Ed Helms and Chris Mintz-Plasse -- that's McLovin to you! -- toss around a baseball in this new-school voting PSA from Declare Yourself, the GoTV organization started in 2003 by TV titan and Norman Lear. Not a bad idea, draft viral video into the make-voting-cool mission that MTV pioneered. And it's well done! Declare Yourself has revved up its '08 campaign, stoked by celeb-studded viral videos aimed at making voting cool (or at least, funny). There's a phony telenovela starring Rosario Dawson and Wilmer Valderrama (two parts), in which Dawson's steamy Latina ingenue ends her brief engagement with Valderrama's Don Juan when she learns he's not registered to vote. There's also a cute-in-a-boring-way video document of Hayden Panetierre signing up to vote when she turned 18.
FOR those of us on the Internet bandwagon, there's such a constant, loopy din -- so much back-patting and self-congratulation, so many rosy forecasts, that even if there were dissenting voices, you wouldn't hear them.
But in his new polemic against the Internet, "Against the Machine," Lee Siegel is yelling extra loud. And when it comes to criticism, Siegel is no lightweight. He's critiqued art, literature, film and television, including for this newspaper, with his own brand of pugnacious tenderness. So what happens when a guy who's made a living X-raying concrete culture tries to see into the digital stuff?
Regretfully, nothing you haven't heard before. In his new book, Siegel has a habit of emphasizing the Web's lowlights and using them to repeat tiresome and obsolete critical tropes -- YouTube as repository for funny animal movies and angsty confessions, Wikipedia as morass of slander and inaccuracy, and the blogosphere as echo chamber for blowhards and amateurs.
The Root, an ambitious new online magazine that focuses on African American culture, politics and genealogy, launched today. The site arrives with a quantity of journalistic gravitas inherited from its parent, Washington Post Co., as well as academic and media star power from editor in chief Henry Louis Gates Jr. Malcolm Gladwell, Charlayne Hunter-Gault and William Julius Wilson are contributors, and former New York Times reporter Lynette Clemetson is the managing editor.
With its sepia-toned author photos and family-tree-like visual structure, the site's design evokes one of the Root's principle themes: the exploration of African American ancestry. The Roots section offers readers tools for exploring their familial history, including an online family-tree building application, links to DNA-testing services and suggestions for hard-core archive hunting.
Barack Obama is well represented in the site's early posts. The News page is stocked with the latest Obama-related developments--many from sister publications Slate, Newsweek and the Post itself-- including the recent Obama endorsement by Toni Morrison.
On the Views page, John Edwards finds at least one backer, but again it's Obama who generates the most buzz. Princeton professor and Obama enthusiast Melissa Harris-Lacewell admitted she is "drinking the Kool-aid and loving every minute of it."
"I feel like a citizen," she wrote. "I don’t think I realized just how disinvested I was, until Barack came along. For me, the wins in Iowa and South Carolina feel like Reconstruction."
Author Kai Wright is more guarded. Citing the candidate's "race-neutral" image, he writes: "The question for black America is what he will do with the power he gains from shedding his skin. If he continues to avoid unpleasant questions about race, we're in deep trouble."
In an introductory video, Gates traces the Root's lineage to Freedom's Journal, the nation's first black-owned and black-focused newspaper, started in 1827. "One hundred and eighty years later," he says, "TheRoot.com seeks to continue that work, providing fertile ground for exploring our history, our aspirations and ourselves."
Now this is a good way to get someone to pay attention to your new TV show. Just be careful you don't send it to your teacher, government representative (of any level), neighborhood paranoiac or mother.
I received an e-mail this morning from someone I didn't know saying: "You need to hear what this guy has to say." The e-mail contained a link to a blog I'd never heard of. The top post on the blog appeared as below, including the title.
David Sarno is a slacker
Needless to say, I was momentarily disturbed to see my name get crossed off a crazy man's white board.
I won't spoil the back story for you Internet detectives out there. Just look a little closer before you call the police or hide in the closet.
