“This one’s a classic,” Old-Timer Al said to us, sternly examining our VW Bus parked across three spaces in the Wal-Mart lot, yellow in the sun as a sea lion carcass. Tendrils of rust crept from the wheel wells. It was far from a classic.

Kevin responded, “sure is”.

“All we need to do is sign over the title and it’s yours,” Cody said.

“I couldn’t let you boys do that,” Al said to us. “How much do you want for her?”

“Seriously, you can just have it for free if you take over the title.” All we wanted was to be rid of this damned bus, which we’d bought off an acquaintance a month earlier for $800. Still, Al wanted to haggle.

“Okay, how about $300″ Cody said.

“$150″ Al said. “It’s a deal.”

We’d finally found a taker. Stuck in the tiny town of Yreka, ten miles south of the Oregon-California border, we were selling our only form of transportation for $150, and it was the best news of the day. Kevin, Cody and I were in the last legs of a two-week tour of the Pacific Northwest with our band Mule Train, which I’d formed a year before, in 2004. After a decade of writing songs and playing bars and house parties solo, I had finally developed the self-confidence to form a band. We were an unlikely crew: myself, a 27-year-old coffee-shop worker, pursuing a musical career as my thirties loomed. Kevin, our drummer, was a hippie with an unlikely love of punk rock, who traipsed around his commune in flip-flops and ripped-up hand-me-downs. My co-worker Cody was the bassist, an imposing gentle giant who had never played an instrument before, who was chosen more for his personality than his musical skill.

We had garnered a decent following in our home town. Our amalgam of folk and punk rock won over crowds of college students, grizzled old punks and folk-listening hippies alike, and we’d even opened at the largest club in town, a cavernous 1000-seat hall. After a mere year of paying our dues, we had a full-length CD, satisfyingly covered in shrink-wrap. At the CD release show that launched the tour, we sold 200 copies before embarking on a ten-stop tour up and down the legendary hotbed of indie rock that was the Pacific Northwest. We were feeling pretty damn good about ourselves: that last night in our hometown, as I played guitar before a swirling mass of sweaty, dancing bodies, I felt vindicated. I felt, for once, that I’d made the right choices with my life. I felt like a rock star.

The next night we played the first show of our tour in Eugene, OR, for an audience of 10. We wrote it off as a first-night fluke. Next up was two nights in Portland: the first found us clanging loudly through a busted PA for studying students at an anarchist coffee shop, the second night at an empty bar underneath a freeway overpass. Off to Olympia WA, the birthplace of Sleater-Kinney, where we performed to a disinterested waitress in a vegan cafe. By this point, Cody and Kevin had resigned themselves to gallows humor, joking about the show turnouts.

I wasn’t laughing.

Our next destination was Seattle, another bar under a highway overpass. The tour reached its lowest point the following night, at a honky-tonk in a small town outside of Seattle. The audience emptied out after our second song, because the meth-addled sound guy couldn’t stop the feedback peeling from the P.A. speakers.

Our trip came to an end after a marathon driving stint through the mountains of Southern Oregon. Racing past the Oregon border, driving up a steep incline, the bus let out a bleating wail as we lost power to the engine. The transmission died as the August sun settled into 10am convection mode. Kevin and I got out and stood on the side of the road. My hangover was reaching full blossom, the hot gravel radiating nausea back at me. Cody slid underneath the bus to investigate.

As I stood by the side of the highway, I thought about how I’d convinced Cody and Kevin to go on tour: sitting on the back deck of Kevin’s commune, saying, “if we want to take ourselves seriously as a band, we have to go on tour. I’m not interested in being a big fish in a small pond.” Kevin had been up for it, more for the adventure than for career advancement, while Cody was dubious, but relented. Now I was having hung over panic attacks on the side of a rural highway while Cody tried to figure out why our van had died.

