When I was producing music festivals and nightlife events, Facebook changed its membership policy, opening up beyond just the collegiate community. Hundreds of people I didn’t know requested to add me as a friend. At first I balked at the idea of letting complete strangers into a space that had previously been the walled-garden escape from the mess Myspace had already become. Ultimately, however, I came to terms with the benefits of accepting friend requests from potential ticket buyers. Facebook became a sort of digital Grand Central Station that friends, colleagues, business acquaintances, vendors hawking their wares, strangers I couldn’t pick out of a lineup, and the inevitable crazy person talking to himself, all loudly traversed on their daily commutes through my online social world. It was really fucking noisy.

Then, at the end of 2007, Facebook introduced a feature to specifically address this noise issue, as they wrote on the Facebook blog:

Today Facebook lets us connect and communicate with people that we are connected to in all kinds of ways — friends from school, family members, long-lost high school sweethearts of yesteryear, and weird people. They’re all here.

This all begs the question… what does being friends with someone on Facebook mean today? We pondered this for a while, and then decided that there just wasn’t any single right answer.

So instead, we’ve built and launched Friend Lists. The new Friends page lets you create named lists of friends that you can use to organize your relationships whichever way works best for you. These private lists can be used to message people, send group or event invitations, and to filter updates from certain groups of friends.

Pretty much everyone I am connected to on Facebook has been assigned to one list or another depending on the context of the connection. In a previous incarnation, Facebook offered the option of setting a specific list feed to be the homepage view instead of the default friend feed. Later that option was removed, so I’ve created a workaround to simulate the functionality: I have the URL for my preferred Friend List set as a bookmark on my browser toolbar and when I want to go to Facebook, I just click the bookmarked link. Typing “facebook.com” into the address bar hasn’t been the way I access Facebook for years.

So when I heard that Google+, the web giant’s just-launched social network, was based on grouping connections into “Circles,” I was instantly curious. Ever since Friendster first appeared almost a decade ago, there have been certain disparities between being social online and being social offline that we have come to accept. We’ve become so accustomed to these differences, we hardly even recognize they ever seemed unfamiliar. The fetishistic, collectible-card type quality to online “friend acquisition,” for example. This is not at all how we understand the process of  “making friends” to work offline — aside from high school, maybe. Online we have learned, sometimes the hard way, that what we do and say is “public by default,” private with effort, the direct opposite of how it works in the analog world. And we have come to accept, despite the paralyzing plethora of privacy options Facebook offers, that we can’t expect control over social context. Online we are in all contexts at once. Friends from school, family members, long-lost high school sweethearts of yesteryear, and weird people, as Facebook lists them, are not only all here, but who we are within each of these different social groups, our identities in each of their different contexts, all exist simultaneously. Online, we are contextless by default.

But what if online sharing worked more like your real-life relationships? That’s the question posed in the video introducing the Google+ Circles feature:

Of course, it’s not a new idea. As I mentioned, this is a functionality Facebook has offered for years. It’s just that the platform has never really cared about it. As Mark Zukerberg, Facebook’s founder, inisisted in a 2009 interview: “You have one identity. Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity. The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly.” For Facebook, Lists are literally an add-on feature. For Google+, however, Circles appear to indicate an understanding that context is as important as connection.

In physical space, we are constantly adjusting our behavior to the demands of different social contexts. It’s second nature, literally. In his paper, “Cross-Cultural Code-Switching: The Psychological Challenges Of Adapting Behavior In Foreign Cultural Interactions,” Brandeis University Professor, Andrew Molinsky, offers these examples:

Consider the case of an Iranian business-woman shaking hands with her Western male counterparts. In Iranian culture, shaking hands with a male colleague is neither customary nor appropriate. This situation entails behavior that is unfamiliar and also in conflict with deeply ingrained cultural values.

[Or] consider the case of a Chinese student attempting to participate in an American MBA classroom discussion. The norms for appropriate behavior within this setting in the United States encourage and require students to express themselves, as well as reward them, even when their opinions are controversial or conflict with those of another student or even with the professor. Norms for classroom participation in China are quite different. Having been socialized to respect the “wisdom, knowledge, and expertise of parents, teachers, and trainers,” Chinese students are discouraged from voicing personal opinions in class discussion. American norms for classroom participation, therefore, are quite discrepant from Chinese norms for the same situation; these norms demand a significantly different type of behavior than what the typical Chinese student is used to.

Cross-cultural code-switching is the act of purposefully modifying one’s behavior in an interaction in a foreign setting in order to accommodate different cultural norms for appropriate behavior.