As the Washington Post reports, some snow days are worse than others. Ask Candy Tistadt, the wife of Dean Tistadt, chief operating officer for the county system that includes Lake Braddock Secondary School in Burke, Va. Mrs. Tistadt has become an Internet anti-celebrity after she responded to a message -- to her husband -- from a Lake Braddock student who asked why the school didn't declare a snow day last Thursday.
The phone message, by no means warmly worded, reprimanded the student (who'd left his callback number) for daring to phone the Tistadts' house in the first place.
But woe to those adults who entrust digital records of their anger to young people. The consequences could be serious!
Welcome one and all (and at this point I think one is all) to the maiden installment of Web Scout's first regular feature, Apptitude. I'll be doing quick takes on the best, worst and funniest new Facebook applications, and with perhaps 1,000 new apps being launched every week, we (that's us two, reader) shouldn't have much trouble finding grist for the mill. In fact, I'd like to invite you to contribute suggestions for the most or least interesting apps, and we can be a dynamic reviewing duo!
I'll heave off this little feature with a look at Steal My Booty, a Warner Brothers app-vertisement for the Matthew McConaughey-Kate Hudson Valentine vehicle "Fool's Gold."
"Fool's Gold" is a romantic comedy about treasure hunting, a conceit so easy and tired that fully 38% of all stories ever told have made use of it in some way. Likewise, "Steal My Booty" follows in the footsteps of thousands of apps before it, existing less as a game than as a computer worm, designed to functionlessly propagate itself onto as many profiles as possible.
The object of the game is to steal treasure from your friends' chests. Stealing a fistful of doubloons is not difficult -- nothing so complex as hand-eye coordination or puzzle-solving is required. All you have to do is position your mouse pointer over the desired plunder and press the button.
Key to the game, the creators remind you, is "gaining experience points earned by inviting people to play." Translation: You win by inviting more people. Puts one in mind of good old elementary school magazine drives, where publishers and distributors cadged door-to-door sales labor off young children by rewarding them not with wages but with Weeples.
The above image tells the story-: Play Steal My Booty for a few minutes and you're sure to find that, try as you might, you're unable to grasp the point.
As of this writing, Facebook is listing almost 50 events under Heath Ledger, the great majority of them memorial services, moments of silence and screenings of Ledger's movies. Where are they taking place? Everywhere from the University of Texas, Austin, to Lee University (a Christian school in Cleveland, Tenn.) to "Wherever You Are."
If you watched the story of Heath Ledger’s death explode chaotically across the Internet, with facts, errors, inconsistencies and confusions flying every which way, you may have concluded that in the new digital media’s race to break stories in minutes, accuracy has been left in the dust.
Chief among the media’s switchbacks was the early non-fact that Ledger’s death had taken place at the New York apartment of Mary-Kate Olsen. Celebrity news site TMZ.com and even the New York Times' City Room blog reported this piece of misinformation before they unreported it.
Importantly, however, neither the New York Times nor TMZ got it wrong. It was the NYPD spokesman who had the story mixed up — the media were simply parroting incorrect information.
When the spokesman later corrected himself, the sites rushed to update the story, but readers were critical of the changes.
“TMZ is in such a rush to break the news,” one commenter wrote, echoing dozens of others, “that they are usually wrong first.”
But here’s the problem: Stories have never arrived to the world fully formed or vetted. Journalists have generally had hours — not minutes or seconds — to craft a story from the blast wave of facts and factoids that comes in the wake of a bombshell.
What people are seeing now is an old-fashioned process — reporting — as it unfolds in real time. If the public wants its information as raw and immediate as possible, it'll have to get used to a few missteps along the way, and maybe even approach breaking stories with a bit of skepticism, like a good reporter would.
2008 marks the start of the race to produce the first successful lineup of Web TV shows, and the first horse is out of the gates....
60Frames, the Web production studio offshoot of United Talent Agency, has released its first slate of seven original online series. Six of the shows are comedies, and in the best Web-comedy tradition, they run the wackiness gamut from somewhat to the extreme other end.
Among the headliners is "Erik the Librarian," a creation of Brent Forrester of "The Office." The shortish first episode has the protagonist lost in dweeby musings when along comes a fair damsel ("Office" star Mindy Kaling) to ask him a reference question, and to rock his world.
