11

The Medium Decamps

By Virginia Heffernan

The Medium was born as Screens, a blog that got started almost exactly three years ago, in June 2006, with this post. As a TV critic for the Arts section of The Times, I wanted to try to make sense of the brand-new phenomenon of online video — but not the technology or the business of it. The content of it. Would YouTube feature sitcoms, dramas, reality, talk shows — or whole new forms, unknown to the networks?

The blog became The Medium when I started writing a weekly column about Internet culture with that name for the Sunday magazine in October 2007. Since the column started, I’ve used the Medium blog periodically to explore questions raised by columns, as well as to post unusual video, or video that makes a point about the direction of online culture.

But now the blog is morphing once again. Beginning soon, this link — themedium.blogs.nytimes.com — will redirect users to ArtsBeat, the rising Times arts blog, where I’ll now be contributing digital-content criticism and occasional news dispatches, to go along with the “culture news and views” on offer there. Does this mean online content is finally sharing a stage with the likes of film and TV — and theater, opera, painting, sculpture, architecture and the real arts? Maybe not exactly. But we’re getting close.

So look for my byline over at ArtsBeat. And find The Medium column every week at nytimes.com/magazine, where you can leave comments, same as ever. Thanks to everyone for reading.

7

Lights! Camera! Inaction!

By Virginia Heffernan

Anyone who has followed fantasy football or an eBay auction at the office — and gotten away with it — knows that many of our everyday activities now look like work. Typing and scrolling and peering at a computer, you could be doing anything: e-mail, accounting, short-selling, browsing porn, buying uranium, getting divorced.

This odd accident of life online — the increasing visual homogeneity of our behaviors — may be a boon to procrastinators, hobbyists and multitaskers. But it has some victims. I don’t mean bosses concerned with productivity (who cares about them?). The crowd truly stymied by the merging of human activities are filmmakers. If fighting now looks like making up now looks like booking travel, as it does when people conduct their affairs online, how do film directors make human action both dramatic to viewers and roughly true to life?

In the past 10 to 15 years, Hollywood producers have devised various solutions. In the ’90s, filmmakers made a broad, corny character of the Internet, studding movies with close-ups of on-the-nose screen bulletins like “Unrecognized System Virus” (“The Net,” 1995) or “You Have Mail” (“You’ve Got Mail,” 1998). But movies about the Web soon lost their energy, especially as the novelty of communications technology faded. Now canny producers opt either to devise ways to recapitulate classical stagecraft in a digital environment — as when characters give soliloquies on cellphones (“The Insider,” 1999) — or to sidestep the fact of the Internet almost entirely (“The Sopranos,” 1999-2007).

Read the full story in the magazine.

27

Addressing Security Concerns on Mint.com

By Virginia Heffernan

In response to last week’s post about Mint.com, many readers posted comments saying there’s no way it can be secure. I contacted Aaron Patzer, the site’s founder & CEO. Here’s his reply:

First, Mint has bank-level data security. That means we have the same level of encryption your bank does, along with outside third-party verification through Verisign and Hackersafe. We also have routine security audits where so-called “white knight hackers” try to break into our system — they’ve never been successful. We also have bank-level physical security. Our servers are located in an unmarked secure building which requires a palm scan to gain entry. After making it past guards, you have to go through a “man-trap” where one door will not open until the other closes and you again have biometric access. Once you get inside, our servers are in a locked cafe monitored with 24/7 video surveillance. Get inside, and the racks themselves are locked. Break those open, and our hard drives are encrypted. It’s seven layers of protection. All that’s missing are the electrified floors…

Second, Mint is a read-only system. Even if someone managed to gain access to your account, they cannot move money around, your accounts cannot be drained. Mint is also an anonymous system. Read more…

6

Realism Minus Reality: iPhony Art

By Virginia Heffernan
New Yorker iPhone cover

On the latest cover of The New Yorker, good old Times Square comes to moody after-hours life, painted, as if with eye shadow, entirely on … an iPhone.