But the setting doesn’t have to be as foreign as you think. For immigrants, or anyone of mixed racial or cultural heritage whose identity is inextricably linked to different communities, code-switching is an inherent part of navigating everyday life. To children of divorced parents this will likely sound familiar as well. We actively modulate our behavior even among the closest people in our lives. In writing about the tactics we use to maintain context control while engaging in a public online space like Facebook, social media researcher danah boyd describes “social steganography,” a practice of creating messages that communicate different meanings to different audiences simultaneously:

When Carmen broke up with her boyfriend, she “wasn’t in the happiest state.” The breakup happened while she was on a school trip and her mother was already nervous. Initially, Carmen was going to mark the breakup with lyrics from a song that she had been listening to, but then she realized that the lyrics were quite depressing and worried that if her mom read them, she’d “have a heart attack and think that something is wrong.” She decided not to post the lyrics. Instead, she posted lyrics from Monty Python’s “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.” This strategy was effective. Her mother wrote her a note saying that she seemed happy which made her laugh. But her closest friends knew that this song appears in the movie when the characters are about to be killed. They reached out to her immediately to see how she was really feeling.

“We used to live in a world where space dictated context,” danah writes, “This is no longer the case. Digital technologies collapse social contexts all the time. The key to figuring out boundaries in a digital era is to focus on people, roles, relationships, and expectations.”

Relationships are all about context, but for Facebook, this nuance is something that has never quite made sense. All along, Facebook has staked its claim not by adapting to existing social behavior, but rather by insisting that we adapt to the behavior the platform defines for us. As Zuckerberg said in a TechCrunch interview last year, in regards to the assertion that privacy is dead, “We decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it.” As far as the platform is concerned, managing contexts is a nuisance for the user. With every “privacy” violation, what Facebook has actually been attempting to do is outsource managing context to software; to switch code-switching with code. At this point we’ve become so accustomed to the inevitable, resulting intrusion we don’t even make too much of a stink about it anymore. Case in point: Facebook’s new facial recognition functionality — which automates the photo-tagging process by suggesting the names of friends who appear in newly uploaded photos — has caused less of fuss for how uber-fucking-creepy it is, than….. wait, what was the previous fuss about? I forget already.

Facebook’s helpful way of nudging us towards this manifest, post-identity complexity destiny is to devise ever more features to destroy our control over social context. This has created a gap which Google+, with its aim to “make sharing on the web feel like sharing in real life,” seems squarely poised to fill. Not that Circles will be the panacea for online context collapse, but this is the first attempt by a mainstream web property to directly address this disparity between the online and offline social experiences, and offer a way to bring context back to our contacts.

Ever since Apple started putting a lowercase i in front of its products, their advertisements have been known for basically two things — articulating a visceral, transcendent grace inherent within the Mac product experience:

…and making fun of people who don’t already use Macs:

Which is why the iPad ads — with their exaggeratedly simplistic gestures, their induced first-person perspective, (the people in the photos always seem to be seated in some awkward position in order to give us, the viewers, the perspective of being the “user” in the image), and above all, the blatantly basic depiction of the product experience — just don’t quite fit with the image of what an Apple ad is supposed to be.

If these ads seem like a departure, it’s because they are.

In the 60′s, Everett Rogers broke down the process by which trends, products, and ideas proliferate through culture. There are five basic types of adopter personas in his diffusion of innovation theory:

Innovators are the first to adopt an innovation. They are, by defualt, risk-takers since being on the front lines means they are likely to adopt a technology or an idea which may ultimately fail. Early Adopters are the second fastest category to adopt an innovation. They’re more discrete in their adoption choice than Innovators, but have the highest degree of opinion leadership among the other adopter categories. Individuals in the Early Majority adopt an innovation after having let the Innovators and Early adopters do product-testing for them. The Late Majority approaches an innovation with a high degree of skepticism, and after the majority of society has already adopted the innovation first. And finally, Laggards are the last to get on board with a new innovation. These individuals typically have an aversion to change-agents, tend to be advanced in age, and to be focused on “traditions.”

The thinking in marketing, especially when launching a new product, generally tends to be about aiming at the early adopters over on the left side of the adoption bell-curve. Once the early adopters get into it, the thinking goes, whatever it is will trickle down through all the rest of the early and late majority who make up the vast bulk of the market share. A few years back I wrote about how Nintendo was going for a “late adopter strategy” with its Wii console. At the time (and perhaps still now) the Wii was outselling both Sony’s PlayStation and Microsoft’s X-box combined. The Wii’s uniquely simple controller and intuitive game-play enabled it to appeal to a much broader audience than the more complicated, hardcore-gaming consoles.

From a Time Magazine article on the eve of the Wii release in 2006:

“The one topic we’ve considered and debated at Nintendo for a very long time is, Why do people who don’t play video games not play them?” [Nintendo president Satoru] Iwata has been asking himself, and his employees, that question for the past five years. And what Iwata has noticed is something that most gamers have long ago forgotten: to nongamers, video games are really hard. Like hard as in homework.

