Old advice for “journalists”

In reading about McBee-type card systems, ran across Calvin Mooers. He was one of the more interesting characters of early computing. I’ll feature his Zatocard system later, but first want to write up his best-known observation:

An information retrieval system will tend not to be used whenever it is more painful and troublesome for a customer to have information than for him not to have it.

Where an information retrieval system tends not to be used, a more capable information retrieval system may tend to be used even less.

This was 1959, so Mooers was talking strictly about commercial customers, not individuals. Behind the sour grapes there’s a pretty solid truth about all products and all customers. Improving the technology for distributing a product is a useless expense if nobody wants the product. You need to SELL the product first, then you can worry about the shipping methods after the product starts to move.

Modern “journalists” and “entertainers” are not listening to Mooers. They keep trying to improve the apps and streaming and display systems for a painful product. If they made the product trustable or desirable or fun, the tech wouldn’t be an obstacle.

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The “journalists” know what they’re doing, though they don’t seem to recognize the Mooers point. Their sole function is to cause pain and discomfort to peasants.

The “entertainers” are more of a mixture. Some of them are certainly partisan in the same way as the “journalists”, but others only want to create beauty and enjoyment. The shipping routes are owned by the partisans now, so the nonpartisans have a hard time wedging their products into the stream. When the Fairness Doctrine was in charge, partisan packages were strictly limited, leaving more space for plain old entertainment and unbiased information in the channel.

The effectiveness of FD was experimentally shown by the chief writer for Fibber McGee, who did a beautiful job of conveying empathy and simple enjoyment in the scripts. Behind the scenes he HATED the limitation, and after the series was off the air he poured out his arrogance and nastiness in a fully modern-sounding way.