Jorge Colombo apparently whipped this thing off using Brushes, a $5 app that represents the latest digital end run around paint and paper. (The natural-media painting application boasts “an advanced color picker, several realistic brushes, extreme zooming and a simple yet deep interface.”)

This image does make me think of the Ashcan crowd, who (in the salty appraisal of Robert Hughes) “wanted paint to be as real as mud, as the clods of horse” — excrement — “and snow, that froze on Broadway in the winter.”

Of course, the work of Colombo and Brushes lacks the detail of the Ashcan painter. And also the paint. On the iPhone, paint is not as real as mud or snow; it’s not even as real as paint. Anyone want to discuss?

Here’s how he did it:

23

Home Economics

By Virginia Heffernan
HOME ECONOMICS

Not long ago, Aaron Patzer, the founder of a personal-finance Web site called Mint, posted an update to his Facebook page, marking a milestone for his company, which is based in Silicon Valley: “To celebrate our one-millionth user, we took the whole team to Napa for the day.”

Napa. Nice. I admire Patzer’s Facebook presence. It suggests that he leads a full life. He plans to head to Costa Rica for surfing and Spanish lessons. He ran a marathon. And on behalf of Mint, he will accept two 2009 Webby Awards in June. Mint also won second prize in the Edison Best New Product Award competition.

Mint absolutely deserved the awards — as well as the praise it has received from just about every quarter. The site helps you track how much money you have, how much you spend and how much you owe. Artfully designed, it comes off like a patient and discreet friend who knows your awkward financial secrets and stands by you anyway. “There are a number of people we’ve heard from that say Mint is literally the first thing they look at every single morning with their cup of coffee,” Patzer told me recently by e-mail. I’m not quite first-thing yet myself, but still: Mint opens on my desktop every weekday.

The service seems simple enough, though Patzer says there are five separate patents pending to the technology. All I know is that once you slip Mint the user names and passwords for your online accounts, the site collates your mortgages, bank accounts, credit and debit cards, I.R.A.’s, 401(k)’s and more. (Mint, which is connected to about 7,500 financial institutions in the United States, does not itself view or store the information.) Mint can also show trends in your cash flow. It sends you weekly financial summaries via e-mail, while also alerting you to anomalies like unusually high bank fees or sudden surges­ in expenses. Ordinarily, dealing with banks and credit-­card companies requires personal vigilance. With Mint, someone seems to watch over you. And that love comes free of charge.

Read more…

32

Hate at First Sight

By Virginia Heffernan
Kevin Van Aelst

There are scores of books, both serious and bogus, about the science of attraction. But the dynamic that pop psychology really should try to explain is revulsion. I mean the ferocious, amoral, hatred-at-first-sight that creates jaw-dropping spectacles on reality TV. On Bravo’s brilliant “Real Housewives of New York City” and on Oxygen’s lesser-known “Pretty Wicked,” instant enmity propels plots and derails lives.

Early reality shows borrowed plots from fiction: the end of innocence (“The Real World”), the dawn of romantic love (“The Bachelor”), the perils of greed (“Joe Millionaire”). By contrast, later-generation reality producers have recognized that capricious animosity, even when it seizes an otherwise unremarkable mind, is an exceptionally efficient source of dialogue, character and suspense.

Anyone who caught the recent bar-table showdown between Bethenny and Kelly on “Real Housewives,” the serial documentary about rich women, knows what I’m talking about. The scene, which was set in a Downtown Manhattan bar, belonged on Broadway: it showed the wonderfully rhythmic explosion of mounting aggression between two women, who, in spite of superficial similarities (both are pretty, sociable divorcees who live large), can’t stand each other.

Read more…

11

Finding Harmony in YouTube’s Cacophony of Sounds

By Virginia Heffernan
World MusicKevin Van Aelst

This spring, the radical dissonance at the madhouse YouTube was — for a moment, at least — subdued. Did you feel it? The cacophonous video-sharing site was briefly brought to harmony in March by a composer, animator and musician known as Kutiman. Born Ophir Kutiel in Jerusalem in 1981, Kutiman created a minor masterpiece with an online project called ThruYOU that makes both sense and music of YouTube’s warring tendencies of compartmentalization and community.