The key to the Wii’s success is that it made gaming simple, broadly accessible, and inherently intuitive. Later that year, AdAge wrote that the Wii’s popularity is “part of a growing phenomenon that’s overhauling the video-gaming industry…. Video gaming is beginning to transcend the solitary boy-in-the-basement stereotype with a new generation of gamers including women, older people and younger children.”

Anyone who has bought, or even used, an iPhone at some point during the three years since the first iteration was released, already understands what the iPad is all about without any help from an ad. Indeed, Apple has done such a good  job of making ads aimed at early adopters for the past decade, they no longer need to. An ad is not going to make a difference in whether someone on the left-hand side of Apple’s adopter bell-curve buys an iPad or not. Instead, these ads are targeted straight at the people on the downhill slope.

New results from a Pew Research Center survey tracking 2,252 adults 18 and older show that use of social network sites among older adults has risen dramatically over the past two years:

While overall social networking use by online American adults has grown from 35% in 2008 to 61% in 2010, the increase is even more dramatic among older adults. The rate of online social networking approximately quadrupled among Older Boomers (9% to 43%) and the GI Generation (4% to 16%).

Of course, Millennials still have a healthy lead among all age groups in social network use, with 83% of online adults from 18-33 engaging in social networking, but grandma and grandpa are just catching up. Particularly grandma. Last year, the fastest growing demographic on Facebook was women over 55.

Unlike the Apple ads we’ve become accustomed to in the 2000′s, these iPad ads are no longer touting the product’s “higher resolution experience” to digital natives. That is, they are not emphasizing the ephemeral or smugly superior subtleties that are inaccessible to anyone who does not intuitively “get it.” These ads are, instead, paring the experience down to be as unintimidating as possible. Not only is the iPad a completely new way to experience personal computing, it is as effortless to use this technology, the ads say to you, the viewer, as if you were, yourself, a digital native.

Some friends came through town on tour, and sitting around in the dressing room backstage at House of Blues during the opening act, we started talking about the most epic-est, rock-’n'-rollingest backstages we wished we could have gotten to been a part of. Guns N’ Roses, Mötley Crüe, The Rolling Stones. You know, the usual acts that had come to represent the platonic ideal of the Rock Star. This conversation was instigated by an admission from the main act himself about how boring it was backstage. Thinking back on the venues and the bands I’ve worked with, and even the vaudeville circus I used to manage, it occurred to me that (aside from a few exceptions working with music festivals — notably, on the production rather than the performance side — which only served to prove the rule) almost all the backstages I’ve ever been in were basically boring. Sure, there was always the inevitable adrenaline of last-minute chaos and ego trips and personality clashes and whatnot, but the debauched excess of the truly rock ‘n’ roll antics of yore? Even the folks on the tour, who would, that night, go on to rock the faces off twelve hundred screaming fans, noticed that all the examples of the epitomized backstages we were listing off had had their heyday before we were even old enough to get into any of their shows. This was not what MTV (back when MTV, actually stood for Music Television) or even Vice Magazine had promised us backstage would be like when we grew up. It looked increasingly less like the photo above.

It looked a lot more like this:

Mike Gallagher of the band Isis, backstage at the Trocadero  – Philadelphia, 2007 / Image: Markphoto.net

And that’s when it dawned on me: the Internet had killed the rock star.

Well, first off, is there anything the Internet hasn’t already killed yet? Back in May, The Atlantic featured a piece about the Internet’s ongoing assassination of the music industry — a crime story a decade old now, but, like the JonBenét Ramsey of disruptive technology, undyingly over-covered. Other casualties in the Internet’s Edward Gorey-like murder spree have included music journalism, killed by mp3 blogs, pirate radio, killed by general redundancy, and even the mystique of the radio star (which, hadn’t video already confessed to killing like 30 years prior?) killed by too much exposure. At this point, to say the Internet’s done away with anything else when it comes to music is, admittedly, a cliché, but, nevertheless, I do think there’s one more, less-publicized casualty.

In an interview with NME earlier this year, Kasabian singer Tom Meighan was on to part of it:

It’s not like what it used to be like in rock ‘n’ roll. In the ’60s and ’70s you had the likes of David Bowie and Marc Bolan, and then in the ’80s you even had shit acts that were rock stars.

I think – especially in the last three or four years – the internet’s taken a stranglehold and killed off the myth of the rock star now. You know when you used to buy the records and there was the myth behind them? There’s too much on blogs now and I think it’s killed it off. Nobody’s surprised by an interview anymore or anything. It’s quite tragic.

There are so many rock stars writing these self pitying blogs and it’s not in the spirit of rock ‘n’ roll, it’s like ‘Wow, what rubbish’.

