“There is luxury in self reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel no one else has a right to blame us.” ~ Oscar Wilde

For those of you unfamiliar with Sondheim’s Into the Woods, there is a sequence where all the fairy tale characters in their make-believe world begin to blame each other for the tragedy of their current situation, which came about through a series of events and misadventures rooted in desire, foolishness, greed, innocence, innocence lost, guilt, vanity, unresolved issues, and lots of other human failings. It has been foremost in my mind while checking in on the Emerald issue.

If you’re not aware of the Emerald situation, a good-enough summary can be found HERE. For me, this summary is a bit too petting toward the Emerald team, but, well, there’s a lot of that going around. My chain of events goes like this:

A. Linden Lab failed to update their product in a way that met the needs of their user base.
B. A talented, but irresponsible segment of the user base created a third-party project for reasons unknown. This project became known as the Emerald Viewer.
C. Lots of people began to use Emerald, as it provided an improved user experience; few of these people knew anything about the team that created and maintained the project.
D. Questions began to arise regarding the reputation and integrity of the Emerald team and their motivations.
E. Despite there being lots of blogs and “news” about Emerald, no one in the blogosphere bothered to ask some point-blank “on the record” questions to the team (I personally sent two emails attempting to get an interview out of sheer frustration. They were never responded to, but then I don’t pretend to be a reporter or a talk show host so I’m sure I was easily ignored).
F. Despite there being no statement of ethics, obvious untruths in their blog posts, and several other low-grade warning signs, people with credibility spoke in support of Emerald and made it clear it was their viewer of choice.
G. The inevitable happened and a member (or members) of the Emerald team abused the trust of their users in a griefer prank. The prank, while not in itself very interesting or damaging, demonstrates a flagrant disregard for ethics, a lack of basic integrity and employed tactics which engaged an unwitting user base in ridiculously childish (and potentially criminal) behavior.
H. An Emerald team member that few people know from Adam posted an “I’ll fall on my sword even though I really don’t think I did anything wrong” non-apology apology; another Emerald member that few people know from Eve said she was stepping up to the plate to get everything under control. Then didn’t. Feel free to read the Emerald blog for more accurate step by step on this part.
I. Rabble, Rabble, Rabble.
J. Linden Lab issued their mock-outrage “we’ve taken care of this” farce statement while dogs and cats began living together (mass hysteria).
K. People began to issue “aww shucks, they’re just confused kids” type excuses for Emerald’s antics, others posted “we think it’s wrong, but everyone’s being so mean” type excuses, and others went the “they’re all a bunch of Nazis” direction. Because, you know, that’s how the interwebs work.
L. Linden Lab continues to fail to update their product in a way that meets the needs of their user base.

There is not enough facepalm in the world. Seriously.

The problem I have with this situation is that some people I like are on the insanely wrong side of this issue, and some people I find disgustingly vile are on the right side. So it’s frustrating. It’s like when you have to admit that the KKK is entitled to free speech. Yeah, it’s right, bt it makes you feel like you need a bath.

Yet, between all the hate-fueled “I told you so” mocking and the Eeyore “you guys are so mean” pouting, there is very little learning going on. It’s enough to make me climb a bell tower and take a hostage. Why? Because there are lessons here that are getting missed in the exchange and they are THE SAME FUCKING THINGS THAT HAVE BEEN GETTING MISSED ALL ALONG.

