How Should Technology Developments be Covered?

Developments or Advances in high efficiency electrical energy transmission. The key to renewable energy development is to build a global grid.

Why?

Because media coverage of just about anything these days is a huge subject. The (dystopian) charge being leveled at the media is that it is in the pockets of the corporations it serves. Thus, we are not getting "news coverage" from the media, we are getting press releases which tell us exactly what someone has calculated that we should hear.

I am sympathetic to this view because I have seen it operate. But it may be over-simplistic. For example, within the context of engineering or the university, there may be a high degree of corporate desire to have certain target audiences very well educated in the realities of a given technology and its potential applications, even if this means withstanding some degree of criticism from the ethics community.

However, the general consensus seems to be to make technical data available on a need-to-know basis. Technologies are played up or played down or made controversial for the general public according to the various agendas at work. For someone trying to learn the "truth," the perception is that all the important players in any particular issue seem to have something they want to hide, ignore, or gloss over. I come away from even a fairly innocent search for data on a fairly simple subject with the impression that I am being manipulated. And this seems wasteful and counter-productive to me.

Engineers tend to be quite devoted to an older paradigm that implicitly includes the "need" to manipulate public perceptions about technology. They are devoted to it because it seemed to work so well for most of them. It created a technology explosion that many parts of the planet are still reeling from. And it gave a lot of people who were in the right places at the right times very well-financed lives. But beyond that, how much did it accomplish and at what cost?

You could say that is a question for an ethicist, not an engineer. But the future is shared by all of us. So it is unwise for any of us to ignore the future implications for a technology simply because it lines our pockets today.

I would like to see the media serve as a forum for this type of discussion, as well as a conduit that favors factual data over cooked "stories." This is not how the media is currently structured. That is partly why a flourishing "alternative media" exists.

But this is planet Earth, not a prison. If my perception is that the emperor is wearing no clothes, I should be able to communicate that perception without being clobbered.