Is this tech?

Just a little thinking out loud this morning. What is tech? Maybe a better question would be what isn’t tech?

This is a problem I struggled with for years when I started and ran the site TechBoise. It was fairly easy to deal with then because I let the companies and people in the community self select if they considered themselves tech or not. But then I saw these story lines in the technology category of the AP iPhone app.

I read some of these titles and I wonder if this is what tech news is:

Redbox and 20th Century Fox suing each other is a business article for sure but has nothing really to do with technology.

Same with the big studious picking on RealNetworks. (Didn’t we get over the whole copying media we purchased to our hard drive issue a decade ago? I guess not.)

Netflix running a second competition to improve their recommendation algorythim makes sense to me as a tech story.

EA and ESPN partnering to promote the new Madden game is a Business/Marketing story and not tech, IMHO.

Is this really tech?

A Twitter Opera? Really? Come on, that’s Arts and Entertainment!

Another DDOS attack on Twitter, yeah I buy that.

Google’s new search engine? Yep for sure.

GM selling their cars on EBay? No. Not tech.

I get that business and technology are forever linked at the hip. They can’t live without each other.

My point in breaking down each of these articles was not to diss on the AP or Journalism and what passes for news (I’ll save that for another post). This is more a comment on society.

As much as I may not think these stories are “tech” I found all of them interesting. The first section I head to is the Technology section. Now for “hard tech” they have the Science category but I think something has happened.

Technology used to be the realm of engineers and uber geeks. But over the last decade technology has gotten easier. It’s become an everyday occurrence to the point that every aspect of our lives is impacted by technology.

Tech blogs set the pace over the last 5 years and the main stream media is getting the hint. These headlines could just as easily be the headlines of any tech blog. OK that’s not totally true, if they were from a blog they’d be much more snarky.

And just to answer my own question; No I don’t think technology is too main stream.

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