“‘Our human filters have turned into a great way to discover content that interests us, but the amount of tweets coming in through Twitter today is astounding, and it continues to grow. While new features like grouping and lists have been designed to tame the clutter, at the end of the day, there will be more streams and content to weed through,’ said my6sense founder and chairman Barak Hachamov.”

If ever there was a statement that epitomised the dumb approach to social media, this is it. Filters, by definition, filter things out. If you’re having to filter what your friends pass on, they’re not being filters – or you’re following way to many people you don’t know.

In almost every case of Twitter overload I’ve seen, the latter is true. I’ll say it again: follow 4,000 people you don’t know, and you’re following sources, not filters. Follow 200 people you do know, and they might just be genuine filters.

“Tired of the media obsession with Tiger? Me too. Yet people are fascinated with it. Serve the audience or ignore ‘em & move on?”

I’m bored of Tiger too, so amen to that. Then it got interesting, as my blogging friend Mathew Ingram added his perspective:

“that’s the eternal debate — give people what they want to read about, or give them what you think is important?”

Jordan Furlong added this:

“It’s not a debate: you give people what they need. That’s journalism. Giving them what they want is entertainment.”

Mathew responded:

“so giving people what they need is journalism — how do we know what they need?”

From my perspective, deciding what people need is simple: They tell you what they need through the merry actions of the free market. There are other ways of deciding of course, but the only other valid one is “one person, one vote” – otherwise known as democracy. And that tends not to work well for deciding what should be lead story on page six.

Mathew’s response was to differentiate between “need” and “want”:

“I disagree when it comes to news – I think more people would pay for news they want (gossip) than news they need (reporting)”

And that, I think, is where the real problems start. Once you start to divide things into “what people want”  and “what people need”, you end up in a kind of paternalism, where you decide as a journalist what people should be reading. Jordan actually summed up this perspective on what journalism should be in another of his tweets:

“Journalism is exercise of judgment on deliverables for civic literacy. Not a market need; it’s an enabler of effective citizenship”

If ever there was a description of how to suck the life, soul and fun out of journalism, that is it. It moves journalism out of the real world and makes it into something like a branch of the civil service, spooning out “the truth” into ears that don’t really want to listen. It basically says “people don’t want to buy it, so we’ll give it to them whether they want it or not. They’ll be grateful!”

Would you read a newspaper that was all about “civil literacy”? I’m interested in politics and society, but even I would avoid something like that like the plague. This is a form of puritan reductionism for publishing, dividing the world neatly into “things people want” and “things people don’t want but need to hear, so by God we’ll sit them in Church on Sundays and read it all out to them. They need it.” It treats readers as children, who need to be spoonfed their medicine because it’s good for them, but don’t understand why they need it.

The fact is that the best journalism has always been about entertainment as much as information, because entertainment is story telling, and story telling is about provoking an emotional response – and that’s the first, best way to help people understand and engage with the world. John Pilger’s reports from Cambodia were incredibly good journalism not only because of the facts he uncovered, but because of the tools that he used to provoke emotional engagement. He told the story.

Yes, sometimes people don’t know what they want until they hear it. If your idea of deciding what should be in newspapers is just “whatever the readers say they want in a focus group”, you’re in the wrong business.

But if you treat journalism as some kind of “enabler of effective citizenship” you will never produce stories which are compelling, interesting, provoke real emotion – and yes, which entertain too.

“Think about what happened: if we reduce this to its component parts you have some dudes in California who talked to some dudes in Singapore and who agreed to work together on a piece of hardware. I’ve seen the prototypes and the thing worked and worked well. Most hardware manufacturers can barely take each others meetings let alone coordinate a massive project while separated by a culture and an ocean.”

Yes, John. But “most hardware manufacturers” actually manage to ship products. Even the shitty ones tend to have a strike rate that’s better than zero. As some guy who’s made a product or two once said, “real artists ship“. Making a prototype and getting some publicity is what guys in garden sheds do.

(Incidentally, this story is currently lurking in the technology section of the Washington Post, thanks to the WaPo’s “partnership” with TechCrunch. Isn’t it great to see self-serving promotional “news” on the site of one of the world’s best-regarded newspapers?)

(Photo by @Photo)

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“A recent paper in Advanced Functional Materials describes a technique for forming an antenna from liquid metal. The resulting not-so- hardware is flexible, self-healing, and can change the frequency that it’s sensitive to based on the stress it’s subjected to.

ZOMG! Terminator incoming!!!