sethsez: Hollywood gets tech just fine, the vast majority of the industry runs on some of the best tech that exists and there's no way anybody can be a director or editor without having something resembling tech-oriented interests.
The issue is that things are altered to either make the storytelling faster, more interesting, or easier for the audience. The easiest example for this is hacking... of course hacking doesn't work like it does in movies, but the way hacking
does work would be boring as hell on camera. Now granted, Hackers goes about trying to solve this in the dumbest way possible, but it's not because nobody involved "got" computers, it's because they tried to solve a fundamental issue and cocked it up along the way.
drmlessgames: No, special effects people may work with highly sophisticated tech equipment, but the garden variety cop show writers and actors don't, they barely know get the video games and the twitters. I think most of the time it's the shows shoehorning tech in their movies and such, because they think it'll make it more "up-to-date" and interesting to the audience, when in reality it does the opposite. It makes much much more dated.
Cop shows are an interesting exception mostly because writers tend to be on them VERY long term and new blood doesn't tend to come in often.
That said, even there the writers still know more than you think they do. The thing is, their demographics tend to be pretty damn old compared to most of TV, so most technology is dumbed down to the level of magic plot devices to make sure grandma follows what's going on while still giving things a veneer of being modern (and of course, this is also done so they can easily wrap up a seemingly-impossible case in an hour).
"Zoom, enhance" doesn't exist because writers think it actually happens (I'd put money on them making fun of it long before most people even noticed it was a trend... it is their job, after all, and people in the industry tend to be VERY sensitive to these kind of trends), it exists because it's a convenient way to write themselves out of a corner and audiences are willing to just grit their teeth and accept it. Believe me, it's pretty much impossible to be a writer and not be aware that "zoom enhance" is a trope rather than an actual thing that exists in real life, not because of any technical knowledge but because industry tropes and feedback from viewers are pretty much completely impossible to avoid at that level.
I mean, nobody who writes screenplays actually thinks two people typing on a keyboard will get ANYTHING done (using a keyboard is 99% of their daily job, after all), and yet there it is in NCIS! It's not because the writer or director thinks this is how computers work, it's because someone thought it made the scene more exciting and underestimated how much the audience would care.
Now, granted, you do get some goof ups that are due to a writer or director not getting a tech concept. But all of the really blatant, simple computer errors that pop up which anybody who's ever touch a PC would know is wrong? There's almost always a different reason behind those.