That’s the victim no one talks about when they’re focusing instead on how much money the RIAA’s member organizations are losing due to the Internet: the “spirit of rock ‘n’ roll.” Cuz you know what those acts in the 60′s and 70′s and 80′s and, to a large extent, the 90′s didn’t have backstage? Email. Or Facebook or Twitter. There were no urgent texts that needed immediate replies, no forums of endless fan comments to be compulsively monitored, no hundreds of images from the previous night’s show to be sorted through and uploaded, no online profiles for potentially competing or collaborating artists to be stalked, no blog posts that needed to be written, or  livestreams set up. Hell, there weren’t even any cell phones with which to call anyone during those hours and hours on the tour bus. Not to mention any of the normal things that even non-rock stars do on their computers, like instant message with their friends or watch the entire last season of Mad Men. Millennials — the generation whose older members are now of rock star age — spend almost 10 hours a day online. Add to that the three more hours per day that Americans now spend using the web on their mobile phones, and then factor in the completely-absurd-even-to-this-millennial FOUR THOUSAND texts that the average (AVERAGE!!) teenager sends per month — that’s six texts every waking hour — and all of that compounds into a LOT of time that the typical touring act in 2010 is spending doing shit that simply wasn’t there to have been done back in the day. Before we all developed these new digital compulsions there used to be a lot more time for, and a lot fewer pressing distractions from, the analog ones, namely the sex + drugs that = the “spirit of rock ‘n’ roll.”

Of course, being a rock star back in the 20th century, you could also get away with a lot more than you can now. Your drug-addled, sex-addicted, minor-fucking ways were not gonna end up on Twitter three seconds after some groupie snapped a photo on her cell phone, let alone on TMZ. To a large extent, truly rock star behavior used to be a lot easier to contain. Now, there’s really no buffer. And that increasingly permeable line cuts in both directions. Much as self-pitying blog posts are a definite cramp in the rock ‘n’ roll style, so is not being able to avoid your hate mail. In the past, your handlers would have simply made sure you never saw it. Now, not only does it take some herculean willpower to avoid the known hubs of haterade — and rock stars aren’t famous for their self-restraint — but even for the most disciplined musicians, messages letting you know you suck are like online porn: one in three of us has ended up with it in our face even when we weren’t looking for it. It’s why Trent Reznor quit Twitter last year…. Twice. The first time around, Reznor posted the following on the Nine Inch Nails forum by way of explanation:

When Twitter made it’s way to my radar…. I decided to lower the curtain a bit and let you see more of my personality. I watched some of you get more engaged because you started to realize there’s a person (flaws and all) back there, and I watched some of you recoil in horror because I’m not what you projected on me. All expected. I’m not as concerned about “breaking” your idea of NIN at this point. It is what it is and I am what I am. The relationship between artist and fan is changing if you haven’t noticed, along with the way we consume and experience music and even communicate since the internet arrived.

….But some people exist to ruin it for others – and they are the ones who have nothing better to do with their time. Example: on nin.com, there’s 3-4 different people that each send me between 50 – 100 message per day of delusional, often threatening nonsense. We can delete them, but they just sign back up and start again. Yes, we are implementing several changes to address this, but the point is it quickly gets very old weeding through that stuff.

Rock ‘n’ roll has never been scared of confrontation, but in the past it’s always been in-person, and visceral. Being able to settle things with a fistfight or a blunt and / or glass object is incredibly more rock ‘n’ roll-y than this new equation:

Image: John Gabriel

Of course, it’s undeniable there are significant advantages that all this new technology has afforded artists as well. From those just starting out to the ones with Stadium Status, the Internet has put a lot of new tools and resources directly into artists’ hands, allowing them unprecedented control over their own careers and their relationship with their fans. But it also means that handling much of what a label was once responsible for — and even more that they still haven’t even figured out how to do — is now part of the job requirement of being a successful musician. You have to be an expert in marketing, branding, community strategy, and user engagement; knowing how to write code, the meaning of the term “information architecture,” and a good web designer also help. “Engaging your fans” the old fashioned way meant spraying them with champagne in the green room. Now, replying to messages on Facebook is your second job. A couple of decades ago you wouldn’t have had to be giving a shit about anything called a website; now you have to anticipate you’ll be redoing yours every few years just to keep up with the rapid pace of change on the web. A friend of mine who’s in a band that just finished a tour of the U.S. followed by Australia, told me in the wake of the band’s website redesign to incorporate the StageBloc platform, a process that spanned several months, “At the time, I didn’t think that working at an internet startup was going to be helpful to my music career.” Which also speaks to the kind of personality the evolution of rock ‘n’ roll is selecting for these days.

