tekhna
New member
I think a doctor or lawyer don't really qualify as there is really specific training that goes into being a member of those fields. I guess my issue is with what he means by knowing more than us. If he means that maybe he knows certain things coming down the pipeline that haven't leaked yet then yes he knows more than us. However, that's not what I think he meant in the comments he made in that video. I think he meant that he knows more about "technology" (not just future products or releases), and that to me is patently absurd. To use your example of a political journalist, a political journalist might know more about the backroom dealings or gossip in the area that he covers, but I wouldn't say he knows more about politics as a theoretical field then most people.
I don't want to go into what makes or doesn't make him a professional as the lines of journalism are being blurred in the era of blogs and such, but I don't buy him as a professional akin to a doctor or a lawyer. He's more like the guy who runs WebMD (except they are most likely doctors too). Has he even worked at a tech company aside from "building his own computers" and running tech websites?
Of course the political journalist has a knowledge of politics in the abstract--it's their job to. They probably studied politics as an undergraduate before they went to J school. And they have strong normative opinions about politics.
Let's pretend you spend all day every single working day playing with technology, writing about technology, thinking about technology. Phones, cameras, computers, everything. And then there's the casual phone user. Who knows more about tech? It's patently absurd to me that you deny him any kind of specialized knowledge because, as far as I can tell, you just don't want him to have it, not because he's unqualified.
As for the comment about bloggers, what is this, 2007?