executive style" hair. It's like asking a tone deaf person to audition singers for a West End musical: you're only going to get the best person for the job if the right people are making the selections. Thankfully, like all the old women that turn up to sing at church on a Sunday, if you get enough people together you'll usually end up with a close enough approximation of what you're after. You won't get the best, but if you're lucky there'll be enough people singing the right note to drown out those that are flat or sharp (or just plain wrong).
The sad thing is that many of the most intelligent members of society are often the ones that don't produce any offspring, but pay the most in taxes; the lower end are the ones that seem to reproduce like the energizer bunny, are a drain on society, typically unattractive, and (ultimately) appear to reduce the quality of the gene pool. I'm not saying we should slaughter anyone with a low IQ, dodgy personalities, or chavs (hmm, maybe I'll rethink chavscum...), but perhaps we should do something to discourage them from reproducing. We can't ban them from having kids, but we could perhaps choose not to support them if they choose to have more than, say, 2 kids. The alternative form of support would be to offer free hysterectomies and vasectomies to anyone that already has 2 kids and doesn't want any more. I'm not saying they can't have more kids, but they'll have to rely on someone else other than the government.
Perhaps I should stay well away from politics.
* I tried connecting to the net with my mobile the other night, it worked fine, although it was only 9.6kbps, which takes me back to my days in the Now Media office back in 1996.