Michelle Cottle has written a piece for The New Republic on Sarah Palin’s public relations strategy that ends up making a far more interesting point about Facebook in the process:

Of course, unlike other categories of the rich and famous, political celebs (especially populist firebrands) cannot risk being seen as remote or out of touch. But here’s where Palin’s embrace of new media saves the day. Her perky, quirky tweets and chatty Facebook items make her fans feel as though they have a direct line to her—despite the oft-voiced assumption that Palin (like so many pols) does not write most (if any) of her own Facebook posts. Such is the beauty of social networking: It allows a public figure to avoid direct interaction with the public while promoting the illusion of personal connection and involvement.

Cottle’s writing drips with enthusiasm for the “genius” of this strategy. But I think this paragraph reveals a great deal more about social media than it does about Sarah Palin. The whole underpinning of this new kind of campaign is based on faking human interaction through things like Facebook, where its connections are inherently ephemeral and illusory.

I guess my question is—how true is this assertion about the connections we make on Facebook? Because if it’s true when it’s used in this way by politicians, isn’t it also necessarily true about the other connections we make on Facebook? This gets at one of primary reasons why I myself am on hiatus from Facebook at the moment. Very little of what I did while I was on it was actual communication with people. Mostly, it was about having the feeling of being connected to people by virtue of being privy to random tidbits about their lives that they chose to share. Once I came to realize how disconnected I actually was I grew disenchanted with the whole thing.

If Cottle is right about this, that what’s so innovative about this approach is the ability to manage a political campaign built entirely on false connectivity and the willingness of people to buy into a kind of self-delusion about how much they really matter, then “beauty” is just about the last word I can think of to describe it.

And if this is what’s at the core of social media interactions—that it’s not about interacting at all but more about giving ourselves the illusion of being connected to one another—then we need to rethink the kind of value we place on things like Facebook and Twitter.

Brando Skyhorse has some excellent advice for aspiring writers that he has garnered from the nineteen years he spent trying to get his first book published. This is one of my favorite points:

Work hard AND smart. It’s not enough to write 1,000 words a day IF you keep making the same mistakes. Diligence is only half the solution. The other half is evolution. Your writing has to evolve. It should look, sound, and read differently now than it did six months ago. That’s because your perspective as a writer should be different now than it was six months ago. You should be in a different place because you’ve been reading new writers, getting fresh perspectives on your work from new readers, and trying different things in your writing.

Updated to Add: A writer friend of mine asks whether or not this is a misleading suggestion. After all, if you write a thousand words a day, won’t your writing necessarily get by virtue of practicing your craft? I would agree that your writing can and does get better the more you write. But I think Skyhorse’s advice is still solid. Reading more writing is just as important as writing more often in the process of becoming a better writer, and I think that’s a point that’s not made often enough.

I’ve just finished reading an incredible article by Joshua Wolf Shenk that highlights the work of psychiatrist George Vaillant with the Harvard Study of Adult Development. The study followed (and is still following) the lives of 268 Harvard college kids from the time they were in college, most during the late 1930′s and early 1940′s, until their deaths. The article’s title, “What Makes Us Happy?”, hardly does it justice. It’s a sweeping epic of a piece. It discusses the history the study itself, the evolution and trends of psychoanalysis, the lives of men who took part, the personal life of George Vaillant himself, and what conclusions we can draw (and more often, what questions are raised) from the vast amount of data collected during the seventy-plus years that the study has been conducted.

It’s hard for me to pull only one passage that exemplifies its remarkable depth, but this one will do as well as any:

Can the good life be accounted for with a set of rules? Can we even say who has a “good life” in any broad way? At times, Vaillant wears his lab coat and lays out his findings matter-of-factly. (“As a means of uncovering truth,” he wrote in Adaptation to Life, “the experimental method is superior to intuition.”) More often, he speaks from a literary and philosophical perspective. (In the same chapter, he wrote of the men, “Their lives were too human for science, too beautiful for numbers, too sad for diagnosis and too immortal for bound journals.) In one of my early conversations with him, he described the study files as hundreds of Brothers Karamazovs. Later, after taking a stab at answering several Big Questions I had asked him—Do people change? What does the study teach us about the good life?—he said to me, “Why don’t you tell me when you have time to come up to Boston and read one of these Russian novels?”

