“Ahem.. excuse me! Can I have the attention of the class for one second?” ~ Eminem

Grace has volleyed up some interesting questions that I’ve been personally wrestling with since the dawn of Salome. Well, before, actually, but never quite as intimately as with Salome.

In the world of new media, where reincarnation, re-branding, and re-invention are sometimes just a few clicks away, what is the value of a virtual identity? The more I examine this issue and read the input of others, the more I can’t help wondering if it’s the right conversation to be having at this point about where we are as Second Life citizens. Are we allowing ourselves to be pushed to a level of theoretical discussion that just breezes over the issue of who is demanding our identity and what rights they have to assign value to us or anything else in the dysfunctional playground where nothing seems ready for the big show? Are we being co-opted by our own intellectualism, milked for a sense of outrage to distract us from asking the simplest questions about who the people are behind the curtains and what are they doing about the existing problems before creating new ones and what rights do they have to our information?

Background: Grace’s post branches organically from the tree of Wallace Linden’s somewhat clumsy post addressing the management of virtual identity. Shock and awe, a week to the day of Wallace’s “things that make you go hmmm” style post, Linden Lab announced their acquisition of Avatars United. An acquisition that Grace points out comes with its own share of clumsiness.

It’s getting to the point where sighing and highlighting Linden Labs failure is feeling a bit like picking on the slow kid at recess. But, ironically, many of us seem to be in this abusive relationship with the slow kid. He kicks the ball over by us, we take it back to him all big smiles and friendliness and he knocks us down for our trouble. It’s all Lucy and Charlie Brown practicing place kicks. “What? You trusted us? AGAIN? You really are a blockhead.” Good grief.

So it really doesn’t shock me, nor do I think it shocks anyone, that Linden Labs fumbles their user base again. I keep thinking of the World of Warcraft episode of South Park where the Blizzard executives are trying to hand off an in-world item to a player only to discover none of them actually have accounts or play the game. “I don’t have a World of Warcraft character! I have a life!” More and more, this feels like how Linden Labs also views its users. They are making SL, but they’re not of SL. Virtual identities are just their business tools — their DBAs — their stage names. I don’t know that any of them tie themselves into a virtual identity the way many of us do. They certainly do not seem plugged into the issues that matter to their users. To some extent, of course, there is always a betrayal of the first generation of early adapters. The shucking off takes place when most start-ups edge into the mainstream. In theory, this happens to homogenize things for a bigger audience. The one SL keeps chasing and never quite catching.

But it’s a disservice to dwell just on the usual SL fail side of this particular issue, because the concept of value based on a virtual identity is, actually something even virtual lifers disagree on. I touched on this in a previous post where I addressed an ex-acquaintance calling me untrustworthy because I do not publicly attach my RL identity to Salome.

My own feelings on the issue are a bit schizophrenic.

On one hand, I get exhausted by the endless stream of lackluster twattle that tries to pass itself off as professional grade in SL. The reality is that the majority of SL businesses, media, artists, etc. are all just hobbyists playing at being qualified for the tasks they take on. Much of it is self-absorbed and self-promoting on a level that is just shy of repulsive and it’s as vulgar in these ways as it is unexamined and unchallenged. When you cast too bright a light in most corners, the paint is peeling, or is simply a primer base that never got its final coat.

But for 95% of SL, that’s okay. It doesn’t matter if the talk show host is a self-centered nit who doesn’t research their guests or have so much as a basic grasp of new media issues. It doesn’t matter if the musician’s manager is just a “look at me” credit hog who does nothing beyond a little digital paperwork. It doesn’t matter if the news is brought to you by sensationalistic creeps or shills that regurgitate the shiny happy corporatespeak.

It doesn’t matter because no one is asking you to take them at more than their presented worth. No one is forcing you to watch or read or use their services. So their credentials are based on a brand in a virtual world. And their brand is what you get to take or leave. There’s nothing wrong with that.

To that end, the services most people are seeking in SL aren’t that major. Just like most services in RL aren’t all that major. Amid getting all riled up about identity, ask yourself, what have you ever engaged in in SL where a RL name, resume, etc. would matter? Then ask yourself how much does it even matter in RL?

We all like to think that we do full research on anyone and everyone we hire or do business with, but in reality, most people in RL don’t jump through huge hoops for the great majority of our daily transactions. It’s all first impression and luck. You pick a name out of a phone book (okay, Google search these days, but you get my point), you call, if the person talks a good game, you let them fix your sink. You get the number of a teenager from a friend and let her babysit your kids. Maybe you run a Google for the important stuff. But you hand over your credit card every day to god knows who behind the counter of Store X and Restaurant Y. The vast majority of service agreements and exchanges in RL boil down to the word of a friend, a good phone impression, the tidiness of a uniform, the brand name of a franchise. Even in some of the “important” institutions and practices of RL, this is the case. Most people get away with overpumped resumes because employers don’t bother to check all references. The package, the brand, the haircut, the suit, the ease of conversation — in most cases these will take the place of established credibility. Anyone who plays office politics will tell you it’s not usually the work horse that gets the rewards, it’s the person who sells themselves to the right people in the right way.

