Wired (was: Re: Interview questions)

[Jurgen Botz <jurgen@botz.org>]

Ok, this is getting rather far off-topic, but I refuse to be in the closet
about my Wired-reading habit, so I feel I have to take a stand here.  ;-)

I have noticed a tendency toward Wired-bashing in sysadmin circles before,
and I'm really puzzled by the absurdly overblown anti-Wired rhetoric I
hear sometimes (i.e. showing potential candidates who admit to liking
Wired the door immediately... give me a break).  I don't understand this
attitude.  Wired is not a "techie" magazine about technology itself, it is
a pop magazine about "technoculture" and technology policy, and it's
damned good at being that.

Wired is also pretty good from a journalistic standpoint... on issues of
technology policy certainly it is /far/ better than other mainstream media
(say the New York Times).  And I enjoy reading about technoculture... there
/is/ such a thing and it plays a very important role in the process by 
which the technlogy we (SAGE members) have been working with for years 
gets absorbed into the mainstream.  I for one feel that I need to know
about it.

Even seasoned technologists like us can learn things from Wired...
take Neal Stephenson's article last December on the FLAG project... we all
use and depend on the trans-continental phone cables but how many of us
really knew what was involved, both from the engineering and political
perspectives, in laying such cables?  Personally I was rivetted, excited
and enlightened by this gem of an article, not to mention greatly 
entertained.  By seeing and managing to conveigh the complexity of the
effort at all different levels, Stephenson gave us a rare view of a 
complex and secretive industry of which few people who are not insiders
have more than an inkling.

Of course we should take what we read in Wired with a grain of salt... I
hope we all take /anything/ we read /anywhere/ in the popular press with a
good dose of salt.  But I'm not ashamed to say that I read Wired basically
every month, greatly enjoy doing so, and not infrequently learn a thing or
two.  Of the Wired-bashers I would like to ask; if you're singling out 
Wired from the popular press, then exactly what's out there that is better?

--
Jurgen Botz
Sr. System Administrator