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Like, Sympathize, But Don’t Hate: How Social Media’s Enforced Positivity Is Making Us Dupes

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A couple of years back, we ran a post called “The 10 Things That Are Killing Indie Music in 2011.” It discussed various ways in which the world of indie music could be better, and generated what amounted to a heap of attention for Flavorwire at the time, also stirring a healthy debate in the comments section (all of which sadly got nuked when we switched over to Facebook comments). Inter alia, several commenters took me to task for being “negative,” asking why I didn’t write something positive about the world of music instead of criticizing it. And, y’know, sure, why not? A couple of weeks later, I wrote “10 Things That We Love About Indie Music in 2011.” It generated precisely one-tenth of the traffic the first post did, proving neatly that for all people’s stated good intentions, negative pieces were a whole lot more popular on the Internet than positive ones. Or so it appeared, anyway. … Read More

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Web

The Worst Part of the “Diane in 7A” Hoax Wasn’t the Deception

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I am one of those terribly smug people who always suspected that last week’s Diane in 7A thing was fake. I should say I am usually credulous about these things. I was totally taken in by that Jimmy Kimmel twerking video, for example. But the level of detail in this guy’s tweets — I’m not using his name, let’s all forget it immediately — was a red flag in itself. I didn’t believe that 7A was an aisle seat, and I also didn’t believe anyone would answer notes passed to them on a plane by a stranger. Particularly not, I thought, hostile ones from strange men. In “Diane’s” place I would have ignored him, mostly out of reflex. My default, even after a lifetime of being known as a mouthy woman, is never to escalate. … Read More

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Web

OK, Internet: Enough With the JFK Assassination Exploitation

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“JFK blown away, what else do I have to say,” wrote the Long Island poet William Joel in his 1989 epic “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” as a sort of bridge from one era (the age of innocence) to the modern age we’re living in (“the fire,” if you will). The moment when the president was gunned down in his car on a Dallas street was, in the eyes of Joel and millions of others, the end of one era and the start of a new, scarier one. What else did anybody need to say? Well, if you walk into any Barnes and Noble, you realize that a whole lot of people have a ton of things to say, evidenced by the fact that Kennedy, his presidency, his family, and his public assassination pretty much get their own section. … Read More

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Web

Let’s Stop Pretending Twitter Etiquette Exists

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This morning, Salon ran a piece from Edward Champion about the dreaded subtweet. If you don’t know what the subtweet is — it’s quite possible you don’t, and that’s something those of us in the very insular and incestuous New York media world forget very often — it’s when you basically make fun of someone on Twitter but don’t include their name or Twitter handle. Presumably, they won’t see it. (Of course, people often do, weirdly enough.) … Read More

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Television

How Not to Live-Tweet Your Favorite Television Show

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The results from the first week of Nielsen Twitter TV ratings (a surprisingly new-media measuring metric for the decidedly old-school company) are in, and they’re hardly surprising: Scandal topped the list, with a “unique audience” of 3.6 million from 712,000 tweets. And I’ll tell you this much: there are nights where it seems like all 712K of them are on my timeline. Look, I get that everybody loves Olivia Pope and her smart/soapy badassery, and that the social media experience has become part of the show’s appeal. But can we all think about upping our “live-tweeting” game, just a little bit? … Read More

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Television

Celebrities on Twitter Are Just as Sad About the ‘Breaking Bad’ Finale as You Are

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It ended last night. We always knew there would be a day when we could no longer rely on the White family to stress us out more than our own families do. The fact that Breaking Bad is now definitively over, after five pretty much perfect seasons (thank you, Vince Gilligan, for knowing that some things, however hard to admit, have to end), is something we’re all contending with. Last night and this morning, celebrities did the same thing you did: they turned to Twitter to announce their heartbreak. … Read More

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Web

Jonathan Franzen Is Wrong Again: Why Twitter Is Great for Writers

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I need to start with an admission: I’m not on Twitter. You’ll probably think me naïve for thinking I can write about it with any authority without yet having been seduced by its promise of an instant and presumably attentive audience. I think the opposite to be true. My distance allows for at least the semblance of objectivity, and in any case, I’m no Twitter neophyte. There are multiple Twitter users whose feeds are so striking that I have them bookmarked and visit them daily. I know how it works. … Read More

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Web

Twitter Verification Is the Internet’s Gated Community

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Twitter’s verified badge — a tiny white check-mark surrounded by a blue ribbon-shaped circle (as if to say, “Congratulations! You are important!”) — quickly became a status symbol. When the site started rolling out the feature as a way to determine who was a real famous person and who was just a super-fan posing as a celebrity, it was an easy way to immediately separate the important Twitter users from the average user who was tweeting jokes about his or her lunch. Soon, media outlets and their employees became verified (mostly in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy and the Boston bombings, which saw loads of unsubstantiated rumors spread by several amateur news junkies). The process is a mystery — one cannot simply apply for a verified account. Which is why it’s confusing now that Twitter is rolling out a new feature that enables only verified users to filter the types of mentions they receive from unverified accounts. … Read More

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Film

‘Star Trek’ Writer’s Comments-Section Meltdown Proves Creators Need to Leave Angry Fans Alone

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Star Trek: Into Darkness is the second-highest-grossing film in that series to date (behind only the 2009 reboot), and with an 87% aggregate rating at Rotten Tomatoes, one of the best-reviewed. But it was met with far greater ambivalence among the Star Trek fan community, where its half-assed political commentary and lazy shoplifting of Wrath of Khan iconography (not to mention the filmmakers’ weird obsession with keeping that angle under wraps) left a bad taste in the mouths of many Trekkies; in fact, at last month’s Star Trek convention in Las Vegas, a fan poll deemed Into Darkness the worst Star Trek film to date. (And these people saw The Undiscovered Country.) On the fan site Trekmovie.com, Joseph Dickerson wrote an editorial about the current state of the series, titled “Star Trek is broken — here are ideas on how to fix it.” And then screenwriter Roberto Orci, who co-wrote the last two films, showed up in the comments section. You can imagine how well that went. … Read More

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