Wired: Willfully Stupid or Just Cynical?
So the Wired Death of the Web issue finally came out, and as Tim Meaney has noted, the lead article is so poorly formatted online as to be nearly unreadable.
But just for starters, let’s talk about the bizarro chart that begins the article:
I stared at this for about three minutes because I couldn’t believe that an semi-responsible journalist would use a chart in such a blatantly misleading way, but there it is. As far as I can tell—and I’m left guessing because they haven’t cited their sources in any useful way—this is a graph of data use. It indicates that people are now downloading files that are big, presumably because they have faster net connections.
Chris Anderson is showing you a picture that demonstrates that O HEY VIDEO AND PIRATED MEDIA FILES ARE REAL BIG-LIKE, Y’ALL and claiming that it says something about how people view and use the web.
Let me rewind that one more time.
By using this chart, Anderson is claiming that because people now download big media files in addition to tiny HTML files, the web is dead, when the chart actually casts zero light on web use from any meaningful human (non-file-size-centric) point of view.
And Wired, in addition to having the (web) design sense of a drunken baby rabbit, apparently thinks we’re too dumb to tell the difference.