So, for next time, can we please review:

1. Linden Lab is not releasing a product that services the needs of their users. The buck stops there. If this isn’t where your bottom line on this issue rests, then you’re getting it wrong. Period.
2. If you think it’s shocking that some of the code monkeys working on Emerald had grief-genes, you’re an idiot. I assure you, every product on your computer right now likely had griefers or ex-griefers working on it. They just weren’t in charge, weren’t given a lot of power, or were good enough not to get caught. Save your outrage for the next episode of Real Housewives of New Jersey or something.
3. Third Party Viewers are a valuable tool, but they need to be investigated and held to task. Their project managers need to be interviewed and asked hard questions in a civil, responsible way — preferably by the people who claim to be delivering news to our community. If the names don’t mean anything to the average consumer, their reputation and integrity (or lack thereof) within the community needs to be made clear by anyone advocating the product.
4. When warning signs appear and then begin flashing in neon, YOU PAY ATTENTION and don’t just hem and haw and hope it all gets better. You certainly DO NOT put your name and/or reputation behind the mess unless you’re damn sure you’re right.
5. An active griefer is not going to behave just because you like them. Just because they haven’t griefed *you* doesn’t mean you can trust them not to behave like an idiot. Are griefers evil? No. Sometimes they’re even useful in a social way. But they’re generally irresponsible, juvenile and reckless on the fly. These are not the people you want in unchecked positions of responsibly in any format or project. You just don’t let an alcoholic tend bar, ffs.
6. You cannot cry about being deceived if you never did anything to educate yourself as a consumer. If you didn’t know about the Emerald team and used their product anyway, then just shut up and switch to Imprudence with the rest of us. Your right to bitch is exactly zero. Oh, and while you’re at it, check into the Imprudence team — don’t just switch to them blindly.

In the meantime, welcome to one of the big reasons the Second Life community continues to be bad-mouthed in technical and professional circles. When “he’s kind of a friend and I don’t think he’ll do anything bad” trumps obvious warning bells, when consumers bitch and moan but don’t educate themselves on their choices or advocate for their needs, when bloggers and journalists self-promote but don’t even try to get answers to hard questions, when “Ha ha ha you got what you deserved and I hope you all die” counts as a valid part of the general discourse — well, how can you take them seriously?

I’d really like it if we didn’t drive this self-hating cycle into the next race on the same tack. Pretty please? With sugar on top?

So stop crying “poor me,” quit making excuses for fuck-ups, back off blaming the branches and learn to identify the roots of a problem, refrain from engaging the hate-mongers, advocate and educate and just LEARN FROM THE FUCKING MISTAKES ALREADY so we don’t end up back in this same place. Ever. Again.

That is all.

“Don’t compromise yourself. You are all you’ve got.” ~ Janis Joplin

I’ve gotten a few in-world comments from a couple people who tell me that they can’t bridge the disconnect between my “feminist rants” and my “squee! look how pretty!” posts. My virtual fashion lust, they feel, leads others to “take me less seriously” than they think I deserve. The general sentiment is “you should be doing so much more than wasting your time on all that fashion drama.”

Fashion drama? Kittens, I grew up on teh interwebs back when Mac vs PC flamewars were still defining troll and forum tropes. 4chan vs Scientology is drama. SL fashion is just bored housewives and college students being bratty. It’s not like they’re rioting in the stands over men in shorts kicking around a ball or anything.

I know, from the bottom of my heart, that these individuals are well-intentioned, and they are paying generous compliment to my writing, but seriously, if this is how you feel, just get the fuck out of the 50s already. I read any number of blogs where a guy will frequently weave in boy-squee rants about sports teams or the latest techno widget without blinking; I doubt anyone takes their other content less seriously or tells them to move on from iPhone drama.

So, once more for those in the cheap seats:
Virtual fashion and bouncing in girlish delight over pretty things does not remove anyone’s ability for critical thinking, their professional experience, or demean their sense of self. I am human; I have vanity; I embrace the deadly sin. But it alone does not define me. Or anyone.

Just in case you missed it — I’m a girl (BTW, spare me the mock-feminist outrage of “you’re not a girl, you’re a woman.” Girls are girls; boys are boys. Deal with it.). I grew up playing dress up and outfitting dolls, baking bad cupcakes in a box with a lightbulb, and applying cheap makeup onto a disembodied over-sized Barbie head. I also grew up enamored with Erector sets, Lincoln logs, and Legos, playing video games, watching my uncle rebuild his Shelby Cobra as if he were reassembling the Ark of the Covenant, listening to my Dad’s folk rock and my other uncle’s hard rock, and learning how to bait a hook properly.

