fling93 loves fishies

A journalism fling?

Update 12/1/05 Forgot to credit Gene Healy for a link. Whoops!

Last week, I saw Good Night, and Good Luck at one of the South Bay Movie Fiends gatherings that I organize. This film, along with the previous movie we saw, Capote, got me thinking about my future.

This requires some explanation.

Some of you know that I’ve long been contemplating a change in career. I’ve already talked through this at length on my LiveJournal (note that this entry is only visible to friends), so let me just rehash it briefly.

I’ve been a software engineer for twelve years now, but I don’t think it was ever really my true calling. It was just something I picked because I was good at it and it paid well. Indeed, my plan was always to save as much as possible so I could retire early (hopefully in my forties, but perhaps even earlier if the startup ever went IPO). And then I could finally do what it was that I really wanted to do, whether it be write or paint or whatnot.

Realize, this wasn’t really that far-fetched a plan, as I’ve maximized my 401(k) and IRA contributions ever since my mid-twenties (even rolling a couple 401(k) plans into a Roth IRA despite the taxes), and I’ve lived well within my means so that I could save even more on top of that into non-retirement accounts (indeed, I’d long planned a series of blog posts on personal finance).

But after the bubble burst, my projections of retirement at 40 rolled out into my mid 50’s, and suddenly I was faced with the prospect of being an engineer for decades to come. This didn’t sit well with me. To top it all off, I started this blog around the same time, and as long-time readers might have noticed, I don’t exactly write about technology or programming.

Indeed, this isn’t an isolated phenomenon. I hate fiddling with computers on my free time. I’m good at debugging problems and diagnosing issues, and I’ve installed modems and controller cards and hard drives before, so it’s not due to fear or lack of ability. I guess I just get more than my fill of this stuff at work and thus am never in a mood to deal with it at home. Also, I’ve had aspirations of learning Java (embedded systems predominantly uses C) and writing code for open source projects and my Palm Pilot (and even bought books on these subjects), but of course, I never got around to actually doing anything (given the amount of time and effort I spend on my writing and photography, I don’t think this is due to laziness).

So as I’ve mentioned before, I started taking night classes two years ago in economics and then political science. Just to get my feet wet and see where it would go. Well, it merely whetted my appetite. So, I finally took the big step and told my boss a couple of weeks ago that I’ll be going to go back to school full time at the beginning of next year. The plan is for me to do some undergrad at San Jose State University, and then go to grad school and get a Master’s in either economics or political science or public policy. Or maybe something else entirely, like sociology or psychology. That I’m not sure is a big reason why I’m doing some undergrad first — feel free to plug the field of your choosing — but the prospect of being in close proximity to nubile young college coeds was a plus as well. :) Yes, the possibility that I’m being naive or stupid scares the heck out of me, but really I’m more excited than anything else. And having all my savings along with our surprisingly low standard of living means this won’t be as bad an adjustment as you might expect.

As for what comes after school, perhaps I’ll go on to become a policy analyst in government or a think tank like Cato. It kinda depends on the actual field I eventually pick. But another career possibility is journalism (I bet you were wondering what any of this had to do with the film). After all, I love to write. I like to think I’m a lot better at being objective and nonpartisan than most bloggers or journalists. And I also like to think that I know a lot and am more interested in learning about what I write about than your typical blogger or journalist (I also like to think I’m very modest, but I think I’m pushing my luck there).

But anybody who’s followed blogs over the past year is well aware of the fact that journalism faces a crossroads. I’ve already written about this at length multiple times. My take in a nutshell is that blogging has already demonstrated that having journalists write about subjects they don’t know very well is far inferior to having experts write and self-publish. Especially when there are so many of them willing to do so for free.

This is a good thing, because I think journalism has gone downhill to the point where one of the best sources for news on television is the satiric Daily Show. And watching Good Night, and Good Luck was a big reminder of that. It’s an excellent film that covers how Edward Murrow took on Senator Joseph McCarthy, and it’s a pretty stark contrast with how nobody in the media was willing to challenge the Bush administration in the run-up to the war in Iraq. And this is symptomatic of the problems resulting from journalists covering topics they don’t know very much about; they don’t know enough to recognize and/or challenge the sources that are trying to deceive them (yes, deceive — if I wasn’t enough to convince you about Bush and Miers and Mike Brown haven’t swayed you either, then maybe you should read this, link via Gene Healy). It’s also symptomatic of the laziness of reporters who believe they are being fair by giving voices to both sides (incidentally, danah boyd has a great post discussing how Good Night, and Good Luck and Capote depict contrasting situations where the main characters “made a choice to write in a way that frames a story, recognizing that the true facts are only one part”).

So I’m rather wary on whether journalism will be a viable career for much longer. But even if it isn’t, Edward Murrow exhibited a lot of characteristics that I admire, and I think I ought to start emulating him a bit more. For instance, I’d mentioned earlier that I’d have a substantive post up last weekend. Well, the impetus of that post was to respond to this post from the ever-effervescent Ealasaid which discusses her pondering whether to buy a laptop from Wal*Mart, a company she absolutely detests.

If you’ll read the comments I’ve written there, you can get a sense of what direction this post is taking. As someone who is taking a microeconomics course, I view firms as profit-maximizing entities, and I actually see this is a generally good thing with some undesirable side effects (i.e. negative externalities), but I don’t believe corporations are even capable of grasping morality. However, economics is more concerned about how firms and consumers act (often employing simplifying assumptions) and less about why.

Indeed, questions about organizational behavior and morality are more the bailiwick of sociology and psychology. While I have a lot of theories and thoughts in regards to this issue and consider myself fairly knowledgeable on a wide variety of topics, I have to admit that everything I know about sociology was learned from Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, and everything I know about psychology was learned from Wikipedia. So instead of just tossing off a post of my less-than-informed thoughts (a tendency of the blogosphere that I frown upon), I’m going to take a couple of weeks to immerse myself in the topic and properly research it, especially since Brayden King (who has a Ph.D. in Economic Sociology) tells me that the question of whether firms behave like individuals is the topic of an ongoing debate within organizational studies, and has given me a few papers to read.

Anyhow, let me bring to a close this long rambling post (whose main purpose was to announce procrastination on my writing of another long but hopefully less rambling post). Although I rather doubt I still have the same number of readers now as I did in my “last open thread”, I welcome any of you to voice your opinion in the comments on whether or not you think corporations currently act like individuals and should be judged similarly. If so, what should be done about corporations that misbehave? And if not, should our system be reformed so that they do? And if so, how?

So let me know what you think, and hopefully it’ll help me write a post that does a much better job of journalism than I would have done otherwise. And remember, I’m also open to recommendations of what field I should study, along with suggestions on what classes I should sample at San Jose State.

And if none of you say anything, well, that’s okay. The deafening silence will merely reaffirm my egotistical belief that I know far more than all of you, bwa ha ha ha!