Virginia Heffernan - Opinionator - The New York Times (2024)

Reality television needs reformation.

As a longtime fan of even the louchest reality shows — “The Bachelor,” “America’s Next Top Model,” you name it — I never thought I’d say that. Reform, I long believed, would cost the vaudeville genre its freaky and subversive status as a fact-fiction hybrid. We’d lose all the surprises, comic and dramatic, generated by reality’s artful and mischievous line-walking.

But the suicide of Russell Armstrong, a middle-aged investor with financial problems who appeared as a rich middle-aged investor on “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” on Aug. 15, has convinced me otherwise. I should have said something sooner. The whole genre needs an overhaul. The longtime modus operandi of reality television has damaged the shows’ participants, the TV business and the public trust.
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More than two million travelers will board commercial airplanes today. Check-in kiosks. Sockfeet at security. Overhead storage.

Some passengers, hurtling through clouds, will prepare spreadsheets as if they’d never left their desks. Others will read Stieg Larsson or the Koran. Still others will morbidly contemplate the airborne-hunk-of-steel perplex. They may use Xanax or whiskey to mute concerns about gravity.

The lucky ones will sleep, undrugged. I watch the sleepers. I make a study of them. These are seeming mortals who, though in coach (in infantilizing seats complete with baby trays that trap them in their own refuse until mommy clears their place), conk out.
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Happy birthday!! With two exclamation points, as we do it on Facebook. It’s your birthday today, right? I send you many happy returns — and a wish that you are, if only for today, among the 750 million active Facebook users.

Yes, Facebook can be capricious and tyrannical and tedious, but the leviathan social network is the best thing that’s ever happened to birthdays.

Come to think of it, how did we manage birthdays, those nettlesome sources of narcissism and guilt, before the Internet? I’m trying to remember. It seems there was always a scale problem. Birthdays in analog times were over-celebrated (as for children or the powerful), or they were neglected (as for everyone else). It stung when people forgot your birthday, sure, but the shame of caring or, worse yet, reminding people to care about your birthday stung much more deeply.

I’m now convinced that if you’d asked me what I wanted for any birthday, or indeed for anyone else’s birthday, before 2007, when I joined Facebook, I would have said I wanted a mechanism that made it easy for people to wish one another happy birthday. In my fantasy app, celebrators of birthdays wouldn’t have to be seen craving attention, but they’d still have their presence on this third rock from the sun gratefully and annually acknowledged. At the same time, acquaintances and intimates wouldn’t have to go to heroic mnemonic lengths, or hire secretaries, to keep calendars marked and birthday greetings in the mail.
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If you have a child entering grade school this fall, file away just one number with all those back-to-school forms: 65 percent.

Chances are just that good that, in spite of anything you do, little Oliver or Abigail won’t end up a doctor or lawyer — or, indeed, anything else you’ve ever heard of. According to Cathy N. Davidson, co-director of the annual MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competitions, fully 65 percent of today’s grade-school kids may end up doing work that hasn’t been invented yet.

So Abigail won’t be doing genetic counseling. Oliver won’t be developing Android apps for currency traders or co-chairing Google’s philanthropic division. Even those digital-age careers will be old hat. Maybe the grown-up Oliver and Abigail will program Web-enabled barrettes or quilt with scraps of Berber tents. Or maybe they’ll be plying a trade none of us old-timers will even recognize as work. Readmore…

Mariah Carey and Barack Obama each had something to sell this week, and they made live videos to do it. Both videos bombed. Ms. Carey’s pitch on HSN, for tracksuits and other sundries from her fashion label, was too weird. Mr. Obama’s pitch on the networks for Congressional compromise wasn’t nearly weird enough.

Both impresarios made the same mistake. They failed to understand the shifting dynamics of the very small screen, and instead aimed to produce traditional TV spots. Spots like these nearly always misfire when they are played on the Web, where most people now see them. And analyze them. And satirize them.

What difference does it make if you don’t craft a message with its medium in mind? A world of difference. Readmore…

It’s extremely satisfying having just 20 friends on the new Google+.

Twenty simple, comprehensible, there-from-the-start friends. I know their first and last names by heart. To add their birthdays and e-mail addresses to my memory bank would require only a short afternoon with flashcards.

