Tom Abate
Tom Abate covers the technology sector for GlobalPost. Abate has covered Silicon Valley as a newspaper reporter since 1992, but his experience with high-tech goes back to the mid-1980s when he...
The Accidental Technology Journalist
In the 1980s I owned a typesetting business. I designed newsletters, produced the text for books and prepared all sorts of material for printing. But soon desktop publishing enabled my former clients to point, click and drag their own graphic designs. So I adapted. A lifelong fascination with the written word led me to journalism school and, ultimately, to a daily newspaper in San Francisco. I started in 1992, covering science and technology. Silicon Valley became my beat. Ever since, I have followed technology's twists and turns.
A few years after I took over the tech beat, a German-born executive named Michael Spindler was running Apple Computer. This was back when Steve Jobs had been ousted and before his return. In a speech about the triumph of desktop publishing, Spindler boasted about the dramatic decline in the number of typesetting businesses. I remember smiling and thinking, "Yes, and mine was one of them!".
That experience reinforced my conviction that technology is the engine of change. Take the World Wide Web. In perhaps 15 years it has transformed everything from shopping to entertainment to news. In the late 1990s I read excerpts from "The Information Age," a three-volume treatise by Spanish-born sociologist Manuel Castells. It described a society organized around networks and predicted all sorts of consequences arising from these connections, everything from outsourcing to the resurgence of tribalism. I found his thinking hard to swallow at the time. In retrospect his insights were amazingly prescient.
So I continue to watch technology expand into new areas, looking for the winners and losers and trying to look ahead to the eventual outcomes. I don't view technology as necessarily good or bad. It is simply inexorable. We had better pay attention. Because ready or not it keeps coming.
Reporter's Dispatches
SAN FRANCISCO — The U.S. technology lobby is hoping lawmakers will soon tackle an immigration overhaul that would include measures to make it...Read more >
SAN FRANCISCO — The world's largest economies have responded to the financial crisis by including substantial investments in technology as part...Read more >
SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. — The speech began with a laugh when Aneesh Chopra, chief technology officer of the United States, fouled up his slide...Read more >
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