Technology is for all, not just geeks

For the best part of four years, I've covered primarily one area as a writer: technology. I'm regularly asked, why? What compels anyone to stick with this hopelessly intimidating subject, all its twists and turns, exhilarations and lunacies, quirky personalities and self-promoting false gods, breathtaking insights and foolish fads?

Often, the question is asked with the smirking distaste reserved for similar queries about the career choices of proctologists. In some ways, I understand this. Either you enjoy long conversations about operating systems and jokes about Bill Gates, or you'd prefer to listen to Oireachtas Report on an endless loop. Either you like wearing a T-shirt that has a famous cryptographic algorithm printed on the front or you'd rather poke out your eye.

I grew up in Silicon Valley and watched it move from an electronics to technology powerhouse. Perhaps that makes an interest in technology second nature, since it pulsed through the background of local lives. My earliest memories include the physical reality of Stanford and Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Nasa; the arrival of a refrigerator-sized microcomputer in maths class at my junior high school, the gift of some technology firm; and the awareness that "engineer" as a job title wasn't limited to the man who drove a train.

Maybe as a result, I now happily confess to enjoying geeky conversations, jokes and items of apparel - although my favourite T-shirt right now is actually one that reads: "My VC gave me £80 million for my dotcom company and all I have left is this stupid T-shirt". But of course, technology is about so much more. It's not just reviews of software programs and computer games, or news about products, companies and sectors.

Technology is finding the tools to map the human genome and thus read the book of ourselves. It's inventing software that makes you shiver in fear at the dinosaurs on-screen in a darkened cinema. It's sending a text message to your friend in Moscow. It's discovering how to use magnetic images to reveal a breast tumour. It's a political dissident in an oppressive nation using the Internet to anonymously and safely tell the world her story. It's a website that explains photosynthesis to a 10-year-old.

Technology is also an unequalled tool of surveillance for governments or security agencies. It's unexpectedly encountering images online that shock and disturb you or your children. It's acquiring the ability to clone a human embryo. It's facing up to painful ethical and moral questions. It's facing a future we cannot yet predict or envision.

Technology is politics and arts, culture and history, entertainment and learning, catastrophe and triumph, crisis and resolution. Technology is about fear and anger, healing and gratitude, protest and resistance. Technology is about possible good and potential evil. It begins in the machine world and ends, ironically, and for better or worse, as deeply human.

The sheer breadth of what we mean by that catch-all term "technology" is what makes it such an interesting challenge, and one of the more thankless subjects in journalism. Journalists are expected by their readers to be knowledgeable in their field - and rightly so. But most journalists rotate through a wide variety of fields, often within a single week. Because a story must be filed as quickly as possible, often on a subject outside a writer's area of knowledge, a journalist is required to learn as much as possible within days or hours.

That's a difficult job for all writers on all subjects and creates much potential for the errors that we all try to avoid, and which readers are swift to notice. It's a Sisyphean task for anyone trying to report on technology as all areas are so highly specialised and complex.

No sooner do you gain some understanding of the differences between operating systems than you must grapple with the significance of a new microchip architecture or development in a convoluted anti-trust trial.

You interview a technology pioneer and must understand enough history to condense his complex accomplishments into a meaningful nutshell for the general reader while, one hopes, engaging the informed reader as well. The next week, you must explain why telecommunications firms are moving towards using Internet protocol for transmitting voice-calls over their networks.

Then, you're back to some new development on the operating system front. You never truly master a subject and inevitably it changes out of all recognition within months, leaving you to start all over again.

How does a lowly writer with no formal technical background cope? Most reporters I know that love covering this area operate as I do. We spend hours every week reading a wide range of technology news-sites on the Internet, simply to keep up with general developments and specific interests. We also subscribe to any number of print magazines and in-tray-clogging tech newsletters, and our friends in the industry forward us all sorts of things they think we should read. And we get lots of press releases. We don't read most of this stuff; we skim headlines and content, and occasionally delve into something that intrigues, amuses, offends or triggers a new story idea.

Most of us have networks of friends within the technology industry who, to our great relief, love talking shop. Then there are regular meetings with industry folks from various tech companies or related fields - law, government, finance.

Press and analyst meetings can help deepen one's sense of an industry sector and company but can also prove exasperatingly full of useless hype. Conferences deliver massive amounts of information - but again, not all very useful. In my case, readers also bring many issues to my attention, often kindly correcting my errors, and sometimes disagree strongly with my opinions (I like hearing from all of them).

As with those who work in the technology industry, our private lives tend to merge with our working lives to a sometimes disquieting extent. That can add to the occasional feeling of exhaustion; the sense that the `on' switch has been flipped up for far too many hours. Sometimes it's a great relief to be around friends who have never heard of XML, open-source software or Larry Ellison.

But eventually I am ready to go back for more. The best thing about writing about technology is that while I may need the occasional break from it, I am rarely ever bored by it or the people I get to interview. And that, come to think of it, is obviously why I love it.

klillington@irish-times.ie