Not just accessible but relevant. Engineering has a natural advantage in that tech produces artifacts you can use whether or not you understand how they work. I don’t need you to study navier stokes equations before complaining about airlines. The airplane itself is “relevance”
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I think I’ve read pieces by a couple of people in the thread, yes. But my basic attitude is: leave your credentials and references to your prestigious field and profound work at the door when you enter the public arena. Show me what I can value without all that.
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That is not my complaint. I’m specifically objecting to “there’s a whole field of study” as a line of defense/attack. That specific phrase makes me flip the bozobit on scholars.
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Yeah, this piece in particular needs zero external references to offer a critical alternative framing. I wonder why such a piece would be published now and here. What work is this doing and for whom?
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Well I’ve also flipped the bozobit on the NYT entirely. It works purely to perpetuate its own profitable media hegemony at this point and will serve any other interest and co-opt any other tool to that end. Wordle and the occassional deep investigation piece do not redeem it.
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Ezra is of course a prime mover of explainer journalism in the last decade and I have a whole other problem with that, which I did a rant about over the weekend.
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Just hit me that explainer journalism is the one genre of modern pre-Weirding media that survived the Great Weirding completely intact. Didn’t miss a beat.
It got big explaining the subprime crisis and has taken everything since 2007 in its stride.
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I saw that. I think that’s exactly the key bit to track tbh. Vox populi guy — explainer, polarization, media critique — bellwethering the mainstream. 🤷🏻♀️
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There’s a whole field of anti-explainer study in my corner of the blogosphere 🤣
I don’t unreservedly dislike them since there is a minority of good ones, but overall it’s a grifty part of blogo-newslettero-podcasto-sphere just a notch above Taboola-grade click farming
I am somewhat sympathetic to both POVs here since I started to straddle both spaces (so you can argue I have no cred to critique either!). I have definitely had editors in popular press edit out all references to theory, even accessible “pop theory”, in writing I submit.
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It is completely different writing styles. But as for who gets to write the big piece in mainstream pubs, shaping the debate for the public…that does often go to pundits.
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