The Daisey Chain

On Friday I was in the writers' room for Aaron Sorkin's new HBO series, The Newsroom, when my colleague Gideon Yago -- who trolls the Internet even more fiercely than I do -- blurted out something like "Wow."

Gideon -- a one-man encyclopedia who worked at MTV and CBS news and reported from Iraq and Afghanistan -- does this several times a day, and sometimes it's about things I can't comprehend, like international finance.  But Friday's topic hit close to home -- especially since we're working on a show that has to do a tricky dance with truth and reporting and fictional entertainment.

What tripped up Gideon was the news that the esteemed NPR show This American Life was going to retract a story it had aired. The website was so clogged it took me about 15 minutes to get to the story.

Sounding a little like a parent about to tell his kids about a divorce, host Ira Glass wrote a blogpost starting with the unfortunate phrase:"I have difficult news."

In the days that followed, Mike Daisey, who most Americans had never heard of, went from a beloved cult truthteller to a nationally discredited fabricator. And again put what Stephen Colbert called "Truthiness" front and center stage.

Saddest Status Update Ever

“Jumping off the gw bridge sorry.” 

One of the many horrific aspects of the suicide of the Rutgers freshman Tyler Clementi was the fact that he posted his intentions as a Status Update on Facebook. To me this act epitomized the very worst of the distancing effect that the web has had, not just between one person and another, but a person and his or her true self. 

It's impossible to track the thought process that caused him to pause between the decision and the act long enough to type that up for all his friends in such an impersonal/personal forum. Did he want someone to find and stop him, as they say with many suicide attempts? Or did he simply decide to get the most attention for it, paying back his tormenters in the same public way? (They are now facing criminal charges). 

Tonight I attended  a screening of The Social Network, followed by a Q&A with my longtime friend, sometime employer, and unparalleled writer Aaron Sorkin. 

As the credits rolled, with the theater still dark, little flashes of light started popping up all over the room. People had whipped out their BlackBerrys and iPhones to see what messages they had missed during the one hour-57-minute running time. (Actually, one woman couldn't even wait that long; she took out her phone and started texting during the last five minutes of the movie. I went over to her seat and told her it was distracting. She seemed amazed at MY gumption.) 

Aaron entered at the back of the theater, and I pointed out the sea of phonescreens, and he said "I know. What's become of us?" 

Aaron kept his personal feelings about the Internet out of the movie

The Slipstream

In many things I was an early adopter -- CDs, Tivo, tragic Met fandom -- but I was a longtime avoider of Twitter.

Even though I knew Shaq and Justin and Lady Gaga were on there, the few times I saw tweets by people I knew, they seemed both embarrassing and time-consuming. Besides, Facebook, which I joined in fall 2007 partly to reconnect with the world during the Writer's Strike and just after my mom died, seemed a big enough sinkhole.

Then I started this blog, and several people I respect told me I had to tweet to get more traffic. Besides,