Think about the best concert you’ve seen in the past five years. You know what the band did after the show? They checked a bunch of email, sent a bunch of texts, possibly also a bunch of Tweets, and generally stared at screens for a while. Cracked.com’s list of the 7 Most Impossible Rock Stars to Deal With, which features the likes of DMX, Keith Moon, Iggy Pop, Nikki Sixx, Ozzy Osbourne, and Eric Clapton — all people who were wreaking havoc by the time they were my age — includes absolutely no one who is my age now. (And aren’t we, Millennials, supposed to be the over-entitled spoiled-brat “Generation Me”?) While the barrier to entry into rockstarhood may have never been as porous (getting discovered on YouTube, anyone?), the competition has arguably never been more intense. Just being a talented performer and charismatic entertainer is not enough anymore. The same tools that are giving artists more control are also saddling them with more responsibility. The business savvy and marketing aptitude that once made Madonna an anomalous success are now prerequisite just to stay in the game. You simply couldn’t keep up if you are the kind of mess that the emblematic rock stars who defined the term got to be. Or, perhaps, as Cracked suggests, all the drug addiction and general nihilism were so rampant among rock stars in the olden days “possibly because no one had invented the Internet yet, [and] they got bored.”

Of course, there’s still bands like Justice, whose trouble-making, euro-hipster decadence is entertaining enough for an hour-long tour documentary. But as you’ll realize if you watch the “A Cross The Universe” DVD, chronicling the band’s 2008 U.S. tour, the duo hardly spend time at their computers, aside from when they’re performing. And there’s no mystery why. The band doesn’t have a website, or Twitter. Their Facebook is a UGC Community Page created by fans. They basically just have a Myspace, which is maintained by their French label, Ed Banger Records. In a sense, Justice isn’t so much an exception as an appropriately ironic throwback. The documentary, hearkening back to when rock stars were legitimately so, effectively paints the laptop rocker duo in those nostalgically familiar colors.

When asked during the promo tour for his latest book, Imperial Bedrooms, whether contemporary book launches are more or less fun than when he started in the late 80′s, Bret Easton Ellis — arguably the closest equivalent that the literary world has to a rock star, and a writer who has expertly articulated the unbridled excess that is the trope’s defining characteristic (“It was always the A booth. It was always the front seat of the roller coaster. It was never ‘Let’s not get the bottle of Cristal’ … It was the beginning of a time when it was almost as if the novel itself didn’t matter anymore—publishing a shiny booklike object was simply an excuse for parties and glamour.”) — laughed, “Oh, it’s less fun. It’s much less fun. Because we’re in the ‘post-Empire’ world now. Book publishing,” he added, “flourished in the ‘Empire,’” a term which Ellis uses to refer to the period from 1945 until 2005 — the era that defined the 20th century, and a time when, not coincidentally, the rock star flourished, too.

There’s a reason that Aldous Snow — the rock ‘n’ roll MacGuffin played by Russell Brand in this summer’s Get Him To The Greek, the latest installment “From the Director of Forgetting Sarah Marshall and the Producer of Knocked Up and Superbad” — is referred to in the movie as “one of the last remaining rock stars.” When it comes to this 20th century Dionysian archetype, there really aren’t that many left. The Internet is making sure of it.

Remember a time when it seemed like the power of the new technologies suddenly at our fingertips was limitless? When lasers and floppy disks and modems were cutting-edge, and a whole slew of movies which took on the subject matter insisted that teenagers, especially, were capable of using these incomprehensible, futuristic phenomena to do things no one could even imagine? There’s 1982′s Tron, in which Jeff Bridges is a computer genius who hacks into an evil video game corporation and gets zapped inside the computer world, where he’s forced to participate in gladiatorial games; 1983′s War Games, in which Matthew Broderick is a high school kid who nearly starts World War III by hacking into a military computer; 1985′s Real Genius, in which Val Kilmer is a brilliant teenager who develops a laser for a class project and then has to stop it from being used as a government weapon, and another 1985 flick, John Hughes’s Weird Science, in which Anthony Michael Hall and Ilan Mitchell-Smith are two geeks desperately seeking popularity, who use a Memotech MTX 512 to create their ticket to the in-crowd: the perfect woman.

The consistent, underlying premise of all these movies was that technology is a new, unexplored frontier, and no one could really say for sure what it could — or couldn’t — do. There was the pervading sense that the new wave of personal computing had put the power to create monsters right at teenagers’ fingertips.

Now, the Internet, iPhones, the rise of “digital natives,” and nearly 30 years later, it seems our conception of the unpredictability of new technology still hasn’t really changed all that much, and neither has the sense that, inevitably, teenage geeks will use it to create preposterous monsters. Case in point: The Social Network.