The League of Extraordinary Writers looks into the question of whether steampunk is inherently dystopian:

Is Steampunk dystopian? Most of the time: no. But, it can be. At the end of THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE, we do get a glimpse of the present day world (at least the 1990’s) in this alternate time line. It’s depicted as a dystopia. Other Steampunk writers who extrapolate that past to the future may end up with a dystopia, too. However, most Steampunk—at least that I’ve read—focuses on the alternate past—the past as we wished it had been—and embraces the brash confidence and optimism of the Victorians. It was an age when Brittania ruled its empire, the Wild West was still wild, and technology and reason could solve anything.

There’s no easy way to tackle this question, particularly because steampunk itself is difficult to define. The debate is still raging over whether it’s purely an aesthetic or a genre, or any number of other things. It’s perhaps due to the difficulty of determining what steampunk is in any concrete way that the post on the subject largely dodges the question and instead diverges into talking about the forays steampunk has made into the mainstream.

As a matter of topic, whether steampunk is inherently dystopic hinges on a matter of perspective. An alternate imagining of the world, whether posited as historically in the past or hypothetically in the future, where the British still run their empire may sound like a good setting for an adventure—if you’re a white Anglo. If you were an Irishman or an Indian living under British rule, your perspective would undoubtedly be different. The same goes for the romantic idea of a Wild West that’s still wild. In theory, in the abstract, it sounds fun and exciting. But it probably wouldn’t be if you were the one getting slaughtered at places like Wounded Knee or if you were one of the Chinese workers building the transcontinental railroad.

This sentiment hints at often unmentioned aspect of the steampunk… err, subgenre: that it’s politically incorrect. It romanticizes a past filled with all the prejudices, injustices, and racism that inevitably arises in an imperialist system and which were exacerbated specifically because, not in spite, of the “brash confidence and optimism” of the Victorians. These issues are not always dealt with substantively. Actually, I find that steampunk works usually ignore them altogether. I don’t say this to damn steampunk. It’s fiction and it’s fantasy, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with indulging in fantasy as long as we recognize it as such. I do think it’s important though to acknowledge this fact when tackling the question of whether it’s dystopic.

The post concludes with this distinction:

In a dystopia, the characters fight against the world—whether it’s an oppressive government or a post-apocalyptic landscape. In Steampunk, the characters (in general) revel in their world, using technology, ingenuity, a bit of whimsy, and attitude to conquer it.

As a matter of tone, I think many works that are categorized as steampunk do feature protagonists with plucky optimism and a can-do attitude about technology. That, however, doesn’t necessarily disqualify it as dystopic. With that thought in mind, it’s interesting that it concludes with this thought when in the course of discussing the topic it went out of its way to lionize Scott Westerfield’s Leviathan.

For those not familiar with the work, Leviathan is an alternate history adventure story taking place in Europe at the outbreak of World War I. The two main characters are from opposite sides of the conflict, and they are both indeed optimistic—particularly about the odds of their respective sides winning the war quickly and decisively. This very optimism, however, belies just how horrific the state of their world is in. They’re both soldiers hurtling headlong into a bloody conflict that neither of them can either avoid or prevent. They’re coming to grasps with just how little control over the world they have and what (if anything) they can do about it. It’s too early to judge whether that makes it genuinely dystopic, not least of all because Leviathan is the first novel in a trilogy and we don’t yet know how the story will end.

I happen to agree that steampunk isn’t inherently dystopic. At the same time, I wouldn’t write off the question with such a definitively “no” answer. There’s a darker strain underlying steampunk works in how they depict their alternate worlds. It’s not always acknowledged or grappled with head-on, but it’s there in one form or another.

A year and a half ago, I did a short mockumentary on one John Schumer (played admirably by Andrew Heder) and his attempt to give up and cope without Facebook:

The idea behind “Giving Up Facebook” was that once you join Facebook it becomes such an integral part of your day-to-day life that leaving it is impossible.

So far though, my own experiences haven’t shown this to be the case.

A week ago I deactivated my Facebook account after months of deliberation. (I say “deactivate” because, as the New York Times reported, actually deleting your Facebook profile is something close to impossible). Not only did I not experience the pangs of withdrawal or adopt the myriad of bizarre coping mechanisms that Schumer uses, but I’m not sure I miss it at all.

