collision detection about the influence of technology on the writing style in journalism:

One of the biggest areas of change is headline-writing. Normally, a headline writer tries to use some witty wordplay to attract readers: A literary or cinematic allusion, perhaps, or maybe a pun. But such nuances are totally lost on machines. A bot is trying to quickly figure out the content of an article, and wordplay just gets in the way. Though the article doesn’t discuss it in this depth, this dilemma is known, in A.I. circles, as “the problem of synonymity”: A machine doesn’t know that when a copywriter pens the line “A horse of a different color”, she’s not talking about horses. The bot might accidentally slot that story into the sports section, even if the piece is actually about politics.

Now, is that good or bad? As Clive Thompson continues, he explains that also human readers prefer “to-the-point”-headlines … Is language losing some of its stylistic devices because of technology? Time will tell, I guess.

Tagsoup: Blogging, journalism, technology, writing