Twenty friends don’t exceed anyone’s capacity for caring. And because they’re so few, these relatively arbitrary 20 nonetheless appear to be of a far higher quality than hundreds of friends could ever be — and more real, by far, than the hundreds and even thousands of friends many now have on Facebook, that other social network.
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Some readers like to see portraits of authors they admire, study their personal histories or hear them read aloud. I like to know whether an author can spell. Nabokov spelled beautifully. Fitzgerald was crummy at spelling, bedeviled by entry-level traps like “definate.” Bad spellers, of course, can be sublime writers and good spellers punctilious duds. But it’s still intriguing that Fitzgerald, for all his gifts, didn’t perceive the word “finite” in definite, the way good spellers automatically do. Did this oversight color his impression of infinity? Infinaty?

Bad spellers are a breed apart from good ones. A writer with a mind that doesn’t register how words are spelled tends to see through the words he encounters — straight to the things, characters, ideas, images and emotions they conjure. A good speller, by contrast — the kind who never fails to clock the idiosyncratic orthography of “algorithm” or “Albert Pujols” — tends to see language as a system. Good spellers are often drawn to poetry and wordplay, while bad spellers, for whom language is a conduit and not an end in itself, can excel at representation and reportage.

For readers who find humanity in orthographic quirks, these are great times. Book publishers used to struggle mightily to conceal an author’s errors; publishers existed to hide those mistakes, some might say. But lately the vigilance of even the great houses has flagged, and typos are everywhere. Curious readers now get regular glimpses of raw and frank and interesting mistakes that give us access to unedited minds. Lately, in a big new memoir from a fancy imprint, I came across “peddle” for “pedal.” How did it happen?
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It took my husband and me eight months to conceive our first child. Much of that time was passed in bored agitation, like a long wait at a Verizon Wireless store. To pass the time, swap information, and quiet my mind, I turned to an online message board for women who are Trying to Conceive — TTC, one of the first message-board acronyms I learned. Then, rapidly, I learned the rest of the lingo known to the voluble and surprisingly large community of women who turn to the Internet to ask intensely personal questions: TWW (two-week wait), BFN (“big fat negative”) and OPK (ovulator prediction kit).

That was in 2004. The message board was corny, but also a revelation. The voices on it were provocative, frequently ingenious and charged with emotion (and emoticons). Practical tips (and scientific reports) were exchanged, and subject to critique. Friendships were struck — and some even materialized in three-dimensional places like bars. Women whose posts suggested distress were often treated to “good vibes” and virtual hugs. You knew you’d been hugged on a message board when your screen name was rendered in double and triple parentheses, like this: (((you))).

Not to get too misty, but the board format itself might deserve a nostalgic embrace. The Internet forum, that great old standby of Web 1.0., has become an endangered species.
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ONE recent Saturday my family had a small emergency, one that required the hasty packing of snacks and swimsuits, many Amtrak schedules and advanced logistics concerning car seats. Through it all there was a flurry of texts on BlackBerries and iPhones. It was the kind of weekend that makes me appreciate a nice tedious Monday morning meeting.

Because the emotions seemed haphazard — even to the adults experiencing them — the kids in the picture never received clear explanations of what was happening. One of the ways my son, Ben, who is almost 6, protected himself from the ambient anxiety was with Frisbee Forever.

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Imagine a sci-fi universe in which every letter, word and sentence is a commodity. Companies make money off chunks of language. Bosses drive writers to make more words faster and for less pay. Readers then pay for exposure to these cheaply made words in the precious currency of their attention.

You can get a glimpse of that world on the Web right now. Just take a sunny summer tour of a content farm like Associated Content or Answerbag. You can find these content farms in some quarters of the CNN and AOL sites, too.

Content farms, which have flourished on the Web in the past 18 months, are massive news sites that use headlines, keywords and other tricks to lure Web-users into looking at ads. These sites confound and embarrass Google by gaming its ranking system. As a business proposition, they once seemed exciting. Last year, The Economist admiringly described Associated Content and Demand Media as cleverly cynical operations that “aim to produce content at a price so low that even meager advertising revenue can support it.”

As a verbal artifact, farmed content exhibits neither style nor substance. You may faintly recognize news in some of these articles, especially gossip — but the prose is so odd as to seem extraterrestrial. “Another passenger of the vehicle has also been announced to be dead,” declares a typical sentence on Associated Content. “Like many fans of the popular ‘Jackass’ franchise, Dunn’s life and pranks meant a great amount to me.”
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