I had switched over to Facebook from Myspace a couple months before I started school at the University of Arizona in 2006. At that time I was getting sick of the clutter that was encrusted into Myspace’s interface. Facebook’s design and layout was minimalist by comparison. Back then, it was designed specifically with college kids in mind. You had to be part of a school network just to sign up for it. So I dove into it head-first.

In the years since then, Facebook has undergone a number of changes. It’s been opened up to anyone who wants to join, for one, and it’s been opened to applications designed by third-party developers. Along with these developments came the newsfeed—long nicknamed the “stalker feed” for the way it aggregates information about what people on your friend list have been up to while on Facebook—that became the centerpiece of Facebook’s main page once you signed in.

All these developments made Facebook inundated with stuff. Some of it useful, most of it not, but always in massive volumes. This was definitely a turn-off for me but not a deal-breaker.

What really made me start considering getting off Facebook was how much time I spent on it versus how much I spent talking to people on it. Of the hundreds of people on my “friends” list, I hardly communicated with any of them on a regular basis. This turns out to be the norm for most users, but I had only come to terms with it recently. How many times did I log in to Facebook to start the day, only to blow through an hour scrolling through tons of aggregated information that had nothing to do with me? I realized that everyone I was actually friends with I communicated with on a regular basis by other means. So why spend all this time on Facebook?

I kept it for some time longer because I didn’t know where to put my photos (Facebook allows for an unlimited number of photo uploads for free), but once I had found a suitable substitute in the form of Webshots, I decided to finally give it a rest.

Aside from a handful of texts that I’ve received from people wondering where I’ve disappeared to, I haven’t thought about the fact that I’m not on there all that much. It’s kind of nice, truth be told. I still think Facebook is a useful tool for keeping in touch with friends, but if you’re not actively using it for that it becomes nothing but a time-sink. I may yet be back on it one of these days (the mockumentary, after all, asserts that any attempt to give up Facebook for good is doomed to failure), but for now, I’m good with living a Facebook-less life.

Continuing on from thoughts I shared about Twitter awhile back, Golnaz Esfandiari (via The Daily Dish) dumps a small lake’s worth of cold water on the notion of Twitter being a key component during the Iranian protests last year. In an article for Foreign Policy, he starts with an anecdote that sums up the public misconception of the phenomenon:

Before one of the major Iranian protests of the past year, a journalist in Germany showed me a list of three prominent Twitter accounts that were commenting on the events in Tehran and asked me if I know the identities of the contributors. I told her I did, but she seemed disappointed when I told her that one of them was in the United States, one was in Turkey, and the third — who specialized in urging people to “take to the streets” — was based in Switzerland.

The journalist’s reaction is all the more curious considering that, “Through it all, no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than Farsi.”

In other words, Twitter’s role in disseminating information within Iran during the protests was widely overstated.

This isn’t to say that Twitter didn’t have a huge impact on the Iranian protests. The Iranian Revolution and the Twitter Revolution may not be the same, but the latter has largely shaped our views in the West on the former. The level of online activity on the subject of the Iranian elections made it a familiar topic to many of us looking on from outside Iran in a way that it might not have otherwise.

But as far as the actual usefulness of Twitter itself goes, I remain a firm skeptic.

Now up on Canted: reviews for How To Train Your Dragon (if you haven’t seen it yet, go now—right now) and Kick-Ass (if you haven’t seen it yet, don’t unless you really have nothing else to do today). Valerie also waxes philosophical about Jack Bauer and shares some InterWeb finds about Glee and Bob Odenkirk.

I’d like to add on to what I said in my review of Kick-Ass by talking about some of the other issues at work in that film, beyond the basics of what does or doesn’t make it a good movie (and more so the latter, in my opinion). A friend of mine has informed me that the film is based on an original comic book series and is faithful adaptation of it as far as the overall story-arch goes. I’ve never read the original comic book series so I can’t comment on that one way or the other. My review is therefore from the perspective of someone who knows nothing about the original comic.

With that out of the way, let me say—by way of introduction—that I was a victim of false expectations. By and large Kick-Ass has been marketed as a silly movie, a comedy with crime fighting mixed in for good measure (“Superbad with costumes” is the way I worded it in the review). It’s not. After the first third or so of the movie, the comedy takes a backseat to the action and only comes up again in places where it feels either ill-timed or out of place. It doesn’t even trend dark comedy because the comedy clashes instead of compliments the action. It’s just dark.