ThruYOU is an album of seven original songs, each built from dozens of fragments of video clips of (mostly amateur) musicians, selected from among the seemingly endless footage of music lessons and private recitals archived on YouTube. (You can watch and listen on Thru-You.com, Kutiman’s cleverly custom-designed site.) Over what must have been a grueling two months, Kutiman collected an array of striking sounds and images, some no longer than a split second, and pressed them into musical service. Each one now furnishes a note or two, or a groove or a sensibility, in Kutiman’s audiovisual medleys. He has put the fractured universe of musical YouTube in concert. The housebound noodlers of the world now miraculously jam together.

Music bloggers have praised Kutiman for effectively using YouTube as a musical instrument and striking a blow for freedom from corporatized pop music. The project, wrote Jon Newton on P2PNet, is “absolutely, 100 percent guaranteed to inspire artists around the world to produce art which has never been seen before and never could have been seen without the Internet.” Lawrence Lessig, the legal scholar and anti-copyright crusader, cited ThruYOU, which samples wantonly from the publicly available music on the Web, as a vivid lesson in why copyright law cannot hold on the Internet.

Read the full story in the magazine.

9

Afterthoughts on Commenting

By Virginia Heffernan

This is great. I’m especially grateful to everyone for enlightening observations about online commentary as a literary genre. (It’s not circadian or tedious, some of you pointed out; others suggested that it’s heckling, graffiti, truth-telling, community catharsis.)

Come on, though. Online commentary is not a political proposition to be for or against. Doesn’t everyone take for granted that it’s a big and important part of journalism now? And hey, does this particular topic really have to occasion a return to 18th-century arguments about the virtues of the Elites vs. those of the Common Man? If something in the original post steered us into that particular polemical rut, please accept my apologies.

Currently, I’m most drawn to @Norman’s idea that online commentary is most satisfying (for readers, anyhow) when it gives an answer to this question: “Am I ALONE in thinking this argument is stupid/sick/dangerous?” Maybe a good comments section comes to express and tease out the id of an article.

Seen that way, Anne Applebaum — in mentioning religious holidays — is clearly trying to say something about religion and religious identity. Commenters, no matter how brutal or uncivilized, are merely demanding that she own up to those references. That’s what makes some comments sections lively and almost dangerously interesting.

I really do love reading comments sections, even the bad ones, to see how an article or a blog post detonates and refracts in the commentary. It’s also kind of Greek-tragic to see a writer trip a wire that you know is going to cost him or her in the comments section; or sometimes it’s kind of cool to see a writer take that chance and try to make a new point anyway, even when commenters are going to drill into X or Y. That drama — among all the players in online journalism — is among the things I turn to the Web for.

128

Comment Is King

By Virginia Heffernan
Kevin Van Aelst

Anne Applebaum is an American political journalist living in Poland whose columns appear weekly in The Washington Post and on Slate. Her views are pro-free-trade and generally hawkish. A Thatcherite in the 1980s, and a supporter of Obama for president in 2008, Applebaum is stoutly pro-immigration, pro-intellectual and anti-torture. Last year Foreign Policy magazine declared her one of “the world’s most sophisticated thinkers.” In awarding the 2004 prize for general nonfiction to her book “Gulag: A History,” the Pulitzer committee called it a “landmark work of historical scholarship and an indelible contribution to the complex, ongoing, necessary quest for truth.”

But what does the analog world know? Online, readers see Applebaum and her work quite differently. To read The Washington Post’s comments section is to discover an outraged throng that insists she knows absolutely nothing. Not long ago, a poster named jbburrows pronounced Applebaum a “liberal fool.” Respondus described her as “a lapsed neo-con addict.” Lloyd667 on Slate wrote, “Anne gets just about everything wrong.”

Just about everything. You don’t say. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the commentary on Applebaum’s column — freely accessible on the Washington Post site — runs according to its own uncertain logic. Themes persist nonetheless. One is that the columnist, whatever her topic, is a “Zionist stooge liar” (in a commenter’s recent phrase). And while some readers applaud her approach to foreign policy, she is also subjected to anti-Semitic tirades when she’s not being acidly patronized.

