WMD: The latest Courier column comes from my interview with Leo Laporte, king of the technology geek journalists in the U.S. He also hosts and produces a tech show taped here in Vancouver. He's one of those rare media people who is in person exactly as he appears on TV or the radio, except perhaps more intense. The original is found here. The rest of the column follows:
Technology guru shares wealth of 'geeky' information
Barry Link, Special to Vancouver Courier
Published: Wednesday, October 17, 2007Last month, the Future Shop near our office brought in an international star. Well into middle-age, rotund and dressed in a trademark tropical shirt tucked in at the waist, California-based technology journalist Leo Laporte is probably someone you've never heard about. But what he says is worth listening to.
To geeks around the world, he's a favourite uncle: friendly, funny and heroically interested in everything. To everyone else--from businessmen looking for the latest smartphone to grandmothers confused about why their laptops won't turn on--he is to computers and consumer digital devices what Mike Holmes is to home renovation and repair.
Laporte was invited by the electronics retailer to headline a discussion, broadcast on the Internet, on the future of high-definition televisions. Sitting on a makeshift stage at the back of the store with Amber MacArthur, his brainy Canadian protege and a Toronto-based TV journalist, and CBC technology guru Todd Maffin, Laporte was watched by an adoring crowd of two dozen men in their 20s and 30s, many of them snapping photos or shooting video of the talk. Another thousand or so watched the video feed of the event on Future Shop's website.
Future Shop tells me last month's event was the first of a series of Internet-based forums it has planned as a "community-based" approach to selling products. Laporte was a good first choice for the series launch. He's a rare crossover figure between the world of geeks and what he teasingly has called the "straights," that is people who don't understand--and don't care to--the difference between an iPod and the dozen other brands of lesser-known MP3 players.
But he's no corporate shill. Laporte first came to prominence in the late-1990s as a popular presenter and technology guru with the shortlived TechTV network in the U.S. He now hosts a weekend syndicated radio show broadcast in the U.S. and globally on the Internet, a TV show taped monthly in Vancouver and run on the Canadian descendant of TechTV, and his own series of podcasts, now numbering more than a dozen, ranging from hardcore tech discussions to advice for parents worried about the Web.
When he's not patiently explaining to his radio or TV show callers about how to recover lost email, he frequently savages products, manufacturers and retailers for making life difficult for consumers. He's compared the relationship between consumers and the companies that make the stuff we buy to a war, in which we're in an eternal struggle for devices that work as advertised and which we can reasonably understand.
Laporte brings the refreshing message that if you're having trouble with your computer (or HDTV or cellphone or GPS), it's not your fault. The electronic stuff which now dominates our lives was created by engineers with too much facial hair and too little knowledge of the regular world.
"Useability is as bad as it ever was," Laporte told me in an interview following the forum. "For the average person, tech is still opaque."
He's appealingly non-theological. While a lot more egalitarian (and friendlier) a subculture than most, tech is a world of competing theologies, with Apple fanboys who don't understand why others haven't seen the light, humourless Windows apologists who wish the Applelites would go away, and radical Linux heretics who think we'd all be better off if we knew how to work command lines. Laporte's message is that these devices are merely machines. They are not divinely inspired. If Apple works for you, buy Apple. If a Dell machine is more suitable, get it instead.
But sitting at the back of a store filled with more electronic and computer stuff than anyone would ever need, Laporte had one final note of caution. As a devotee of digital toys whose job it is to acquire and test the latest stuff, from web tools like Twitter and Facebook to just about every cellphone invented, he admits guilt about encouraging rampant consumption. People don't need four iPods, he told me, which leads to his final piece of advice.
"It's not about buy, buy, buy," he said. "It's about using these tools to express yourself. Don't be a consumer. Be a creator."
For all its faults, the new technology has the capacity to liberate us as individuals. And if it doesn't work, you know who to turn to.
For the record the audience contained women as well, notably Rebecca Bollwitt, better known as Miss604.com, who live-blogged the event.
http://www.miss604.com/2007/09/the-future-of-hdtv-and-a-busy-me.html
Posted by: Tod Maffin | October 18, 2007 at 12:44 PM