Let me rephrase that: it’s darker than dark. When I first walked out of the theater and was thinking of a way to sum it up, the word I seized upon was “disturbing.” The more I think about it, the more that fits. Kick-Ass is legitimately one of the most disturbing films I’ve ever seen for a number of reasons. I don’t think I’m ruining anything for those of you who haven’t seen it yet by telling you that the first scene is of a would-be superhero trying out a pair of self-fashioned wings and accidentally committing suicide by leaping from a tall building while testing them out. Our first person narrator then callously remarks that the person who’s just died is not him, it’s “some Armenian guy with a history of mental health problems.” Already we’re embarking on some pretty dark territory.

Then there’s the character of Mindy Macready, played by the thirteen-year-old Chloë Grace Moretz. I remember having a discussion in one of my Media Arts classes about the scene in The Dark Knight when Harvey Dent, having become Two Face, threatens a child with a gun. If anyone found that unnerving, then Kick-Ass would cause a psychological meltdown. The very first scene that introduces Mindy is of her with her father (played by Nicolas Cage) as he trains her to take a bullet with a bulletproof vest on. Aside from what they’re actually doing, it’s something of a heartwarming father-daughter scene. It doesn’t change the fact that he’s shooting her at point blank range with a pistol.

This, of course, doesn’t even hold a candle to later scenes when she’s doing some Tarantino slice-and-dice on the bad guys, or when she’s likewise getting the living crap beat out of her by said bad guys. When you then take into account that her killing sprees are an act of revenge that her father has made her believe are necessary, you have a sordid picture of wanton child manipulation and abuse.

Then there is the world of the film itself. Gotham City may have been bleak, but there were beacons of hope here and there. In Kick-Ass there’s not only no hope, but there’s not even beacons. Lawful authority figures aren’t just ineffectual. They’re non-existent. Aside from a friend Cage’s character has inside the police department that gives him insider tips and the occasional sirens in the distance, you will never see cops in action. They’re all either incompetent or in the pocket of the mob. This means you can stab, steal, and kill without having to ever worry about the consequences. From the school yard bullies to the mob bosses running the city, everyone gets away with everything. You can be a vigilante with a Myspace (who the hell still uses Myspace?) and nobody will stop you. (There’s a throwaway line in the film about changing the ISP address so it can’t be tracked, but I feel like in today’s age of technology there would still be a work-around if you needed one.)

Ordinary citizens aren’t much help either. In many of the scenes depicting crimes in progress, the film repeatedly cuts away to people looking on and not helping. In Kick-Ass’s (now there’s a weird possessive proper noun) first major fight, everyone reaches for their cellphones, but not to call for help. Instead they all try to record what’s happening. It then becomes one of the most watched videos on YouTube. People are obsessed with superhero and celebrity culture to the extent that they’re detached from the actual world of crime and violence.

The extent of this detachment is what makes the world of Kick-Ass truly dystopic. From the beginning the movie suggests that any effort to take the law into your own hands and stand up for yourself is doomed to failure. You’ll inevitably be beat up, discarded, and hurt or endanger those who care about you most. It’s better to just stand back and watch because no one will ever help you, and those that do will have ulterior motives. But by the end, the movie makes it clear that standing up for yourself is the only option. The world is so awful and uncaring that the only recourse is the extreme, the violent, and the near impossible. It suggests that since there are no moral boundaries, you will only hinder yourself if you hold yourself to them.

Like I said, it’s a dark, dark world.

Where the film takes a leap though is when it expects you as the viewer to buy into this detachment as well. It expects you to not care about the fact that the police are corrupt and useless, that a young girl is warped into a killing machine, that people are pathetic and self-serving. If there’s any consolation to the so-called ultra-violence of Kick-Ass, it’s that it’s so dystopic that it nears surreal proportions. The fact that it never addresses the meaning of justice or morality (it never seems to so much as cross any of the minds of the main characters) feels like a function of poorly written script crafted by someone who thought such ideas were too boring to be given screen time, rather than the immorality or amorality of the movie world itself.

Such a recourse is hardly satisfying though, and no matter how you work through it, Kick-Ass leaves an uncomfortable taste in your mouth.