Good and Bad Sources for Learning about Consumer Electronics

It is important to consider whether sources are "good" or not when trying to find out more about any particular topic. This is sometimes not as difficult with printed media because it takes a significant amount of expense to mass produce and distribute something. It becomes much more difficult when using the internet, as having a webpage is significantly cheaper and can reach far more people than printed media can. As a result, pretty much anyone that wants can make information available on the web, regardless of whether it would be considered a "good" source. Without the proper precautions, a web-surfer could utilize this information with ill effects.

With that understanding of good and bad sources know, let's look at the world of consumer electronics and try to find some good and bad sources of information. Within the gadget world, the most common types of websites are those that either provide reviews of new electronics or speculate on upcoming products. There are also sites that provide forums where owners of a particular device can chat and help each other learn about new features or solve problems.

There are several well-known gadget blogs that provide news and speculation about upcoming and newly-released gadgets. Two of these I frequent regularly are Engadget and Gizmodo. I feel that they are sometimes good sources to get new information about this topic because they provide information on a wide range of topics. For every particular post, they credit their source, and when there is a mistake in something they have presented, they correct it immediately. That being said there are occasionally problems with these sites. Here is a blog post titled 5 ways gadget blogs fail readers. It points out the fact that sometimes there is false information on these sites. Also, and this is a another point I agree with, these blog sites often post information on company announcements or prototype products that never actually materialize. I know that I have read about several really cool things over the years that were coming "soon" and I have yet to actually see in the marketplace. So in a way, I guess these sites have to be characterized as potentially bad, but with some good information mixed in.

Another type of site that can help learn more about gadgets is one that reviews new products. One site that comes to mind for me is CNET. CNET prides itself on providing unbiased reviews for a wide variety of electronics. In my opinion, it is definitely a good site to get this sort of information. Two sites that may not always provide the best information, in my opinion, are PC World and Mac World. These sites have biases toward PCs and Macs respectively, and tend to only cover news and information about their own products, with news about competitors having a more negative slant.

If you look at this list of recent Mac World stories about the Android operating system, you will notice that many of the articles are negative towards android. Some example article titles are "Android apps on the Galaxy tab may be 'a little ugly'" and "Motorola's android 2.2 rollout: What a mess." A similar list of articles on Gizmodo has a very different tone. Sure there are negatively titled articles, but there are positive and neutral articles as well. There are also a LOT more of them on Gizmodo then Mac World, as many in the past week as Mac World has had in the past few months. There is probably a very similar effect with PC World stories about the iPhone vs. Gizmodo stories about the iPhone. Basically, using a single source to learn about new technology that is biased to one particular company or another would mean you would not learn about the entire landscape of products available, or that you would get nothing but the negative stories. Uninformed consumers that blindly buy products from one company or the other without even taking the time to learn a little bit about the competition may miss out on some things that would really work well for them. Informed consumers can help create competition among businesses, which spurs cheaper prices and more innovation, things that are really important to the tech industry.

In conclusion, the best types of sites for consumer electronics information are probably like CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget, though with the blogs you do have to watch out for some occasional bad information or useless information about prototypes that will never make it to market. If you truly want to be an informed consumer, you need to consider where your information is coming from, and if the title of the site is something like PC World or Mac World, you may want to take the information with a grain of salt.

Illusion of Control

My group's project this week is based on a paper that discusses the "illusion of control," the concept that people will believe that they have control over things even when they really don't, and even when they know that they don't. This definitely happens in different ways with consumer electronics. I know I have personally hit or smacked many malfunctioning electronics. It is one of the first things I try. It pretty much never changes anything, but I always feel like there is a chance I might magically fix the problem.

Another example I can think of is shopping habits. Someone might buy a small mp3 player with the belief that it will make them work out more. Someone else may purchase a digital camera to take photos of more of their lives. In the end though, these are just tools, and don't actually do anything to make you do things.

Recent History

I think it is safe to say that the consumer electronic industry has "exploded" over the last 20 or 30 years. Constant technological advancements provide an unending stream of toys and tools for sale.