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The movie is based on Ben Mezrich’s book, The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding Of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal. In an interview on Amazon.com, Mezrich describes how the origin of the world’s largest social networking site (if Facebook were a country, it’d be the third most populous, just after China and India) began with a typically adolescent prank:

Facemash is really where it all started. It was late at night. Mark was having a few drinks….He was a master hacker and he hacked into all of the computers at Harvard and took all of the pictures of all the girls on campus and created a “hot or not” website where you could judge which was the hottest girl at Harvard. And this ended up [getting] 20,000 hits in about an hour. It froze the computer systems at Harvard. And he nearly got kicked out of school. That really was the genesis of Facebook, because for the next couple of days he thought about it, and thought, you know, “What if girls could put their own pictures up, and then we’d go and say ‘Hi’ to them, or whatever,” and that’s where Facebook started.

If this story sounds familiar it’s because you’ve seen it before. 25 years before, in fact, as Gary and Wyatt hack into the Pentagon mainframe, create a computer program that synthesizes images, “input” a bunch of photos of girls, and the result is a runaway creation that takes on a life of its own and very quickly alters the course of its creators’ lives as well.

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Cut to 2010, and the question in the Oingo Boingo song, “Weird Science,” which asks, “It’s my creation; is it real?” is no longer rhetorical. Computers are no longer the premise for teen science-fantasy farce, they are serious business.

Now, back to Mezrich, discussing his book on MSNBC:

It is about nerds. The kids who founded it — Mark Zuckerberg and his friend — were geeky, gawky kids, who were essentially trying to get laid…. And basically, these genius kids created the next generation in technology while trying to become part of the in-crowd.

Now, look at Gary and Wyatt:

Now, back to The Social Network:

In 1985, the most incredible thing anyone could conceive of a teenager creating on his computer was a woman. In 2010, it’s a billion-dollar company.

Though much of the history of Facebook is well documented, some of it in blog posts by Zuckerberg himself, the thing to keep in mind in the course of Mezrich’s book, and The Social Network movie, written by Aaron Sorkin, is that while many of the backstory’s supporting cast were interviewed, and directly participated in the recounting of this sordid tale of “sex, money, genius, and betrayal” that Facebook apparently is, the main character, Mark Zuckerberg, very deliberately, declined to be involved in any way. Mezrich himself freely acknowledges that it’s perfectly Zuckerberg’s right not to speak to someone that he doesn’t know, and, in the end, what really happened in some of the scenes he wrote in the story, only Mark really knows. Inevitably, some creative liberties had to be taken in the process of creating a book, and then a film, so, who’s to say where history ends and the weird science begins? Either way, we’re still telling the same story three decades later.

In related news, there’s a Real Genius remake currently in the works, and a 3D sequel to Tron coming out this December.

The tagline insists, “The Game Has Changed,” but you know what?

Not really.

A month before the premiere of True Blood’s third season earlier this summer I wrote a post about the first 21st century superhero. The new Iron Man, as reimagined by Jon Favreau and portrayed by Robert Downey Jr., had broken the mold constricting the superhero archetype since its inception back in the late 1930′s, and in its place offered a vibrantly modern model for the character, reflecting the unique culture, ethos, and mores of the 21st century. True Blood, I’m realizing, is now doing the same for that other undying superhuman trope: the vampire.

Of course, the vampire has been undead for a lot longer. The earliest recorded vampire myth dates back to Babylonia, about 4,000 years ago, and over the millennia it has appeared in almost every culture. But lets cut to the chase: 1922 was year vampires broke ground in film (though, technically, they’d made a few cameos before then). It was the year F. W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu” came out.

Take a good look. That’s what a movie vampire used to be. A creature no teen girl, or anyone else for that matter, would want to see as a lead in a summer mystical romance franchise. In all the silent films that featured vampires there was always a clear and consistent view: here be monsters.

While this original archetype might have undergone a radical transformation over the past 80+ years of cinema — from grotesque monster to, ironically, heartthrob, a result of the only evolutionary force vampires are actually subject to: sexual selection, naturally — don’t be fooled. Just because Twilight’s Edward Cullen or the whatever-their-names-are characters of The Vampire Diaries happen to be getting panties in a twist at the moment, they are not in any way contemporary. Much has been made about the exceptionally “old-fashioned” gender roles in Twilight, but that analysis is basically missing the forest for one tree. Think about it: is there ANYTHING that happens in Twilight that could not have happened just as easily 50 years ago? You could turn Twilight into a 1950′s period piece and basically NOTHING about the major plot points, dialogue, personalities, relationships, or motivations — of either the vampires OR humans in this saga — would need to change. This does not a 21st century story make. In fact, if you’re curious about exactly why Twilight is so popular, the mechanics of this process are actually quite timeless:

Twilight’s preternatural hotties aren’t so much throwbacks as they are completely out of time. The story could be happening in any age; its characters’ capacity to reflect some kind of cultural context is irrelevant, probably detrimental.

