Poor Superman. The guy can juggle battleships but he just can’t catch a break when it comes to technology.
First, there’s his job: Statistically, he doesn’t have one anymore, with newspapers folding faster than JLA members up against Doomsday. Sure, the Daily Planet is a big paper, comparable to the real-world New York Times, but they definitely can’t afford to keep that big globe. And I bet they’d can Jimmy Olsen, too, trading his photographic contributions for pictures stolen (“borrowed”) from social media.
These things aren’t cheap.
It’s probably for the best, though: That globe falls into the streets in every other issue. And Jimmy’s stuff was never much better than iPhone pictures, anyway. (He’s no Peter Parker.)
Speaking of iPhone pictures: How can Superman’s identity possibly hold up when everyone snaps a picture every time they see him? That’s not even getting into all the crazy facial recognition stuff that’s going on.
Can you imagine the TotallyLooksLike entry for Clark Kent and Superman?
“Damn, how’d they figure it out?”
If you’re looking for a new product idea for tech, just think of something that would make Superman’s life even more miserable, and you’re probably headed in the right direction.
There were a few things floating around the Internet today that caught my attention.
The first is a post on using social network analysis to detect less-than-legal behavior among landlords. It’s interesting because we have a small not-for-profit behind the effort, where just a few years ago it would have taken a much larger organization and a lot of manpower to pull this off.
Next up we have an insightful comment on Reddit from an ex-journalist. It details the why of journalism’s decline.
Conspiracy theorists will be disappointed by this one, as it primarily points to the increasingly harsh realities of journalism-as-a-business as the reason for, well, crap like FOX News. There are only so many hours in a day, and investigative journalism in particular eats up those hours.
But cuts happen. So it’s the first thing to go.
Changing, expanding technology has brought about a strange landscape where media outlets buckle under the weight of a deluge of information while simultaneously being liberated to do wonderful things with that information.
This is what had me excited about WikiLeaks. They used tech to shed light on the shadowy parts of the world. They were the organizational embodiment of the scrappy reporter getting the scoop and bringing the bad guys to justice.
Of course, now they seem to be the embodiment of the scrappy reporter mysteriously disappearing before the story is published.
There’s still hope, though, and I think it rests with organizations like the one covered in the first link. Truth is always in demand. We just need to figure out who’s going to carry the burden of digging up that truth.