The fact that I can rig ballyhoo or gaff a mahimahi in the right way so that it damages as little of the fillet as possible, doesn’t negate that I drool over vintage Chanel. The fact that that the words “Marino from the shotgun” can still give me shivers when I’m watching old games on the NFL channel doesn’t remove the reality that I also hum “I Love Being a Girl” while I’m shopping in SL. I don’t understand why those dots are so hard for some people to connect. And maybe it’s just a vocal minority giving me a skewed perspective. But given the amount of “oh those silly fashion girls” crap I read by people claiming to be taking virtual platforms seriously, I think this type of mindset really is as permeating as it seems.

Avatar customization and character immersion is a huge business model and is going to be for a long time. We’ve already got research that demonstrates the visual representations that people bond with can affect them physically and mentally. Tapping into human vanity is marketing 101 for men and women. Yes, many of “those silly fashion girls” are annoying. They’re also driving our virtual economy. And, I promise you they’re no more or less annoying than listening to some idiot try and outline why Lebron James or Brett Favre is the real anti-Christ. Squeeing over make-believe fashion gimcrack is no different from some blogger blathering about how his new iPhoneX.x is ZOMG! BEST! THING! EVER!

So, fair warning — I’m going to blog about pretty things that make me squee beside, around, and in-between all the other “serious stuff” you’ll find here. Given the amount of things that annoy me in SL, I need the squees. The squees are why I’m still in the format. So if that means you take me less seriously, or feel compelled to remove me from your twitter/blog feeds, have at thee. It’s a free world; you can opt-out and I will muster on with life.

All I ask is that you opt-out in silence and don’t moan about it in my IMs; it kills my vanity-drenched, girl-squee, drama-hopping shopping buzz.

“We were able to convince both Dylan’s management and Sony BMG that this was a perfect project for us. . . . We think (they’ve) done a terrific job of doing a total Bob Dylan promotion. It will be a win-win for everybody involved.” ~ Ken Lombard

Sony YouTube Fail

Okay. Let’s forget the fact that I paid for this song already. On vinyl. On cassette. On CD. Let’s forget the fact that it’s sitting on my living room shelves in two of those three forms and I’m sure the CD is somewhere in a box. Let’s forget that if I wanted to, I could go download it from any number of Chinese sites for free (oh, the blessed irony) without so much as a blip of protest.

IT WAS A BOOTLEG FROM SOMEONE’S PHONE DURING AN IMPROMPTU MOMENT THAT ONLY MATTERS TO FANS. It was shoddy audio, jerky and badly lit. Most people would likely have had a hard time realizing who it was or what song he was singing. Your chance of marketing this in a box set of anything was ten degrees less than nil.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is wrong with you people? How long are you relics going to keep alienating consumers? Get with the friggin’ program.

Whatever the equal is of the ten plagues of Egypt in corporate form, can we please get that started on these boneheads? Let mai Dylan bootleg GO!

(And, yes, you know I’m annoyed when I’m wishing frogs to rain down on people)

“Honesty is the cruelest game of all, because not only can you hurt someone - and hurt them to the bone - you can feel self-righteous about it at the same time” ~ Dave Van Ronk

Introspective post warning. Continue at your own risk.

I do not have the respect for honesty that most people do, in a common, every-day sense. I believe there are times (many of them social niceties) where lying is not only a kindness, but a necessity. Measures of self-deception are called for in ourselves to deal with hard times and to come to terms with some of life’s complications. The same is often the case when helping others. It’s tricky, of course, as all nuanced aspects of life are. Knowing when you’re lying for someone else or when you’re lying for yourself; knowing when you’re lying for good intentions as opposed to simple convenience; knowing when your lies are a bridge and when they are a crutch — these are all concepts that can give us mental vertigo and some of us wrestle with them all our lives.

However, there are also times when wielding the “truth” is done recklessly — when facts and hyperbole are used to cloud a narrative rather than clarify it. This has always been a tightrope walk for journalism and writers of non-fiction. It’s one of the main reasons that integrity and reputation are so important when dealing with someone in the position of journalist. A reporter’s responsibility is to relay facts in context with as little editorial as possible. A critic’s job, in contrast, is to deliver an honest, well-defended opinion. Anything different is pandering either to subject matter or reader-base or one’s own ego.

If living in America has made anything brutally clear in the last decade, it’s that facts presented out of context or opinions delivered with a pandering agenda aren’t just distasteful, but also damaging. Championing such acts (whether out of ignorance or lulz) breeds a destructive sort of emotional vandalism that doesn’t wash away easy. The result is that honesty begins to have no distinction against pap and fact begins to have less importance than frenzy.

In the real world we see more and more the pushing of ridiculous narrative in effort to avoid hard work. We know that a 17 year old girl sending a topless photo of herself to her boyfriend on her iPhone isn’t distributing child porn. We know that a hippie grandmother growing pot in her basement to offset chemo nausea isn’t drug dealing. We know, but too often we allow our legal and political systems to further untruths in the name of convenience. It’s easy to catch a teenager and a hippie grandmother. The result is that resources which might have otherwise gone to finding and convicting actual producers of child porn or actual harmful drug distributors are squandered, and the individuals who pushed the agenda are free to push to ever more precarious edges. And those edges reach toward a place where justice has no meaning and can have no authority. The actual gray areas, which are crucial for us to explore that we may better understand the world and ourselves, disappear in order to establish a nursery school palette of primary colors to classify everything as simply as possible; giving us a paint by number ruberick that any idiot can follow. So we don’t have to go to the trouble to explain or, god forbid, think. So we can fall back on outrage when anything makes us uncomfortable and forget about all that tiresome critical thinking. It’s the thread that, once pulled, unravels the whole sweater.

The virtual world is just as tainted by this human game as the concrete-and-sky world. Humans, being the constant, import their vices along with their virtues. Sitting behind the mask of an avatar often lends the distance necessary to unburden ourselves and be truthful, but that same distance also gives us the length of rope with which to be truly vile and hang one another. And that vileness breeds itself, convinces itself it has both nobility and purpose.

Combating this invasive species of sophism isn’t just the responsibility for writers of important subject matter. In the beginning I felt that blogging about make believe clothes meant that I could take a pass on caring about hypocrites and liars. I wanted to just maintain my own standards and not engage because with attention-seeking glowworms, to address them is their own sort of victory. But as I’ve blogged virtual consumerism in Second Life and watched the community develop around it, my feelings have shifted. The silence and indifference of people who would maintain standards is just as destructive as those who prance around advocating drama for its own sake.

So I’ve decided a few things are non-negotiable. Honesty matters. Integrity matters. Ethics are not flexible. Even in the world of make-believe clothes. This is not to say that I won’t color outside the lines from time to time — I simply have to push myself to acknowledge when I do, if for no other reason than to demarcate the point where I crossed over and will cross back. No one can maintain an ideal all the time, but we can endeavor to know what the ideal is, to adhere to it when we can, and acknowledge (winking, smiling, crying or on our knees as the individual case may dictate) when we fall short.

I can do that. When all is said and done, it’s just not that hard.

Manifestos about who does and doesn’t belong in a place are meaningless. Venting without purpose is vanity. Building a reputation on unresearched, out-of-context facts, and outright lies you go back and edit out later is cheap. And every time a person that knows the difference makes excuses for or turns a blind, exhausted eye upon these practices, the good things, the fun things, and those elements of the world that are worth a good fight, disappear under a groupthink veil of mendacity.