“I think it’s the tranny” Cody yelled. “Shit,” I responded. “Think we can push it into second and get into town?” Cody thought we could. Kevin and I pushed the bus off while Cody grinded the clutch, and we were gone–Kevin and I jumping in, Little Miss Sunshine-style, heading for Yreka at 20 miles an hour.

We exited at the first turnoff and sped into the nearest lot, belonging to a giant strip-mall including a Wal-Mart, fabric store, a Subway, and a DMV.

We came to an inelegant stop across three parking spots, sat there, and assessed our situation. “Hurting,” Cody said. “Hurting” was Cody’s response to most things. Over the course of the tour, I had come to resent the fake adjective, applied every time we entered an empty bar with our unnecessarily large amps. But this time, we agreed. “Yep, hurting,” Kevin said. “Totally fucking hurting,” I agreed.

We locked the van and walked to the pay phone to find a mechanic in the yellow pages. Flipping through the thin volume, we settled on Dave’s Auto Repair. I called from Cody’s cell phone. “Yeah, we’ve got a ’73 VW Bus with a busted transmission, how much would it be to replace it?” “We can get a replacement tranny next Tuesday for your vehicle. It’ll run you $1400.” “Next Tuesday?” I asked, clarifying that it would, indeed, take a week to get a replacement. “Yeah, next week.”

It was clear to me that we had to cut-and-run: we had $400 between the three of us, jobs we were expected at, and we sure as hell weren’t going to stay in Yreka for eight days. We’d find a ride home–somehow–but that bus wasn’t going anywhere. Clearly, we had to abandon it. Kevin and Cody were less eager, but acknowledged that there was no other option. We couldn’t leave it, though: steep fines would eventually make their way to Cody’s mailbox. We had to find someone to take the title.

Giving away a vehicle is harder than it seems. For two hours, we walked up and down the aisles of Wal-Mart, trying to find someone who would to take a bus with a busted transmission. People responded as if we were offering bargain-basement meth cooked in the dumpster out back.

Granted, we looked unsavory: me, tattooed and emaciated, in overly tight pants; Kevin, in a ripped t-shirt and sandals, with a beard that looked like it might sprout shoots of wheat grass; and Cody, a hulking 6’2″ Argentinian in a sea of white people. We approached couples, teenagers, old folks–most of them wouldn’t give us a chance. A middle-aged white trash couple listened. The husband was game, but his wife just scowled at us. “Ed, the last thing we need is another broke-down car.” An 18 year old high school dropout showed some interest, but he became uneasy. “I don’t think I can take it. My Mom would get pissed. Good luck,” he said to us in the fish and tackle aisle. “No, dude, she won’t mind,” Cody argued, as if he knew the kid’s mother. “No, she’d be pissed,” the kid said as he turned and walked away.

Two hours later, we were getting suspicious looks from the Wal-Mart staff and were no closer to getting rid of this bus. It was then that we were approached by our knight in ruffled flannel: the man we’d later refer to affectionately as “Old-Timer Al”. Al and his wife had been watching us since we arrived, and she had finally forced him to come over and investigate.

“You boys have been walking around here for hours. What’s the problem?” he asked. We explained our situation.

He nodded his head and invited us into his RV. “Let’s see if we can figure out a solution,” he said. We were wary, unaware of America’s nomadic Wal-Mart underground. Al and his wife were members of a class of retirees who sell their houses, buy RV’s, and travel the country, wandering from one Wal-Mart parking lot to the next, establishing small societies in big-box-store parking lots. As we entered the RV, we were greeted by Al’s wife. “Al, I’m not going out there today,” she said. “Elaine’s just sitting there on her lawn chair.She cheats at poker–I saw her doing it last night!”

She offered us some lemonade. Kevin, Cody and I, stinking of beer-soaked couches and smoky bars sat in the well-appointed RV of our hosts, as they told us their lives’ stories: they were from the Southwest, after retirement they sold their house to travel around the country in their RV, living as strip-mall vagabonds. Their kids thought that they were crazy, but they didn’t care.