Few people in SL will render services that require access to your credit card, your home, or your real identity. So why this push for unnecessary transparency? Why are we so uncomfortable taking people at avatar value? Is it to do with the trust we have in others, or the trust we have in ourselves to do our due diligence when the time comes?

Unlike most people, I have no issue taking someone at what they present to me. I have every right to ask, research, and examine every relationship (personal or professional) to the limits of good taste. That is my responsibility. If a person has kept themselves private, then I will temper my interaction with them accordingly. If I want to get to know the person, I will. If I feel I need more information before engaging in any sort of business project with them, I’ll tell them. How they respond will dictate how things progress.

A great deal of Second Life residents and businesses are fringe or unpolished. But there are also actual professionals that work and play within the format. Generally they’re not loud, showboating posers. They’re too busy doing stuff to care about make-believe celebrity or fisking a handful of L$ out of consumers that are too lazy to become educated consumers. It’s a frontier society, so you have the shadows and the light.

But RL names and identities aren’t going to add anything to that pool that isn’t already there. That’s not how society works with new media. Not in SL. Not anywhere. A guy named Justin on twitter posts things his 70-something Dad supposedly says. It’s entertaining, so no one cares who Justin really is other than a few media types looking for a human interest story. But Justin’s brand reaches over a million people every time he tweets, not counting what goes viral when those people forward to others. Most of those million probably couldn’t even tell you that Justin was the guy’s name without checking first. They don’t care what his last name is — he entertains them. They don’t hand over anything to him he doesn’t earn with the name “Justin.”

There are a handful of cases where RL identities matter and they all have one thing in common: the point where something virtual finds its way into someone’s meat space life. At that point its the responsibility of the parties involved to engage in proper disclosure, or, if legal procedures are involved, for everyone to cooperate in good faith to resolve issues. Beyond that point, debates about credibility and the value of identity feel like distractions. Important theoretical avenues to pause and consider while we wander down Alpha Ralpha Boulevard, but not the crux of the matter.

The fundamental issue for me is the fact that most of Second Life is not ready for prime time because the format and company brand are not on par with what professionals demand of anything they invest their valuable time into. Before Linden Labs can seriously begin to float concepts into its user base on issues like identity and professional integrity, they need to get their own house in order, present themselves with credibility and professionalism, and show that they can offer a product that invites real professionals to the table. Until then, the theoretical discussions are that of a lot of small time vaudevillians dreaming of becoming Ziegfeld headliners. They’re distracted from the quality of their own offerings because the dreams of the big time shine too bright in their eyes.

I know a few people like Grace in-world who have the teeth and RL background — they can lay down resumes that would make your head spin. The vast majority of these people aren’t about putting their ego and their credentials on their forehead and making you call them Doctor. They don’t chase approval or applause. They certainly have little interest in the celebrity of a make-believe world. They want to explore, create, connect, develop on their own terms. And none of that requires their credit cards, their corporate resumes, or their driver’s licenses.

Their world. Their imagination. Their brand. Their value.

What do I think? I think virtual identity value is an important issue and it merits exploring, but I don’t want to stop holding Linden Labs’ heels to the fire and giving them a pass just because they’re trying to wedge us into the right corner.

Making us register identities, demanding our transparency, these issues aren’t about credibility. These are things that make us sexy to the business world on a consumer level. They want our information, our demographics, our names and our spending habits. And they’re right to want those things. They’re a business, they need collateral assets — and our consumer information is a big part of that.

But once we give it up, that’s the show. Our bargaining chips are gone. It’s all iPad downhill from then on. They give, we consume, and those are the options. There is a small window here for us to be smart consumers and leverage our value by protecting our identities and making them improve their products before locking us into billing cycles.

That’s the value this conversation isn’t addressing. Maybe I’m too cynical, but the more I see where the theoretical conversations take us, the less strength I see us consolidating as a community to demand a better product. That troubles me more than what the RL identity of the avatar next to me is, or what the credentials of the avatar that textured my shoes happen to be.

Have the distractions of intellectualism, drama, and indifference rendered the educated consumer a thing of the past? As such, is our only real value left that of how much we consume, how fast and how quietly we do so?

“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.

“The idea that a game is anything more than a game… You know, there are people who are basically unbalanced who are going to misuse a game and have bad results. If a golfer who insists on playing during a lightning storm gets hit by a stroke of lightning and is killed nobody says, ‘There’s golfers dying by the droves being hit by lightning!’ You can overdo what you really like, and if you’re unbalanced you go overboard.” ~ Gary Gygax

7th Circuit Upholds Prison Rule Forbidding Inmates to Play Dungeons and Dragons

Not even making that up.

“I hope we never live to see the day when a thing is as bad as some of our newspapers make it” ~ Will Rogers

How this works:

Headline: “How the latest trend/technology can KILL YOU!”
Story: Bad/stupid people do bad/stupid things they would have found a way to do anyway, but in this case used trend/technology.
Comments: More proof cousins shouldn’t marry.

Twitter is the new ebil. I’d defend it, but I got bullied into using it in the first place so I don’t feel that passionate about it. I defended video games, Prince albums, and the interwebs. The next generation gets this one.

Hat Tip: Sean

“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.