Simple translation: sometimes you gotta clap to bring Tink back to life or the whole damn play just stalls.

I want to enjoy my SL. I want to still have fun writing about silly make-believe frippery. I want to offer honest, well-defended opinions about unnecessary things without wading through the circus that seems to have formed around the community. I don’t get to make the world and no amount of wishing will change that, but I can change how I interact with the world. In that sense the world really can be what I want to make of it.

The past few weeks have afforded me a painful, but valuable perspective and clarity:
1. But for a handful of people in the world, I don’t have to give a fig about what anyone else thinks;
2. Quality begets quality and good work will attract attention and readership for the right reasons;
3. The only real power we have to change what frustrates us is to refuse it entry into ourselves;
4. Approval and applause are meaningless.

I don’t know that this internal change will have any noticeable effect on my subject matter or writing style. I do know it already makes me feel a little more free and a little less heart-heavy.

That can only be a good thing.

“You don’t have to signal a social conscience by looking like a frump. Lace knickers won’t hasten the holocaust, you can ban the bomb in a feather boa just as well as without, and a mild interest in the length of hemlines doesn’t necessarily disqualify you from reading Das Kapital and agreeing with every word.” ~ Elizabeth Bibesco

It’s not as though bad journalism is surprising enough to raise an eyebrow toward these days, but there are times when certain articles drive a spike into the limits of patience and good taste. As such, the piece “America’s Tweethearts” by Vanessa Grigoriadis (contributing editor of Vanity Fair) managed to offend me on so many levels that I actually had to blog about it, even after a good night’s sleep.

I became aware of the article via Felicia Day’s twitter feed (I follow Felicia for a few reasons, mostly involving her creative enterprises). In the process of rushing out the door, FD took a passing glance at the article she’d been asked to participate in and made the sort of mistake many of us would be guilty of — she saw she was in focus and photographed well amongst her peers and assumed the content below the photo was equal in sophistication. She then tweeted a link and went about the day. It was some time later when she found out how painfully egregious the article was and managed to sum up her own feelings in a blog post.

Her dismay is understandable; Grigoriadis’ article manages to offend on so many levels. For myself, I find it ridiculously offensive across the board: as a modern feminist, an internet-age geek, a writer, and a person who uses interactive social media. In short, there is so much to loathe about the piece, it’s hard to know what to start with. I suppose we’ll just go down the list.

Backbiting masqueraded as intellectualism and feminism.

If you looked at Grigoriadis’ profile page on vanityfair.com, you’d conclude that she was a young woman with some understanding of how traits like appearance and attitude can contribute toward being successful. You might, for example, note that she doesn’t have any problem wearing a light blouse that takes a naughty v dip down into the cleavage area. Her long hair is nicely styled, her face punctuated by a decent (if heavy-on-the-blush) make-up job. The photo she chooses to place beside her list of credentials would indicate that she knows a nuanced acceptance of how attractiveness and sexuality can lend an edge in competitive media. You wouldn’t expect her to have that sort of photo and then paint other women as lipstick feminists. Because that would make her, you know, a hypocrite (and how can anyone with those apple cheeks be a hypocrite?).

Yet, in the article Grigoriadis takes so many pot shots at the attractiveness and gregariousness of her subjects that it comes off with robust pettiness. Let’s look at the most glaring quote from the article in this voice:

It so happens that they are nice girls—the Internet’s equivalent of a telephone chat line staffed by a bunch of cheerleaders—and it’s all free. Any tweep who wants to talk to them will likely get a reply to his tweets (“u r so funny!”).

