The literary critic Harold Bloom once said the measure of a work’s immortality is whether it bears re-reading. If we believe that, then generations to come will be puzzling over Adam Rifkin’s “Pandas and Lobsters: Why Google Cannot Build Social Applications.”
Granted, one reason I had to read it three times is because I have no idea what the hell he’s talking about. But re-read I did and not skip off to some other pursuit. That bears some relation to Rifkin’s point about Google’s difficulty with social apps, like Buzz. Historically, Google is about delivering information in an efficient manner so you can go do something else with. It makes you efficient the way a panda is efficient: eat-poop-eat-poop… for 16 hours a day. In contrast, social media platforms are all about sucking up your time.Facebook doesn’t help you eat. Or poop. It only helps you use Facebook. Or Farmville.
After researching what pandas do all day, I was struck by how panda-like we are when we use the Internet.
Roaming a massive world wide web of forests, most of our time is spent searching for delicious bamboo and consuming it. 40 times a day we’ll poop something out — an email, a text message, a status update, maybe even a blog post — and then go back to searching-and-consuming.
RSS-inventor Dave Winer put a fine point on the situation Steve “Just Don’t Hold It That Way” Jobs has gotten into himself into with the new iPhone deficiencies. It’s a shitstorm. To be exact, a brewing shitstorm. This torrential downpour of crap is less about technical issues, Winer argues, than it is the loss of trust that will thrust Apple into the grim ranks of other American companies:
It will be ugly because Apple is going to let it get ugly. Because unlike the oil companies they have no experience with PR disasters. When I read their first public response on July 2, the one that said the problem was the meter measuring the strength of AT&T’s signal, I couldn’t believe this was meant to be taken seriously. It’s the kind of story The Onion might have written on a bad day. Or Jon Stewart. That a corporate PR team wrote this says how unseasoned their people are. That they thought this answer was going to satisfy anyone says how out of touch they are with the world they are in.
Newspaper publishers have of late shown some signs of life. Industry analyst Ken Doctor uses the Wall Street term “Dead Cat Bounce” –as in, even a dead cat bounces when you drop it– to describe the phenomenon. In a useful primer, he also offers a guide to decoding the second-quarter earnings. So all you ink-stained necrophiliacs out there should take a look.
Let’s recall that last year’s ad revenue results had all the spring of a dead cat — down some $10 billion and 27 percent. So take a dead cat and pump a little life in it, with things less worse than they were in the disastrous 2009 and you get a bit of a bounce — but not one to crow about. Unless, that is, you don’t have much else to crow about, and that’s that’s the predicament, circa mid-2010, of most newspaper companies. They don’t have a big, positive story to talk about.
You might be surprised to see Marketwatch’s Jon Friedman make this list. For the uninitiated, Friedman’s “Media Web” column, where he publishes gooey profiles of media moguls, is the Chinese massage parlor of media reporting. So it was with interest that I read his takedown of Joel Stein, Time magazine’s resident “funnyman.” Stein recently went to the far-off state of New Jersey, discovered there were many Indians living there, wrote a rather racist column about it and ignited a low-grade media controversy that forced Time to utter some pointless apology.
Friedman, however, wasn’t having it. It’s clear that at the same time Stein was discovering Indians, our media reporter was finding his stones, because this week Friedman, who wrote the column made him feel “stomach-sick,” gave it to Stein — gave it to him good.
Stein is a smart guy but an insufferable journalist, whose top priority seems to focus on calling attention to … Joel Stein. Take his column on circumcision: “I knew having a child would force me to examine my life, but I didn’t expect to have to start with my penis.” Ha ha. Read Stein’s circumcision column.
While it’s debatable whether Stein is the least funny humor writer around, he certainly is now going to be regarded as the most boorish.
ONE FROM THE VAULT: The most execrable bit of media reportage his week went, naturally, to a New York Times features writer who did another daring voyage to Nolita digerati bar Tom & Jerry’s. The last time the Gray Lady showed up, it was to publish an embarrassing story about how a lot of Internet people hang out there.
This time it was to shadow Internet person Rex Sorgatz, who runs what seems like a web-design and social-media firm. The profile is a brain-numbing, journalistic cipher whose main value was to remind me of a nice piece of writing Sorgatz did for New York magzine a couple years ago. His “Microfame Game,” from 2008, is a wry look at the state of famous-on-the-Internet types, like Julia Allison, and an 8-step program describing the path to join them.
It’s easy to be cynical about this new class of celebrity. The lines between empowerment and self-promotion, between sharing and oversharing, between community and cliques, can be blurry. You can judge for yourself whether the following microcelebs represent naked ambition, talent justly discovered, or genius marketing. The point is that renown is no longer the exclusive province of a select few. Nano-celebrity is there for the taking, if you really want it.