The predominant Millennial quality that grounds Iron Man in the 21st century, I wrote, is transparency. In his total openness about everything from his deepest secret to his fleeting impulses he is as “post-privacy” as Facebook would have us all become. To suggest that True Blood’s vampires are uniquely modern because they too, like Tony Stark, have revealed their secret identity to the world, would be easy — it is, after all the premise that the entire show is based on — but it wouldn’t be accurate. For Stark, radical transparency is a way of life. You never have to wonder what Tony Stark is thinking because it’s usually exactly what’s coming out of his mouth at any given moment. The vampires on true blood are anything but transparent. Their secret truths and ulterior motives are consistently obscure. Tellingly, even Sookie Stackhouse, the show’s mind-reader, can’t penetrate their thoughts. Despite a superficial simulation, transparency is not really a quality that connects True Blood’s vampires to the modern age. But you know what does?

Recycling.

These vampires are environmentally conscious! Hey, it’s the  the 21st century, caring about the environment is hot! In fact, in the wake of the BP Oil Spill disaster which has affected all the Gulf states — chief among them, Louisiana, True Blood’s setting — there is a subtly startling undercurrent of environmentalism running through this season’s sublot. At one point, Russell Edgington, the 3,000-year old vampire King of Mississippi, a new character introduced this season, rhapsodizes, “I mean, do you remember how the air used to smell? How humans used to smell? How they used to taste?” Earlier, the vampire Queen of Louisiana describes a rare delicacy: “A Latvian boy. Has to be tasted to be believed. Not polluted like most humans. Tastes exactly the way they used to taste before the industrial revolution fucked everything to hell.” When Russell asks rhetorically, “What other creature actively destroys its own habitat,” one imagines these vampires didn’t need to see an Inconvenient Truth because they’ve lived it. They may be blood-sucking fiends but destroying the planet is below even their standards.

Nevertheless, consumer culture that they’ve lived to find themselves in, they’re not beyond shopping at the mall. (Looking good is, after all, a vampire priority.)

No doubt, there’ll be some anecdote about a vampire shopping online eventually. Most likely Eric will get there before Bill, I’m assuming, based on this classic exchange from season 1:

Eric: “I sent you three texts, why didn’t you reply?”
Bill: “I hate using the number keys to type.”

In fact, while Bill might be True Blood’s most conservative vampire (how postmodern!) — his education on how to be a vampire for the 17-year old girl he’s just been forced to turn into one is about as awkward and evasive as the birds and the bees talk from a religious dad — Eric is, arguably, its most progressive. That is, he has no fear of progress. Eric might be 1,000 years old but he’s as naturally at ease with his tech gadgets as any “digital native.” So far, he’s the only vampire I’ve seen use a bluetooth device. Ever.

As the proprietor of a popular vampire bar called Fangtasia, Eric clearly recognized “The Great Revelation” — as the vampires call their coming out to the world — as a great business opportunity. Entrepreneurship is an unexpected quality for a vampire in general — I mean, why bother with such pedestrian concerns when you’re immortal, right? On the other hand, what else would you do with an eternity of nights? Might as well launch a nightlife startup. According the Wall Street Journal, The Great Recession, which began in full force around the time True Blood first got on the air, is churning out ever more entrepreneurs. Entrepreneur.com reports, 8.7% of job seekers gained employment by starting their own businesses in the second quarter of 2009, and they expect to see even more people starting their own businesses in 2010. So it’s no surprise that 21st century vampires would be business-minded. Upon visiting Fangtasia, Russell, himself a semi-silent owner of a werewolf bar in Mississippi called Lou Pines, even tells Eric, “We must talk of franchising.”

If being an entrepreneur isn’t your thing, there’s always the royal route: seizing assets from your subjects. In the vampire Queen’s case, that asset is vampire blood, which she then has other vampires move as black market narcotic. Since selling their blood is a high crime among vampires, it’s initially unclear why the Queen would be doing this. What inscrutable and ominous vampiric motives could she have? By season 3 it’s revealed that the Queen needs the money to pay off the IRS. For vampires in the 21st century, death might not be certain, but taxes are. Indeed, True Blood’s portrayal of vampire culture is more of a bureaucracy than any other cinematic depiction. After a religious fanatic suicide bomber self-detonates at a party in a vampire lair, killing a number of humans and vampires in attendance, there are, literally, forms that the lair’s owner has to fill out in this situation — a sequence that encapsulates the equally bizarre extremes of both the terrorism and banality of our age.