Setting aside the fact that I personally don’t see anything wrong with a chat line staffed by a bunch of cheerleaders, likening successful, established, technology-pioneering young women to such stereotype is deeply disingenuous. The language here is sinister and icky both above and below the surface. The use of “girls” to set tone, the anything but subtle use of chatspeak to imply a lack of intelligence, the use of creep “tweep” and “his tweets” to characterize the only people being interacted with as trolling male leisure suit larrys trying to get their tweet on with these oh-so-accommodating “girls.” It’s all a fluffy way of saying “whore.” Apparently, this is because the women in question are polite, engaging, interactive, attractive and nice. It makes you wonder which of those qualities could trigger such insecurity in the writer. You can also bet your bobby socks that had the profiled women been less than attractive that would have been held against them as well.

It’s not at though women backstabbing other women is a new concept, and it’s certainly not the first time we’ve seen this inflated sense of “I’m more feminist than you because you’re pretty and nice” in the wielding of the knife. What is confusing about this example is that if the writer is going to call another woman (or group of women) tarty, you’d think she’d have the brain cells to replace her own tarty profile photo with something that would lend her something touching credibility. It’s difficult to take her seriously about these so-called extroverted twitterers being bubble-headed “cheerleaders” simply because they’re nice and pretty when the author herself is practically wagging her own pom poms in her own photo. I mean, honestly, if you’re going to be a superior bitch on the feminist ladder, then be a bitch with some consistency. Otherwise you risk looking like an opportunistic whore trying to score some cheap readership points by taking pot shots at other women. Oh. Wait.

Interwebs people are stupid and will ruin your relationships and infect you, even though they’re not real.

The fear of social media demonstrated in this article makes you want to hand Grigoriasdis a rape doll and ask her to show you where the mean technology touched her. Her tone takes on an edge of ludditism that could only be reserved for someone writing to please those terrified by the imminent death of traditional media like *cough* print magazines *cough*. What 1950’s health video cliches does Grigoriasdis fall back on for her article?

A. The internets will make you stupid. Sure we all cringe a little at chatspeak, but she uses more of it in her article than I can recall seeing in any of my twitterfeeds over the last several months. The implication, of course, is that we internet peoples aren’t so good with that English-speakin’ stuff (including those of us who majored in it, one presumes). I’d love to put Grigoriadis in a room with a someone like Stephen Fry and ask her to defend the attitude that Twitter is comprised of “…a continual patter of excessively declarative and abbreviated palaver” which she later likens to the language skills of Laguna High freshmen. The notion that otherwise literate people might simply take easy or innovative shortcuts to accommodate the limits of a new fast-paced medium completely eludes her. One has to wonder if Grigoriasdis has ever had to use a post-it note and if she adheres to perfect Blue Book grammar and punctuation when doing so. Of course, the fear of Twitter is completely justified and something to fear because as we all know, internet technology is going to render us all illegitimate illiterate and eat up all the books until the only thing left of the written word is a handful of Cliff’s Notes and Sarah Palin’s biography. Look, I don’t like the fact that the liner notes to Purple Rain have become a legitimate form of communication either, but unabridged Shakespeare is available freely on the web for those who want to read it. They sky isn’t falling, it’s just easier to reach.

B. Geek is the new gay and the interwebs will turn you interwebish. For this, Grigoriasdis not only falls back on how technology will ruin your relationship:

Real-world friends, and even spouses, can be left in the cold. Michaels’s [sic] husband, a real-estate appraiser with horn-rims and a crew cut—a “normy”—calls himself “the Twidower.” “My wife found Twitter and dropped me,” he says. “I basically lost my wife.” Then he sighs. “Sometimes, during dinner, it gets to be too much.”

Of course the husband was completely serious, I’m sure. Note the use of “he says” instead of “he jokes.” Sometimes leaving out certain things is just as sinister as adding others.

Grigoriasdis also goes that extra step and infers that using Twitter will turn you…Twittery. When describing Julia Roy as “New York social strategist turned twilebrity” the message is clear: you can’t possibly be both popular in a social media platform and accomplished in business. Forget that Joy is currently Senior Manager of New Media at her current employer, she’s popular on Twitter and should be considered infected with something Grigoriasdis would put in quotes and refer to as “twaids” or, maybe, “twyphilis.”