“I used to have a bus just like that back in the early ’80s,” Al said to us. “Great,” replied Cody. Morale was clearly low if Cody was responding indifferently to a man offering to help us out. Cody was the face of the band–the member willing to chat with whoever came up to the stage after we finished playing, no matter how drunk or insane they might appear. “Sure did,” Al went on, “same color as the one you have there.”

He waxed on about his old ’70s VW bus. I tried to respond as enthusiastically as I could, avoiding the defeated faces of my band mates. In our small hometown, we felt like a big deal. We’d released our first CD, 14 songs that I had written, 14 songs pressed on a thousand plastic discs. A thousand plastic discs the three of us had spent $3000 on manufacturing. Now, 800 of those CD’s were baking in the back of a broken-down VW in a dead-end mountain town. I sipped the lemonade, and a sour pit stuck in my throat.

“Now why do you want to get rid of that bus again? You can’t do that! It’s a classic, I’m telling you!” Kevin explained our situation to Al once again. “Well, let’s go take a look at it.”

As we stood there, watching Old Timer Al assess the van, haggling with him over the free bus and agreeing that it, was, in fact, a classic, I just missed my coffee shop job that I hated, the dank bedroom that I would cocoon myself in and drink and smoke and write songs, the reliable audience of friends and acquaintances and hometown fans that would come out to every show and dance, not merely glower at us from the corner of the bar. Cody turned to me and said, “the cafe doesn’t seem so bad right now.” I nodded.

“You know there’s a DMV over there, right,” Al asked. “Sure do,” Kevin said. “We have the paperwork right here. All we need to do is sign over the title and it’s yours.” Finally, Al relented.

“Okay,” Cody said, “now we just have to find a way to get home.” I called every friend and acquaintance in Northern California who owned a large vehicle, and finally reached our friend Chris in Sacramento, who was willing to pull a ten-hour round trip in his pickup. When he arrived that evening, we emptied the bus and loaded our instruments, amps, sleeping bags, backpacks, and boxes of Mule Train CD’s into the bed of his truck. It was so packed, I worried it would overturn.

Chris drove us into the pitch-black Sierra Nevada mountains, four men cramped into the front cab of a Ford pickup on a five-hour drive through the black void. A sliver of light from the moon reflected on the still lakes.

As we sat in silence, I stared at the dark outlines where the lakes gave way to mountains, towering on an inhuman scale. The world seemed unfathomably large, and we knew very little of it.

A couple more thoughts that came to mind since I wrote this post for Shareable about The Daily, and how it completely misses the point of the iPad and social media.

The question you’ve got to ask with any new technology is, what problem does it solve? The problem the iPad solves is 1) most of our reading is now done on a screen and 2) reading large bodies of text while sitting at a computer fucking sucks. Computers still suffer from the vestigial design limitations of the unwieldy terminals that spawned them–they’re devices to enter commands and data into, not read on. Sure, they’ve evolved to do other things (poorly), but they’re still only a stopgap solution for consuming text/audio/video online. The iPad, with its tactile interface and slim, magazine-like form factor is an imperfect but improved device for reading text on the Internet.

So what problem does The Daily and Conde Nast’s apps-as-glorified-PDF’s solve for the user? They offer less functionality than comparable news websites, which already look great in Mobile Safari. Instapaper already offers the definitive offline reading solution (as far s I can tell, The Daily doesn’t even have an offline mode, rendering it particularly pointless.) The problems they theoretically solve exist entirely on the publishers’ side: it’s easy to repurpose content, control its use, and cling to the old media business models. But in what way are any of these things advantageous to the user? They’re not, yet the publishers are charging a premium for a substandard product that is easily bested by free web content through Mobile Safari and cheap or free archiving or aggregation apps like Flipboard, Instapaper and Reeder.

Aside from Murdoch’s octogenarian peers who bring iPads to Davos but don’t know how to use them, for whom is The Daily compelling or useful?

Just got back from a group workshop meeting for 2nd Story. If you’re not familiar, 2nd Story is a theater collective I’ve been working with that produces readings at wine bars around Chicago. The process is what sets it apart from other reading series: 2nd Story pull actors and directors from the theater world to workshop pieces of short narrative nonfiction with writers, to craft the stories and their performances into something that people at a wine bar will actually want to engage with while imbibing.

It’s challenging for me: frustrating, rewarding. All of my prior performance experience comes from playing in bands, where the only verbal interaction with the audience was short quips in-between songs. While performing the songs, the guitar served as a crutch separating myself from the audience, and I was performing practiced, relatively polished songs with a group of other people. We were delivering loud, complete products with clearly delineated beginnings and ends, barreling over chatter and indifference with unnecessarily loud amps.

Performing a ten-minute short story, alone on a stage with a spotlight on you, there’s none of that contract that separates band from audience; instead, you’re having an intimate experience with an audience that demands you respect the give and take of the room. You need to be agile and comfortable enough with to riff off the audience and the unexpected, to feel the ebbs and flows of the room in the moment. A band has to consider this, but is far less agile: once you’re locked into a song, you’re committed to finishing that song, and there’s little course-correction to be made.

If they’re not going your way, you steamroll your way through it. In a reading, it’s a much more delicate give and take with the audience. This is terrifying. From the writing standpoint, it’s also challenging: I’m still finding my voice for narrative nonfiction, a far different form from feature articles or half-baked culture punditry or satirical riffs or fantastic/satirical short fiction, all forms I’m a lot more familiar and comfortable with. Certain skills can be transposed, but there are a whole load of new ones to develop. Particularly, writing for a live audience, not readers.

It’s tough and scary and frustrating, but worthwhile. I also suspect that a lot of what I’m getting from this can be used to inform my other writing. Seems like in the current new media/publishing climate, honing your writing so it can hold the attention of a groups of drunks in bars, well, that’s a skill that would serve me well to consider when writing for the web audience.

Anyway, this is already TL;DR, but a few notes from today’s meeting about writing with performing in mind, that I found particularly useful:

Have an hypothetical, ideal audience member in your mind that you are specifically speaking to—I know this is a writing trick—to have a hypothetical reader you’re writing for. It’s one that I’ve deployed in the past. I hadn’t thought about doing something similar when performing for an audience.

Not every response to an unexpected audience action needs to be a witty zinger. A genuine response is just as valid and effective.

Live in the scene – create eye contact with the character you’re speaking to, when speaking those lines – have first scene and last scene memorized – memorize first sentence of each paragraph

Trust your instinctual reaction to the stimuli around you. Unless of course, your immediate instinctual reaction is, as it is for me: “FLEE!”

Crossposted from my Tumblr, Eventual Ghost

I’m often amused, tickled, etc about things I come across while walking around Chicago, IL. This is a collection of pics I’ve too-long kept hidden on the private Facebook.

This could work in a few cases—tween-pop stars such as Miley Cyrus that command singular devotion from their fans—but not for mature music listeners with a large collection of artists in their library. What the new band app craze reminds me of more than anything is the failed enhanced CD initiatives of yore, in which labels were going to add value to physical CD’s by forcing anyone who played music on their computers to interface with it inside of a clunky, frustrating Flash or Quicktime file that offered the exact same content you’d find on the artist’s website.

The headline zooming around the blogs right now is correct on one thing: the album is dying*. But the statement should be more along these lines: the album is dead, long live the playlist. Or long live Random Shuffle. Or iTunes Genius. Trying to create a new product that locks users into one app, particularly given the iPhone’s unscalable app interface and Apple’s insistence on not allowing third-party apps to run in the background, is just another in a long line of failed attempts by the music industry to create a new bundled product that only a handful of obsessives would want.

• And yes, I realize that such a statement sounds contradictory coming a few days after I announced that I’m working on a new album, and to that I say: the album isn’t quite dead yet. The writing’s on the wall, but as long as there are olds who still have some emotional connection to the concept of the album, there will remain a continually shrinking market for it. In addition, the infrastructure just isn’t there to sell and promote single songs or short EP’s for an independent, unsigned artist–to get your music on iTunes, Amazon mp3, CDBaby, etc, it still has to be delivered in album form. This will no doubt change in the next few years, as the emotional attachment to the album continues to fade (I can’t remember the last time I had the desire to listen to a full album, and I’m 33, not 19,), but it’s certainly not going to change in six months or a year.

Take the music industry. You come closer to spelling out where it’s going to go.

A: Music’s already there. We don’t have to guess about what the future of music is; we can already see it. It’s interesting as an analogy. We wrongly correlated, or equated, the music industry with the record labels. It now turns out in fact that the labels are now the least important part. If you look at the rest of the industry now, from the bands to the fans from Apple to tour promoters, everyone’s doing OK, except for the labels. So there’s really nothing wrong with the music industry; we’re just redefining what it is. And I wonder whether we’re going to see a similar fragmentation and reformation of media. Right now, media is defined as those who own the presses – the presses meaning either the physical presses or broadcast towers or whatever. We’re beginning to see a new class of professional media which operate on internet economics. They’re still small, and they don’t make anything like the money.

Really? Everyone’s doing OK other than the labels? Anderson is making a common mistake here (like most people who have opinions on the future of the music business, but know absolutely nothing about it.) First off, the claim that everyone is doing “OK” no doubt extrapolates from the cases of artists like Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails, Dave Matthews Band etc, who, of course, are doing OK. They’ve got money in the bank, they’ve got a healthy number of fans (and cross-promotional marketing opportunities) to ensure that they will continue to do “OK”. Like many a tech evangelist before him, Anderson is assuming that these rare instances represent the bulk of the music industry, ignoring the huge majority of bands out there that are operating on a working-class income level. To generalize how these bands are doing—again, the majority of working bands—by using Radiohead as a model is like trying to extrapolate how independent books stores are doing by looking at Amazon’s sales figures. The difference in scale is immense.

To determine how most of these working bands are doing would be very difficult. Collecting metrics on this would demand getting actually profit/loss sheets from working professional bands, a difficult proposition since 1) many of them don’t track that shit very well and 2) the ones that do are loath to talk about the economics of being in a band and guard their bands’ financial information with a Steve Jobs-esque level of secrecy. This is complicated all the more because it’s always been difficult for working bands. As record sales decline, gas prices rise and ticket sales soften due to the economy, are these bands really doing “OK”? It’s hard to say conclusively. Many of them would probably say that it’s always been hard to be a professional musician, and it’s getting continually tougher with each year. Unless Anderson wants to pull out some actual numbers demonstrating how the economic situation has improved in the past decade for 90% of the working bands out there on the road, he might want to think twice about using the music industry as a model for his free new world.

via the Daily Swarm

Reporting needs to get paid for. But denying everything that has been learned in the past decade as to how people use and interact with content on the web is absolute unmitigated insanity. It’s almost as if the people in the business who are making these arguments want to commit career suicide.

You know the basic argument; it’s made by your Reason Magazine-subscribing acquaintance whenever there’s a large public outpouring of grief over an event deemed unimportant by said bastion of reason and logic. And of course, it’s a bit ridiculous for your average person to experience sadness about a person-as-abstract-concept, a faraway figure of wealth and decadence. That doesn’t make the sorrow any less valid, however. And these responses don’t make a reasonable argument; instead, they’re merely the outbursts of trolls expressing their narcissism of minor differences. Skeptics can tut-tut all they want, and (rightly) wonder why more people are choked up about the death of a pop star, than, say, yesterday’s reports of the increasing death toll in Iraq. Fair enough. But to express confusion at why so many people are affected by this death in particular, and suggest that this sadness is merely a ridiculous response to a minor event, is disingenuous at best.