Like no male columnist at The Post, Applebaum is regularly called “sweetie” and “dear” by commenters who disagree with her. At least one commenter worries that Applebaum’s mother must be disappointed in her for wasting her education; others slight her for being married to the Polish minister of foreign affairs; still others insist she should lose her job.

What commenters don’t do is provide a sustained or inventive analysis of Applebaum’s work. In fact, critics hardly seem to connect one column to the next. In spite of Applebaum’s hard-to-miss hints that she celebrates Christian holidays (“On Christmas morning, my husband found a CD of ‘The Greatest Speeches of All Time’ in his stocking”), conspiracy-minded commenters insist that she’s Jewish and that her Jewishness determines her politics. And even though she makes it plain that her worldview coalesced when she was reporting on Eastern Europe in the ’80s and ’90s, commenters almost never address the intellectual consequences of her analogies between the cold war and the war on terror.

Someone should be paying more attention, especially since online newspaper commenters as a whole seem to have (at least) the stamina, drive and spare time to become a cogent part of online journalism. But as it is, online commentary is a bête noire for journalists and readers alike. Most journalists hate to read it, because it’s stinging and distracting, and readers rarely plow through long comments sections unless they intend to post something themselves. But perhaps the comments have become so reader-unfriendly, in part, because of the conventions of the Web-comment form.

Read the full story in the magazine.

108

Let Them Eat Tweets

By Virginia Heffernan
twitterPhotograph by Kevin Van Aelst

Twitter — the microblogging service that lets you post and read fragmentary communications at high speed — is fun, but it’s embarrassing. You subscribe to the yawps of a bunch of people; they subscribe to your yawps; and you produce and consume yawps for the rest of your days. The me-me-me clamor brings to mind Emily Dickinson’s poem about the disgrace of fame, “I’m Nobody! Who are you?”: “How public — like a Frog — / To tell one’s name — the livelong June — / To an admiring Bog!”

Now that I inhabit the Twitter bog, though, I don’t complain. Twitter can be entertaining, and useful — and, really, who doesn’t like the illusion, from time to time, of lots of company? I have only lately begun to wonder whether I’d use Twitter if I were fully at liberty to do what I liked. In other words, I’m not sure I’d use Twitter if I were rich. Swampy, boggy, inescapable connectivity: it seems my middle-class existence has stuck me here.

These worries started to surface for me last month, when Bruce Sterling, the cyberpunk writer, proposed at the South by Southwest tech conference in Austin that the clearest symbol of poverty is dependence on “connections” like the Internet, Skype and texting. “Poor folk love their cellphones!” he said.

In his speech, Sterling seemed to affect Nietzschean disdain for regular people. If the goal was to provoke, it worked. To a crowd that typically prefers onward-and-upward news about technology, Sterling’s was a sadistically successful rhetorical strategy. “Poor folk love their cellphones!” had the ring of one of those haughty but unforgettable expressions of condescension, like the Middle Eastern gem “The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on.”

“Connectivity is poverty” was how a friend of mine summarized Sterling’s bold theme. Only the poor — defined broadly as those without better options — are obsessed with their connections. Anyone with a strong soul or a fat wallet turns his ringer off for good and cultivates private gardens that keep the hectic Web far away. The man of leisure, Sterling suggested, savors solitude, or intimacy with friends, presumably surrounded by books and film and paintings and wine and vinyl — original things that stay where they are and cannot be copied and corrupted and shot around the globe with a few clicks of a keyboard.

Nice, right? The implications of Sterling’s idea are painful for Twitter types. The connections that feel like wealth to many of us — call us the impoverished, we who treasure our smartphones and tally our Facebook friends — are in fact meager, more meager even than inflated dollars. What’s worse, these connections are liabilities that we pretend are assets. We live on the Web in these hideous conditions of overcrowding only because — it suddenly seems so obvious — we can’t afford privacy. And then, lest we confront our horror, we call this cramped ghetto our happy home!