G.I.L.F (the 'G' is for Grandmother, the 'F' is for Fun!) is good giggle-inducing lunch fodder. It follows 37-year-old "Joyce" (creatrix-star Wendi McLendon-Covey of "Reno 911") as she takes her new 'hood by storm. In the first episode, the infant-toting Joyce hosts a neighborly book club ("So, who's read one?") and flirts a free pizza off the delivery boy, all as her grungy post-teenage son-in-law and already-preggers-again daughter look on.
You can also check out:
--The raunchy air-travel comedy "Cockpit," a sort of a latter-day "Airplane!"
--The self-consciously stereotype-happy "Black Version," which offers an 'urban' spin on entertainment classics, starting with "Silence of the Lambs." (In episode one, Hannibal Lecter uses his extraordinary deductive power to guess that Clarice ate lunch at KFC.)
--Another reality show sender-upper about guys from New Jersey trying to find summertime love. Sorry, I can't link because the name has a distasteful word in it. Distasteful!
--And "WhoWhatWear," which tracks celebrity fashion trends and offers sartorial tips to ladygirls on the go.
If Scientology's tech-heavy lore is in need of a Hydra-like villain, it need look no further than YouTube, where for every video ofTomCruisethe church orders takendown,10 new ones sprout up in its place. There are so many versions up now that LRH's crew has got to be thinking that the Xenu is out of the bottle.
Now that a second round of Scientology videos has been leaked (Gawker has 'em, along with its own fresh C&D letter), it'll be interesting to see if the church will try the perpetual decapitation strategy again, or if it'll simply let the videos spread.
After all, they are singing the praises of the religion. In this video, the voice-over guy -- who sounds bizarrely like he's doing a trailer for the next "Mission Impossible" -- details the church's Cruise-ade warning that "psychiatric drugs are the core of all education failures and ... are wreaking violence across American schoolyards."
"LRH has given us ... the ability to fight and have the courage to crush these guys," Cruise says in the beginning of the prescription drug video.
Why would you want to suppress a message like that?
Speaking of apps that are built to encourage viral propagation ... which is, like, all of them ...
Check out Adonomics’ Leaderboard, a kind of billboard chart for Facebook applications (of which there are now more than 13,000 and growing rapidly). As of today, Facebook app cranker-outer Slide owns two of the top three spots with its FunWall and Top Friends apps. Top Friends, which mirrors an old MySpace feature by letting you pick your elite pals, has been installed by nearly 24 million users (for reference, the 10 most populous cities in the U.S. have about 24 million people combined).
RockYou’s Super Wall is a close second, with 22 million users and a valuation of $26 million, according to Adonomics’ criteria, which factor in number of installs and active users in deciding an app’s potential to generate advertising revenue.
Mess around with any of Adonomics' top five and you'll see that proselytizing to new users is not just a central feature of these apps but indeed feels like the primary purpose. (The most blatant example of a Ponzi app is Hot Potato, which asks you to pass a virtual hot potato to as many new friends as possible (each one, of course, needs to install the app in order to pass the potato to the next poor fellow who needs to install the app to pass the potato).
"Invite more friends to improve (y)our popularity!" shouts Top Friends. Parens mine.
But with all this promiscuous app-passing, much of which is fueled by new Facebook users who don't know any better, could the popularity of the most viral apps be a sort of subprime app bubble? Despite the top apps' huge user bases, if Facebookers come to associate them with junk and fakery — the Wikipedia entry on "chain letter" already singles out Super Wall and FunWall — the apps are not invulnerable. Facebook groups like "I HATE SUPERWALL/FUNWALL" already have thousands of irate members.
Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, recently uninstalled Super Wall himself. Facebook, he said, is bound by a rule that's affected other open online platforms that empower users to create their own applications — like the Web itself.
"The more open it is, the more successful it is," said Zittrain. "The more successful it is, the more vulnerable it is, which makes it less successful."
Zittrain said that there's a common challenge facing these open systems — Super Wall, FunWall and Facebook itself: "Can you survive your own success?"