For people between the ages of, oh, 25-45, Michael Jackson is a vector of childhood nostalgia. He’s the last of an era of bigger-than-god pop stars, the sort of figures that people feel a personal identification with, no matter how much (in this case) that figure was troubled/disturbed/potentially criminal. There won’t be another figure like MJ, and his passing, I think, represents to people the passing of a certain era with which a distinct generational span feels a real, personal identification with. People aren’t necessarily mourning Michael Jackson–an abstract public figure who’s been the subject of primarily public scorn for the past 15-20 years–but the passing of something more personal and intangible. And yes, that may be somewhat maudlin and nostalgic, but it’s a valid emotional response to a news event this size. It may be, to some degree, misplaced, but it’s far from silly or ridiculous.

It’s seductive to anyone who writes for cash money in what may be the worst economic and cultural climate to do so since the Dark Ages (at least for the majority of writers not on the Conde Nast gravy train). With my bank account is often teetering precariously above overdraft gulch, I completely understand the argument for earning a few bucks in PayPal tender by slamming out a how-to-pimp-your-Firefox tutorial.

I totally get it. When times are tight, even pennies on the dollar for a skill seem worth it. But in the long run, you’re essentially selling old books and CD’s to record or book stores to get you through the rest of the week, while selling off your primary skill in favor of a degraded market value.

There’s no shame in doing menial or distasteful or annoying work when you’re broke–waiting tables at a TGI Friday’s, ripping out weeds, writing SQL queries, sucking cock for real money. Shit, I taught myself HTML between spraying shoes at a bowling alley at the age of 25. But when your time is limited–as it is for everyone–you’ve got to ask whether it’s worth your time. Is it worth the hour you’ll spend writing SEO-optimized text about banal subjects in the most bloodless manner possible for a theoretical payday of pennies? For some people it may be.

I’m the king of menial jobs, or odd jobs, or whatever have you. I’ve certainly done plenty of labor for less than my time is worth that has been soul-destroying, frustrating, or somewhat distasteful. But many of the lamest of these jobs–bartending for no hourly wage, and approximately $3/hr in tips, for example–have offered some sort of perk or perks that has made it worth the time. Potential additional odd jobs, free beer, networking opportunities—all possible perks to ameliorate the inequitable time/money ratio.

Staring at these writing mills, I gotta ask: what are the perks of writing for potential nickels on the web, if any? Is there more long-term value in writing what you want for free?

I have a personal rubric by which I measure a writing job’s: every week, I write show previews for the Santa Cruz Weekly, $15 for 150 words a piece. It’s not always the most inspiring work, writing six vaguely-positive sentences about Slightly Stoopid, but I find that it’s more than worth my time. If it takes me approximately an hour and a half a week to write four previews, at $60 a week, for $240 a month in guaranteed money, and from time to time I can have fun with the form, well shit, seems like a pretty good deal to me. Some Ivy League douche who moonlights for the New Yorker might find this distasteful, call it hack work, but in comparison to other things I’ve been paid to do for nominal amounts—spray out bowling shoes, scoop bum shit off the floor of a public restroom–it seems like a pretty good deal. There are plenty of perks: the ability to occasionally let loose on a band that really deserves it (see: any Jared Leto musical project,) an ongoing open dialog with my editors, and the ability to pay a couple bills at the end of the month that I’d otherwise be selling books to pay.

Some of these benefits are tangible, others are intangible, but in aggregate, the writing job is worth my time.

Recently, I signed up for Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, more out of curiosity than as an actual money-making proposition. The prospect of making a few bucks to do menial tasks mindlessly on my laptop while watching boring nature documentaries sounded decent, so, why not? I’ve been on it for a couple of weeks, and I can see it being a great way to make some extra beer or coffee money when times are tight and work isn’t coming in as quickly as you’d like. But it is far from a substitute for real work—it’s the digital equivalent to filling envelopes in your free time. A few cents a job to idly Google song lyrics while watching TV is a fair deal to me.

And that’s what comprises a ton of the work on Mechanical Turk: idly Googling information, and copying and pasting it into a text box. Sounds great, so long as you confine yourself to that sort of busy work. As a freelance writer’s market, it’s shit (to be charitable) or profoundly depressing (to be honest.) If you search for top-paying jobs on the site, a lot of writing jobs appear. On Mechanical Turk, a $1 job is relatively lucrative. Writing jobs on the site will earn you a whopping $1-$3 usually involve writing 6-800 words, potential rewrites included.

An argument could be made that $1 for 600 words is what the Internet market will bear, and perhaps that’s true, but if so, then it’s time to find another line of work. Writing 600 words of copy about a subject that you have no passion for or interest in, for $1, is never worth your time. It’s insulting. It’s demeaning. There’s more dignity in turning tricks on the street or spraying disinfectant into sweaty bowling shoes than selling off your writing talents for such a paltry sum. It’s never worth writing for nickels, even in this fearless new Internet economy.

Still, too much of the Stateside chatter online in the past 48 hours has treated the protests as an opportunity for social media cheerleading. Sites like ReadWriteWeb, Mashable and Gawker appear primarily interested in slapping the wrists of the American MSM while using the protests as a case study validating their pet talking points about the irrelevancy of old-school media, the world-changing potential of social media, and all the usual harangues. This is all spiced with a touch of vicarious protest pr0n from bloggers, Twitterers and the like, perhaps rueful that we don’t have a bloody riot of our own to gape at.

The protests are newsworthy, with global implications, and the MSM has been largely terrible in its coverage, with the exception of generally excellent news sources such as the BBC and the New York Times’ Lede blog. But if the protests themselves demonstrate the potential of social media, much of the ensuing Stateside Internet’s chatter demonstrates all of its excesses—using real world strife to validate one’s own cause, taking a vicarious thrill from cheap shock tactics (there’s a car-accident-gaping quality to the enthusiasm with which people are linking to camera-phone photos of bloody protestors), amplified via the self-congratulatory social media echo chamber.

The instances aren’t exact analogues, but where were ReadWriteWeb and Mashable and Gawker et al last fall during the RNC protests, during which activists used Twitter, Facebook, etc to organize and document instances of police brutality and First Amendment violations that the MSM had no interest in? The social media punditry’s response to the protests were to damn the activists with faint praise, outright mock them, or otherwise ignore and/or dismiss.

In one case, social media is cutting through a repressive regime’s media lockdown, in the other case, social media acts as a corrective to corporate media’s lack of interest. A huge difference of scale and intention, absolutely. I suspect something else is at play, though: for one, Iranian protests are more exotic and thrilling. Secondly, social media punditry, so afraid of undermining SEO as it ever-desperately trolls for more page hits, is loath to cover anything domestic that could be considered partisan. Twitter-broadcasted protesting in Iran is safe for Americans to cheerlead; congratulating CodePink for using Twitter is potentially partisan.

This isn’t a blanket dismissal. For example, this tweet from Dan Sinker, who is asking for people to provide @persiankiwi with technical support uploading video—there are many examples, like this, of Stateside social media pundits using their knowledge and audiences to provide what nominal support they can to the protestors. But griping about CNN’s loathsome coverage to prove a point is not a corrective to missed reportage; cheerleading Twitter while Iranians risk life and limb to protest a fixed election is the worst kind of self-serving masturbatory exercise for Americans safe behind their laptops, covetously wracking up page hits. Come six months, one group may be serving life prison terms in Iranian jail; the other group will be collecting handsome speaking fees talking about the importance of social media in the wake of the ‘09 Iranian election.