Bill Buxton, then principal researcher at Microsoft, closed the CAJ Innovate News conference in January 2010 with an argument aimed squarely at how journalists write about technology. His governing rule was that everything is best for something and worst for something else, which makes when, what, why and for whom the questions that matter; technology, on this reading, is not neutral.
Applied to citizen journalism — he cited the Rodney King and Robert Dziekanski videos — that meant neither dismissing the footage nor mistaking it for reporting: the people who shot those videos, he said, were not equipped to develop and analyse the story. Technology, business and content had been bound together throughout the history of the modern newspaper. Change, meanwhile, tended to arrive not as new invention but as an order-of-magnitude shift: the iPhone contained no new technologies and still remade the smartphone.
This was the beginning of a revolution rather than its end, Buxton told the room, predicting that reading a newspaper in print would be socially unacceptable within five years and that “the Kindle is nothing compared to what is going to come, the iPad is nothing compared to what is going to come.” The computer and the internet were cultural artefacts reflecting a society’s values and lifestyles, and reviewers missed that by writing about functions: a dance critic does not itemise the materials a show is made of. “It is not about the box,” he insisted — it is about the social, cultural and intellectual implications for a culture.