You Never Get To Taste the Bread

David Carr, on the illusory nature of online relationships, as exemplified through a recent dinner he had with Clay Shirky:

As it turns out, Mr. Shirky became very good at bread eating at a young age, so his mother decided that he should also be good at bread making. We all chewed on the bread as Mr. Shirky told the story of learning how to make bread as a 10-year-old.

Now, he could have told that story in a blog post or in an e-mail chain, but it became a very different story because we were tasting what he talked about. The connection in an online conversation may seem real and intimate, but you never get to taste the bread. To people who lead a less-than-wired existence, that may seem like a bit of a “duh,” but I spend so much interacting with people on the Web that I have become a little socially deficient.

Woody Harrelson Gets Chased Out of Reddit

Woody Harrelson is starring in a new drama called Rampart. I haven’t seen it yet, but I’ve heard it is pretty solid.

A few days ago, some PR wizards decided to use Reddit’s “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) community to do a little publicity for Rampart. They created a page for him that read as follows:

Hi Reddit, it’s Woody here. I’m in New York today doing interviews for my new film RAMPART, which opens in theaters on February 10th. I’ll be checking in from 3-4EST today and will get to as many of your questions as I can, so start asking now! Be back soon.

A deluge of questions followed, as is typical for these AMAs. However, either Harrelson or the PR people running his account were instructed to only answer questions about Rampart (or in ways that referred explicitly to Rampart). In fact, if you read some of his answers, they sound like they’re coming straight out of a press kit for Rampart. As a result, Harrelson ignored the vast majority of other non-related questions, thus violating the “spirit” of Reddit’s AMA section.

Subsequent to this was a Reddit backlash the likes of which has rarely been seen. Reddit was outraged (OUTRAGED!) that Harrelson had attempted to use the site to brazenly promote his new film. But while others have done this sort of promotion in the past (e.g. Louis CK), Harrelson’s attempt struck the community is totally inauthentic and blatantly self-serving. The site is now awash with meme pictures of Harrelson, unpleasant trivia about Harrelson’s family, as well as rumors of some kind of sexual liason that Harrelson ostensibly participated in with a high school student in LA.

PR professionals, take notice: do not toy with forces beyond your control or understanding. Speak to communities such as Reddit correctly and they will reward you with lavish praise and tons of page views. But do it with a hint of insincerity and they will respond with the anger of a thousand suns.

[In fact, to state the obvious, when it comes to this sort of online promotion, or ANY online promotion, the less PR people are involved, the better and more interesting the resulting content usually is.]

The iEconomy

The New York Times has been doing a phenomenal job assessing the human and economic toll of all Apple’s wonderful, magical gadgets. Their first piece explained why it is we’ll never seen an iPhone manufactured in the United States. The second one delves into the corners that are cut in order to deliver iPhones and iPads, and the tragedy that can result.

Apple has been in the news a lot for this lately. A recent, fairly effective episode of This American Life showed the personal side of this process. That episode presumably forced Apple to respond, which resulted in a response in kind from This American Life.

Apple fanboys have expectedly rushed to Apple’s defense, and while they are only partially correct, I feel there is a coming reckoning for all of this. At least, I hope there will be. Throughout all this reporting, there emerges one fundamental truth: if Apple really wanted the conditions at factories to be completely humane, it could make it happen. It could insist. It could create a supply chain that was beyond reproach. Sure, they might need to charge a bit more for their products. Their profit margins might not be the same. They might not be able to make as many iPads per quarter as they can at the moment. But they could theoretically do it.

They don’t, because no one cares. They don’t because the voices of their shareholders are louder than the voices of their consumers (who are voting with their dollars and buying products left and right).

At some point, the American people will need to see the human cost of all of our toys. When that day finally arrives, may it also bring dramatic change along with it.

The MPAA Is The Worst

Today, it was breathtaking to see tech giants like Google, Wikipedia, Reddit, and Boing Boing black out their site in protest over SOPA/PIPA. Silicon Valley and Hollywood haven’t had much occasion to clash, but it’s now obvious that when they do, the results are far-reaching and devastating. Jonathan Wiseman and Jenna Wortham at the NYTimes have decent summaries of the different interests at play in this unprecedented online protest (Also, for funsies, check out this cool visualization of SOPA chatter on Twitter).

What infuriates me through all of this is not the near-reality of the bill itself (that’s more depressing than anything else). No, what really grinds my gears is the MPAA’s response to this entire ordeal. Dan Seitz has the only appropriate response to this abomination: a scathing takedown of everything the MPAA had to say:

What the MPAA wants to do is stop private citizens from ripping their DVDs and sharing those copies for free on the Internet, and they already have laws on the books making owning the tools to break DVD encryption illegal. But since suing individual citizens in court hasn’t worked, now they want to shut off websites at will.

In other words, MPAA, you are exploiting actual human suffering to acquire tools you don’t need to solve a problem you don’t have. And now you’re whining that other people are informing the American people of what you’re trying to do. How in God’s name do you sleep at night? Do you even understand how sickening that is to a normal human being?

The Cell Phone Ring Heard Around The World

Some guy’s cell phone went off during a performance of Mahler’s 9th by the New York Philharmonic, and the media is using it as an opportunity to discuss the concept of live performances in our technology-saturated society. The Wall Street Journal has the gut-wrenching account of the event. The New York Times scored an interview with the offending patron, who apparently hasn’t been able to sleep for days:

Both [the conductor] Mr. Gilbert and Patron X found something positive in the episode. “It shows how important people still feel live performance is,” Mr. Gilbert said. “This is something people either consciously or implicitly recognize as sacred.” The patron agreed. The incident underscored “the very enduring and important bond between the audience and the performers,” he said, adding, “If it’s disturbed in any significant way, it just shows how precious this whole union is.”

John Gruber has some interesting thoughts on the design aspect of alarm rings.

Is Internet Access a Human Right?

Despite the troll-y headline from this NYTimes piece, the point it makes is astute and important:

[T]echnology is an enabler of rights, not a right itself. There is a high bar for something to be considered a human right. Loosely put, it must be among the things we as humans need in order to lead healthy, meaningful lives, like freedom from torture or freedom of conscience. It is a mistake to place any particular technology in this exalted category, since over time we will end up valuing the wrong things. For example, at one time if you didn’t have a horse it was hard to make a living. But the important right in that case was the right to make a living, not the right to a horse.

The Best (and Worst) Tweets of 2011

This past year cemented Twitter as a service that has definitely changed the way we think about communication. I enjoyed the following retrospectives about the best (and worst) tweets of 2011:

Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon has a nice overall list of the best and worst tweets of the year.

Time magazine also has their own best and worst tweets list, most of them with a political slant.

The Wall Street Journal has a list of the best celebrity tweets of 2011.

Warming Glow has compiled some pretty amazing tidbits from the world of television.

Mashable has a list of 2011’s shocking social media disasters.

[And these are not really tweets, but New York magazine has some of the best quotes of the year]