

How a new manufacturing technology will change the world - sasvari
http://www.economist.com/node/18114327/

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NY_USA_Hacker
This article is a great example of several currently important points about
'old media':

Exaggeration

The article exaggerates, wildly. So, the article shows a Stradivarius violin
which will have to be one of the last 'macro' sized objects such a process has
any hope of producing. I know enough about violins to say the exaggeration is
much worst than even laughable nonsense. About the best they are talking about
for the foreseeable future is a plastic violin. Since the accuracy of their
'printer' is only about 0.1 mm, they are talking about a crude plastic violin,
one that will sell for less than the cost of some decent violin strings.

Competency

Maybe the author has some ability as a 'story teller' as in 'formula fiction'
and English literature, but the content of the article has little connection
with reality and no serious connection with the headline. The content is junk,
incompetent.

Here the author wildly embarrassed himself trying to make a 'compelling story'
out of the technology, but story telling, as in formula fiction, has been the
main content of mass media at least since Ben Franklin. A 'good newsie' that
gets a bad story will "make it good".

Basically story telling is all old media knows. Where it works, the result is
essentially just light entertainment instead of anything seriously useful,
informative, or instructional; where it doesn't work we get, right, 'Print me
a Stradivarius'.

So, even 'The Economist' is not passing out solid information about the
economy but only 'story telling'. Why? They hire 'writers' and 'editors' who
used to be 'writers', and the traditions have been only story telling, not
information.

Focus

The article is an example of much of what is seriously, even fatally, wrong
with 'old media' where McLuhan was correct, "The medium is the message.". For
'Print me a Stradivarius', the content is a text version of "the great
wasteland". So, the 'medium' was 'mass media' with only a few outlets but
millions of readers so that the content had to be very broad, that is, not
focused. Then competency didn't much matter.

Now with the Internet, there can be much more focus. Each reader has a chance
to get content focused on each of their interests and good enough not to call
exaggerated, incompetent nonsense. Examples include Hacker News, Wikipedia,
Stack Overflow, and no doubt similarly focused Web sites for some thousands of
other interests.

In all of technology mass media, there may not be a single 'professional
writer' able competently even to review the more technical content of Hacker
News and Stack Overflow. For the more technical content of Wikipedia, that's
often past university professors even in their main subjects.

For "How a new manufacturing technology will change the world", that printing
is nice but will "change the world" only very slowly. What is changing the
world rapidly is the much better focused, much higher quality information
coming to the Internet, nearly always by unpaid contributors, as 'new media'.