Read full story in the magazine

5

Boogie Nights

By Virginia Heffernan

This is for everyone born since 1980. The big-mike audio, the amber-colored Super 8, the no editing, the rambling: this was the ’70s. Oh, and the sex. In memory of Marilyn Chambers, who died Sunday at 56:

8

That’s Life

By Virginia Heffernan
life.com

I’m completely hooked. The opulent, just-unveiled, still-in-beta Life.com — “Your World in Pictures” — is hands-down the Web’s greatest photo site — not just that exists, but that’s conceivable. It’s stunning.

Clearly Life has just been biding its time while Google napped on the Life photo archive and let it languish.

The new Life people clearly know they that the franchise’s real innovation lay not in its trove of photos but in its extreme curatorial skills. Given room, nifty ads from Rolex and the excellent life.com url, Life, in collaboration with Getty, once again presents photos — from all over, new and archival — in ways that will blow minds.

Take a look and see acute, illuminating photos of Phil Spector agape at his conviction (oh man); the Maersk Alabama lit up like a surreal party boat; and LOLCats style images you can decide are real or fake! Oh, also, on the homepage: “Would you rather see Harry Truman Blowing up a Dam or Salvador Dali on ‘The Ed Sullivan Show’?” That is a real question that I am still pondering over at Life.com. Stop by and help me make up my mind!

41

The YouTube Presidency

By Virginia Heffernan
I hate my iPhoneKevin Van Aelst; Town Hall Photograph by Scott Olson/Getty Images

Barack Obama looks good on YouTube — and on Joost, BarackTV, Eyeblast, DailyMotion, Hulu and nearly all the other online depots that play video of him. Sure, he comes off less well on Teleprompter President, a Web site devoted to Obama satire and bloopers. And several YouTube recutters made hay of the president’s seeming slight of the Special Olympics during his appearance on “The Tonight Show.” But the president’s overall virtuosity on the visual Internet is remarkable, and significant, as millions of people now behold, scrutinize and evaluate public figures chiefly in online video clips.

Playing well online is not simply a function of offline charisma. Unlike playing well on cable or on late-night talk shows, it takes not only performance skills but also an extensive personal production team. Having recognized the power of YouTube during the presidential campaign, when the BarackObamadotcom account uploaded more than 1,800 videos to the site, Obama now maintains an entire staff devoted to new media. Making your own videos pays off. Where a YouTube search for “George Bush” turns up mostly parody, TV news clips and gotchas (“George Bush idiot,” “George Bush shoe attack”), a comparable search for “Barack Obama” is stacked with videos approved and uploaded by the campaign or the administration. Users of YouTube may not recognize this. In the eclectic ­YouTube interface, all videos — the parodies and the propaganda alike — can simply looks like news.

Among the clips recently uploaded by the administration are events like Obama’s signing, on March 30, of a public-land-protections bill, an occasion that once might have appeared only on C-SPAN, if anywhere, with muffled sound and shuffling camerawork. In the hands of the Obama team, the video has Hollywood polish. Obama’s rousing speech, which had a vaguely Tennysonian start (“winter’s hardships are slowly giving way to spring, and our thoughts naturally tend to turn to the outdoors”), hardly dominated the front pages, but it made the “front page” of whitehouse, Obama’s YouTube channel. There’s always been intensive stagecraft in the American president’s daily rounds. Now there’s nonstop cinematography, too.

Since Obama was elected, the White House new-media-operations team has supplied YouTube with Obama’s “Your Weekly Address” videos, among other clips. The channel is regularly among YouTube’s most viewed and most subscribed. Beginning on Jan. 24, the president has appeared in various gilded White House parlors, speaking mostly about the economy. He eschews preamble, “God bless America” and other stock presidential rhetoric. In these clips, Obama usually starts with brisk optimism and then falls into a somber acknowledgment of the nation’s straits. Other times he runs the bad-good news in reverse.

Read full story in the magazine

3

Network for Abruzzo

By Virginia Heffernan

Aiutiamo l’Abruzzo, on Facebook, can be found here in English. Find links to news reports, some live blogging and specific ways you can help victims of the earthquake in Italy. The translation is awkward, but not terrible; you can contribute improvements. Or see the original here.