C. Internet people are not real people. Those of us who have been on the web for any length of time are familiar with the soap-opera antics that can happen on the internet (or, at least become the thing of internet urban legend). We all know someone with a story about that girl who turned out to be a guy, or the one who pretended to be dead/raped/robbed/abducted by aliens, or the romance that ended in tragedy when the real-life spouses found out about “cybercheating.” All of these are used as examples of how nothing and no one on the internet can ever be taken as legitimate. Forget the fact that you could point to a million people on Jerry Springer or Judge Judy and simply note that some human beings are prone to bad behavior and drama no matter their location. Anonymity on the internet is different than anonymity at some huge frat party in college or that bar where people stop over when traveling on business. Anonymity on the internet defines the reality of the internet, or, rather, the lack of reality of the internet. Grigoriasdis reminds us of this when she makes sure to note that attention and celebrity gained from social media is not “real fame…but a special, new category of fame” of consequence only to the other 55 million make-believe users who spend their days in a “digital rumpus room.” And, just in case you didn’t understand that, she makes sure to drive the point home two paragraphs later when she explains how “…Twitter uses simple technology, it’s a utilitarian vehicle for ambitious extroverts, without any previous distinction, to become digital superstars.” Those she profiles that had “no previous distinction” include (by her own reporting) a new media actress/writer/director, the aforementioned New York social strategist, a travel writer, a publicist, and a marketing executive whose clients include high profile athletes like Shaquille O’Neal. I guess those careers and accomplishments lack the distinction of being a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and are, thus, disposable footnotes of mere chatline cheerleaders.

Bad Writing

While most of the above examples can be explained away as a writer who is simply content to sell out other women or score some petty points against an emerging medium that obviously intimidates her, the sloppy journalism and bad writing in the article cannot be excused as mere lack of self awareness. If the distinctions on Grigoriasdis’ profile page are to be taken at their word then this was just a lazy effort at a topic she didn’t want to try and communicate with or about.

You cannot ignore how she uses ridiculous jargon placed in quotation marks — reminiscent of the way 90’s local news stations would put “cyber” in front of everything to make it sound gimmicky. To see this kind of tactic still being employed in 2010 would be amusing if Grigoriasdis didn’t take herself so seriously and new media so lightly. The buffoonery ranges from the usual ridiculous terms that no one uses (Twitter users do not call each other “tweeple” because we are not pod people and do not put “tw” before ordinary words in some effort to take over the world with new and improved forms of pig Latin) to phrases that would only require quotation marks if you had no understanding of social media norms (the use of “real-time Web” as though the term were some odd new concept coined just for her little article).

I would have to say, however, that it’s the lack of any hint of consistency that makes this article utter tosh and its author appear intellectually dishonest. On one hand, she acknowledges that Twitter has 55 million users, but then the tone she takes is more like someone skimming the surface of a creepy subculture novelty. She notes her subjects’ impressive careers and then dismisses them in lieu of calling them fake celebrities and likening them to chat line cheerleaders. She lists a handful of distinguished high profile users, but then cannot resist snarking about how most of them likely use ghost-tweeters and proxies (it’s not like any of them would ever use assistants when setting up relations with other varieties of media outlets). She tosses out positives to create the illusion of balance such as the article’s opening line:

Whether you consider Twitter a worldwide experiment in extreme narcissism or a nifty tool for real-time reporting—a plane ditches in the Hudson, millions take to the streets in Tehran—it may not yet have dawned on your text-saturated brain that it’s also a path to becoming famous.

But anyone with even a passing sense of reading comprehension can see where the slant tilts heaviest. Not that you’d expect objective journalism from Vanity Fair, but you like to hope the snark will have some intellectual honesty or even a hint of wit. Instead, we’re simply left to hope that Grigoriadis doesn’t quit her day job.

Oh. Wait.