One small segment in the consumer electronics market that can show how fast technology changes is in the digital audio player (frequently called mp3) market. The first mp3 players appeared in the late 1990's and early 2000's, and the first iPod appeared in 2001. These devices had a limited amount of storage and black and white screens. By 2006, digital audio players with color screens and video playback were common, and in 2007 the iPhone and iPod touch were released, with larger, touch-controlled screens. In the span of about 6-7 years, the iPod and its competitors progressed from audio-only devices to full-blown mini computers with web browsing, apps, and games.

Beyond mp3 players, the constant innovation of the tech industry has generated booming business for many years, and it looks to continue that way for quite a while.

The Microchip

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While electronics were starting to gain importance in the 1940's, the main component that made these devices work was the vacuum tube, essentially a light bulb that can represent either a 1 or a 0 for a computer. The problem with vacuum tubes was that they tend to burn out like light bulbs, and in really complicated applications, like computers, you need hundreds or even thousands of them. When one could burn out at any time, it got really hard to maintain ever complicated and ever larger computers that needed these tubes.
nobelprize.org
In 1947, the transistor was invented. It was a much smaller, power efficient, and reliable replacement for the vacuum tube. Within only a few years, an engineer at Texas Instruments, Jack Kilby, and a future co-founder of Intel, Robert Noyce, separately came up with a way to shrink much larger electronic circuits down to wafer-thin slabs of silicon. This invention is the reason computers have become what they are today, and why we are able to have portable audio players, cell phones, digital cameras, and a number of other modern day gadgets.

The Early Origins of the Consumer Electronics Industry

When I first set out to blog about the history of the consumer electronics industry, I was thinking about having to go back maybe 20 or 30 years, to when the first home computers, walkmen, and game consoles began to appear. But a little research later, I realized that the true origins of this industry are found much earlier than that, and not even in the 20th century.

The true founder of consumer electronics, at least according to this website, was Thomas Edison, with his inventions of the typewriter in 1872 and phonograph in 1877. The site goes on to state that the first true "consumer electronic" device was actually the home radio, which caught on with the general public in the 1920's. There were other inventions like the television through the 20th century too.

Introductory Post

In my blog this semester, I will be focusing on consumer electronics. I am, and always have been, a huge fan of gadgets. Whether it was the Gameboy I received for my birthday in first grade, or the Android smartphone I purchased a few months ago, there has been something fascinating to me about these ever smaller and more-powerful devices we use every day. Even my choice of major in college (Computer Science) is related to my appreciation of these little things. I actually check several popular gadget blogs (including engadget and gizmodo) several times a day, every day, to stay up to date on the latest and greatest innovations in the field. As far as I can tell, I am not alone in how much I like consumer electronics, and I want to write a blog this semester that can maybe shed some light on why that is.

I am planning on taking this blog in a few different directions this semester. First and foremost, I definitely want to introduce some of the (in my opinion) coolest and latest personal electronics. This may be anything from a simple announcement of an upcoming product, to a quick review if I am able to get my hands on anything new and interesting. Beyond that though, I want to explore some of the other facets of the consumer electronics space. One feature may be looking back over the past few decades and examining gadgets that were real “game-changers” of their time, and maybe making parallels to more recent events. An example of that may be that the original Sony Walkman was an iconic standout of the beginning of the portable audio market, while the Apple iPod may be a similar device for the mp3 player market more recently.

Another aspect of the electronics industry to examine would be its effects on society. Examples include studying the impact of all the landfill waste generated by thrown away gadgets. Many devices thrown away likely are in perfectly good working order, but have been rendered obsolete by newer items. That part of the industry, the speed at which gadgets become obsolete, and the fact that so many people want to be “early-adopters” (myself honestly included), is worth looking at too.

So that is how I want to approach this. Like I said, I definitely want to do much, much more than just repost some of the cool gadgets I find on other gadget blog sites. I want to explore how this industry works and the consequences, both good and bad, it has on the world’s population.

My First Post

Hello World, this is my first post for my Journalism 289I blog. I haven't picked a topic yet, but will today.