Yesterday, while playing around with Facebook’s most popular application, Super Wall, I apparently sent an image of two half-dressed college women kissing while perched atop beer kegs to SEVENTY-SIX of my valued friends. The caption read, "COLLEGE: The only place where ... like this happens!"
I say “I apparently sent,” because I have no memory of sending any such ridiculous or embarrassing “greeting card” — to anyone, let alone everyone.
Still, the episode was a textbook example of what's been happening to Facebook lately. (I have a pair of examples, really: I was also hoodwinked into mass-posting an image of a crying baby captioned, “Please mommy, no more peas.”)
No doubt I clicked the wrong button at some point — failing to realize that the application, lying in wait for me to do just that, had automatically selected dozens of my friends as recipients for the "accidental" mega-spam. Checking out my own Super Wall, and those of friends, it's more than clear that I'm not the first to take this new form of bait.
Until recently, Facebook has provided a largely spam-free environment. It's difficult for spammers to operate, since there are no e-mail addresses. Likewise, installing apps is an exclusively "opt-in" process — you can never be inundated with applications or solicitations because you only get what you sign up for.
But apps like Super Wall and FunWall seem engineered for frivolous mass-messaging. At their core, they've improved on Facebook's original Wall by allowing users to post video, audio and photos in addition to text messages. These new Walls have devolved, however, by not only making it easy to spam dozens of your friends with one errant click — but also making it hard not to.
Take a look at the average Super Wall . You're likely to see it plastered with chain letters, annoying images and even clever trick-spam. If you don't agree that a message titled "click forward to see what happens" is clever enough to fool you, look around: You may be in the minority. I was.
NOT only are we going to Iowa, we're going to New Hampshire and South Carolina and Oklahoma and MySpace and Facebook . . . YEEAEAAAH!!
Exciting, isn't it? In yet another sign that politics is going digital, two of the Internet's largest states have played host to online presidential primaries -- and more than a few citizens showed up to vote. On Jan. 1 and 2, MySpace welcomed more than 150,000 users to its virtual polling booths -- one ballot per user, of course, and no robots allowed (yet).
The results were released the day of the Iowa caucuses. Barack Obama took 46% of the Democratic vote, handily beating Hillary Rodham Clinton (31%) and absolutely dusting John Edwards (8%). On the Republican side, it was young-folk favorite Ron Paul (36%) doubling Rudy Giuliani (18%) and Mike Huckabee (16%).
No one's yet saying that a candidate's momentum online can carry him to victory at the polls -- Obama's win streak ended in New Hampshire, and Ron Paul's never began. Even so, there's a growing recognition that social networks, invested with the power of peer influence -- marketing's most sought-after quantity -- are a campaigning tool like none before.
Mark Malkoff lives at Ikea, and it’s awesome. The New York comedian and audience coordinator at The Colbert Report somehow persuaded the Swedish furniture monolith to let him camp out in its Paramus, N.J., store this week and post the whole thing on YouTube, since none of his friends had a floor he could crash on while his apartment was being fumigated. (Someone needs to fumigate that premise, by the way -- the believability termites have gotten to it.)
“Mark Lives in Ikea” is reminiscent of the children’s classic “From the Mixed up files of Mrs. Basil E Frankweiler,” where a brother and sister run away to the Met for a week, bathe in the fountains, and sleep in the museum’s antique beds.
But the beds at Ikea are brand-spanking new, and there’s a whole lot more cool stuff to play with. On his first day, Malkoff sets up camp in one of the store’s tricked-out model living units -- the place has everything: a nonworking plasma TV, a nonworking oven range, and cabinets stocked with plastic food.
“An apartment like this in New York City would cost $3,000 a month” he says proudly.
These movie-slash-commercials are a strange new genre -- the opposite of product placement, where a can of Coke appears on a table in the background. Now the commercial is the foreground, and it’s the art that’s the furniture.
In fact, Malkoff has come up with a pretty good hypercommercialization metaphor -- pretty soon, maybe we’ll all be living at Ikea.
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About the Blogger
David Sarno
is the Times' Internet culture and online entertainment writer. — Follow David on Twitter.
