internet

The biography of George Costanza is five times as long as that of Tim O’Reilly. As Wikipedia matures, there are hard decisions to be made about depth and breadth. Shouldn’t Tim’s entry be many pages long? He’s one of the great thinkers of our time.

Only a marketing guru like Seth Godin - whose livelihood depends on maximising the amount of words written about themselves - could think that the importance of an individual is measured by the amount of words written about them on Wikipedia, or conversely that Wikipedia is a reflection of anything more than the sort of people who contribute to Wikipedia. The real Tim O’Reilly is probably quite happy that his life hasn’t been exposed to the sort of scrutiny suffered by the fictional George Costanza; and who says that George Costanza isn’t one of the great thinkers of our time?

Like every white person¹, I like The Wire. Okay, I think The Wire is the best television series ever made. To demonstrate this, I am prepared to fight you if it becomes necessary.

In an interview towards the end of Season 5 (the last season, which I haven’t watched yet, so shut up), David Simon said:

If you’re saying that there needed to be scenes of the Internet interacting with journalism and bringing down journalism, I will now write you a scene: Interior, garden apartment anywhere. A white male, mid-30s, sits at a laptop computer in his underwear, linking to a Baltimore Sun story. He then scratches his left testicle until satisfied and continues to type commentary about that story onto his blog. Cut to drug corner, and on to the next scene.

Possibly unfair - those testicles aren’t going to scratch themselves, are they? - but quite funny anyway. Some “citizen journalism” is vitally important; some is surprisingly banal; mostly, it doesn’t exist.

1. I reserve the right to call myself white. [↩]