MG Siegler on tech opinion:

I don’t know about you, but when I read my favorite technology writers, I want an opinion. Is the iPhone 4S the best smartphone, or is it the Galaxy Nexus? I need to buy one, I can’t buy both. Topolsky never gives us that. Instead, he pussyfoots around it. One is great at some things, the other is great at others. Barf.

Fucking pick one. I bet that even now he won’t.

This is the problem I have with most technology reviews these days. Everyone seems so afraid to say how they really feel about the device. And more often than not, that’s exactly what readers want.

MG Siegler, like myself, loves a fully developed, time-tested, designed-by-great-fucking designers, well-curated products. In the past those products came from companies like Braun in the home appliances, personal electronic space. Today, Apple is not only crafting personal technology products with an unparalleled beauty and attention to details, they are also making it accessible, more affordable to buy for the rest of us.

Good journalists are those who sees the truth and stand by them. Even if they must explicitly name names and print brands. They do not blindly take side, they do so believing it. Living with it. Often in the context of fairness, editors & publishers avoid naming brands, especially today, where Apple is the star of the show and is dominating headlines all over the place. So they need to make up an alternative stance to make them look ‘fair’.

I write for an audience who tend to be less critical but more vocal with their opinion in personal technology (read gadgets). Indonesia, as a community, is very unique and in a stark contrast with the english-speaking internet audience (read TechCrunch/The Verge readers). We don’t buy gadgets. We buy prides.

Albeit less informed, any of us can tell you many great things about his/her device of choice regardless it being inaccurate. They make decisions to buy the product based on an ‘assumed’ coolness, ‘proven’ hipness and often zero tech knowledge about how the product came to be and how it can help them improve their life. Their decisions are made by a lot of illusions; they choose Android for the illusion of ‘openness’, the illusion of being cool carrying a smaller-than-an-iPad tablet in their handbags; they don’t choose Apple for it being a closed-system, of ‘jail’ (read I’m not paying for $1 an app, jailbreaking is not illegal!), or it’s too heavy, or too big to fit inside their branded handbags.

How did they came to that conclusion? ‘Fair’ writing.

The danger in journalism is an undermined objectivity, where the truth gets twisted for the sake of ‘fairness’. But even more dangerous when someone declares the truth as ‘a danger to the audience’ and in the process states an alternative truth that hardly is true, in Siegler’s term ‘way too vanilla’.

It is okay to be blunt with the truth and be an MG Siegler. It’s also okay to be vanilla and be a Joshua Topolsky. But it is not okay to be a chickenshit and call another’s opinion insulting and declare one a selfless hero. Everyone’s entitled to their opinion, and the audience have all the right to ignore or to listen to each of them.

I don’t have to listen to Siegler, but I agree with him completely as I see the way he sees things. That’s how I see it too. What I can’t do is to listen to Topolsky, cause his arguments are nothing but ego play far from the truth.

I’m a vegetarian, and I don’t like chicken.