While just last Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker ruled that California’s Proposition 8 initiative, which denies marriage rights to same-sex couples, was unconstitutional, on True Blood, same-sex couple Russell and Talbot have been married for 700 years. Homoerotica is by no means anything new in vampire lore, but gay marriage?? There’s a concept that barely existed in the public discourse before the 21st century. And Russell and Talbot’s relationship is exactly what you’d expect from a couple that’s been married for 7 centuries — anything but erotic. A particularly noticeable departure for the otherwise seriously agrosexual HBO series. Of course, the new phenomenon of marriage between vampire and human — which, though legal in the word of True Blood, is still highly controversial — has, from the show’s beginnings, served as a running metaphor for “marriage equality.” Alan Ball, the creator of True Blood, as well as Six Feet Under, and the Oscar-winning screenwriter of American Beauty, is not only someone who clearly understands a thing or two about the modern existential condition, he is also an openly gay man. No surprise, then that True Blood’s very opening credits sequence weekly drives home a starkly unfantastical image that connects vampires to that other minority fighting religious opposition for equal rights in the 21st century.

“Alternative lifestyle,” an often-used euphemism for homosexuality, is actually a perfect way to describe True Blood’s approach to vampirism. Even the show’s brilliantly integrated marketing campaigns have sought to bring True Blood’s fictional world off the screen and into reality by treating vampires as an increasingly visible minority with their own lifestyle brands and targeted advertising:

True Blood’s vampires even blog. Well, technically, it’s only Jessica, with her http://babyvamp-jessica.com blog, but as a 17 year-old who just became undead last year she’s the only Gen-Y vampire on the show, so obviously she’d be the one blogging — check out the awesomely pointless first few entries — 1, 2, 3 — this directionless experimentation with a new “toy” is exactly how a teenager would start a blog. (Vampire diaries?? Who the hell keeps a “diary” anymore in the age of social media? Sheesh.)

Overall, there is a deep, underlying theme about progress coursing through True Blood. “It’s vampires like you, who’ve been holding the rest of us back for centuries,” sneers Russell before destroying a Spanish Inquisition-era vampire Magister. It’s the vampires that are most hung up on the past who are some of the show’s craziest messes. The psychotic vampire Queen, who’s stuck in some perpetual 1940′s costume drama, has just been stripped of power; Lorena, whose inability to get over her past with Bill becomes her destruction; Eric’s newly-revealed 1,000 year old revenge obsession for the murder of his father will no doubt promptly lead him into some kind of trouble this season. Godric, Eric’s maker, even destroyed himself in part because after 2,000 years he could no longer bear that vampires had not progressed; that he hadn’t. Unlike the atemporal caricatures of the other franchises, True Blood’s vampires offer a uniquely compelling commentary on our rapidly changing present through their own, archly extrahuman, relationship to it. We are living in a time when change, whether we like it or not, is coming at us so fast and furious we can barely comprehend it — speaking on a panel at Techonomy last week, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said we now create 5 exabytes of data every two days, an amount equal to all the information created from the dawn of civilization through 2003. Who can really understand whatever the hell that even means?  True Blood’s vampires are at once representations of cultural change within the narrative of the show, and, likewise, must themselves confront a new millennium’s progress. Some adapt better than others. Some have more sinister interpretations of where progress should lead, but they, like the rest of us in the 21st century, either accept change, or deny it at their own peril.

I wrote a post recently about how Your Life Is A Transmedia Experience, which included the example of Bret Easton Ellis’s latest novel, Imperial Bedrooms, the 25-years-later sequel to his debut, Less Than Zero, which creates a sort of closed-circuit loop by bringing both the original novel as well as the 1987 movie based on it into existence within the world of the book. By detailing his characters’ reactions to the original, darkly disturbing novel depicting their lives, and then to its sanitized film adaptation, Ellis effectively creates a narrative world that extends, and can be experienced across these multiple media formats, each one adding its own element to the complete story. There is, currently, an emergence of popular entertainment specifically designed to be transmedia experiences, to jump from platform to platform, and, in the process, intertwine the real world with the fictional, but Ellis, who became a published author when he was still in college, has long maintained that, for him, a novel is just a novel, approached and developed according to the dictates of its own medium. Nevertheless, Ellis has always had a penchant for referencing actual pop culture — movies, music, fashion, celebrities, night clubs, etc. — within his stories. It’s pretty much his trademark. His work has, all along, incorporated multiple other media into its fictional world, and, in turn, become an indelible part of the popular culture on which it comments.

In this fantastic interview on BigThink.com, Ellis muses about the possibilities for the future of fiction in the digital age and touches on what is, essentially, transmedia storytelling. It could, he says, “even possibly re-energize my faith in fiction.”

Have a listen. It’s great stuff:

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Bonus: a fun clip of Ellis talking about schooling his publisher on how to function in the “post-empire“… errr … in the social media age: