This isn’t a movie review, although I will talk about the movie “The Social Network” that came out last weekend.

Instead, in this short post I argue that everybody reading this post – and just about everybody who works in the interactive media and technology industries – ought to go out and see this movie in a hurry. “The Social Network” does for the internet biz what “Pretty Woman” did for prostitution.

It’s a terrific flick (take a date and save dinner for after so you can talk about it), but the other reason to see “The Social Network” is that this movie will define for the next decade how the rest of the world sees us, the people who make a living building and placing and optimizing websites and apps and display ads and emails and platforms of all sorts. The fact that the movie isn’t accurate doesn’t matter (there are abundant articles within easy reach of Google on this, so I won’t go into the details here): he who tells the best story wins, and this is a great story.

But it’s not a flattering portrait—more like the elementary school picture that still makes you cringe when you see it decades later.

Directed by the always-ominous David Fincher and with the trademark “Warning: You Must be a Mensa Candidate to Watch this Movie” rapid-fire dialog and crystalline structure of Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay, “The Social Network” paints Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as an arrogant and brilliant software engineer who effortlessly leads other geeks but can’t talk with a girl. The movie Zuckerberg doesn’t care about money yet steals the idea for Facebook from two rich jerks, improves it, lies about stealing it, builds Facebook with his best friend, later doesn’t hesitate to screw the best friend out of the company and gets sued by all the aggrieved parties. I saw the movie with my wife and she found the movie Zuckerberg somewhat sympathetic, whereas I had an easier time feeling good about Humbert Humbert, the unapologetic pedophile in Nabokov’s “Lolita.”

For those of us who has seen the real Mark Zuckerberg interviewed on stage or monitor (the hoodie, the discomfort) Jesse Eisenberg’s physical impression is spookily dead on. The movie Zuckerberg is not amoral or immoral—he just has a different moral code than most people, one that Nietzsche would have found cozy. This is the movie story about digital entrepreneurs that will define them for years. Justin Timberlake does a star turn as Napster-co-founder and Facebook Pied Piper Sean Parker, a vintage bizdev guy with a rolodex and no conscience. This too will stick.

The fortunes of the movie geek have improved over the decades. From Spaz in “Meatballs” to the entire cast of “Revenge of the Nerds” to Matthew Broderick in “War Games” and Val Kilmer in “Real Genius.” Up until now geeks have been socially awkward but moral, plagued by a compulsive curiosity that can lead them into bad decisions but willing to fix the problems they create. Not so with the movie Zuckerberg. This geek leaves bodies in his rear-view mirror and doesn’t slow down, but does so while building Facebook, the addictively engaging platform that many have open 24/7/365.

How the movie Zuckerberg defines a new kind of geek comes through most clearly in one of the films tag lines: “Punk, Genius, Billionaire.” When I saw that tag on a poster in the theater I thought, “Punk? Arthur Fonzarelli and Danny Zuko were punks. Sid Vicious was a punk. But… Mark Zuckerberg?” But if “punk” means somebody who lives outside the normal social order and pressures that order by being compelling and different, then maybe the label fits.

“Pretty Woman” came out in 1990. Five years later we saw “Leaving Las Vegas.” By this logic, we won’t see another movie about the internet biz this good until 2015, so go see “The Social Network.” And the next time you have to explain to civilians what you do for a living, remember that “The Social Network” is probably the ruler they’ll use to measure you.

[This blog is moving to www.bradberens.com in the coming weeks, so stay tuned and get ready to change your RSS feeds, if you have 'em.]

For the inveterate readers out there, the gauntlet has been thrown down! John Durham, Don E. Schultz, Sean Cheyney, Doug Weaver, Jim Meskauskas: I’m talking to YOU… and to anybody else hearing this. What explicit business strategy books have you read lately (or ever) that were worthwhile and why were they worthwhile?

Thinking over my own reading, the books that most influence me tend to not to be strategy books either. When I used to teach writing at U.C. Berkeley, for example, I never found that books about writing were useful to my students or to me as a teacher. Instead, I preferred to use things like Sun Tzu’s Art of War or Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics as writing manuals.

There’s a reason for this: off-topic books (Tzu, McCloud) open the mind to think creatively about how to apply the lessons of one subject to a related but different topic. This is also how metaphors work: if you say “my love is a red rose” that statement doesn’t contain or transmit meaning: instead, it provokes your mind to think creatively about how your love and red foliage are similar (the philosopher Donald Davidson explained this usefully in his terrific essay, “What Metaphors Mean”).

So, the books that have most influenced how I think about the interactive media business over the last three years have been books like:

• Barry Schwartz’s Paradox of Choice, which explains how and why less can be more

• Daniel Goleman’s Social Intelligence, which explains how the real metric for engagement requires people rather than server logs

• Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody, which explains the forces behind things like Wikipedia

In all three cases, the books have stimulated new thought, whereas when I tried to use David Allen’s Getting Things Done it felt like a set of prescriptions that hobbled my thinking rather than expand it.

So, here’s my question: what do you think?

I’ve created this Twitter hashtag to help us all track the conversation, if it happens: #bizstratbooks

We walked out at the moment (mild spoiler alert) when the Fagin-like beggar king and his cronies were about to maim a child in order to make the child more sympathetic as a beggar. I couldn’t tell what atrocity in particular was going to happen — it looked like the kid was going to have a leg cut off; later I heard that he was blinded instead — but that was the point of maximum saturation for us and we left, getting our money back and leaving the theater.

We have young children, and we don’t see movies all that often. When the planets aligned and we had a chance to go to a show, we chose the movie that everybody has been talking about, Slumdog, which the optimistic one-sheet…

Slumdog Millionaire One-Sheet

…advertises as “a buoyant hymm to life, and a movie to celebrate” — this crock of BS quotation according to Richard Corliss.

An hour into this movie the high water mark of buoyancy was when the young protagonist jumped into the wet-and-smelly end of an outhouse in order to rescue a beloved photograph of his movie idol, then ran to said idol covered in feces to get an autograph. Otherwise, the movie was one relentless panorama of degradation, fear and humiliation instead… happening both to the young-adult protagonist but mostly flashbacks to his childhood self.

To us, this isn’t entertainment. We spent the whole time thinking about OUR kids and projecting them onto the screen, and wondering how people can survive in such abject poverty. The setting and serial debasement kept us from engaging with the story. We left.

Much has been made of the “poverty porn” of Slumdog (search on “slumdog poverty porn” for myriad examples), but it’s the child-endangerment porn that I’m writing about today. Increasingly, we see movie-and-TV makers putting kids in graphically-portrayed danger, and there’s no warning to the audience. There’s a clear warning if the movie contains the inexplicable dangers an exposed female breast and an equally clear note if somebody uses the word “fuck,” but no warning if a kid gets killed or nearly killed.

Why not?

Let me be clear: I have no objection to Danny Boyle making Slumdog. I don’t believe in censorship, and I believe that the R rating was apprpropriate.

But the movie sure wasn’t for us. I’m sensitive to child endangerment in movies, and my wife Kathi is even more sensitive. Even when I find myself watching TV or movies alone or with others, when the story turns to a kid with a gun to his head or the like, I feel a virtual Kathi flinch next to me.

When, for example, I saw “Dark Knight” with a bunch of my work colleagues and was sitting next to my friend Don — whose wife Michelle would find her “do not watch” list of movies similar to Kathi’s — the (mild spoiler alert, but c’mon you’ve SEEN this already, right?) I knew that the Joker-holding-a-gun-to-a-child’s-head moment at the climax of the movie would have sent Kathi out of the theater even a few minutes from the big finish. It took ME out of my engagement with the story, and I’m a Batmaniac for several decades. Don took Michelle to see it a few days later — because it truly is a great movie and a historic performance by the late Heath Ledger — and after that key moment Michelle wanted her two hours back.

Even Shakespeare — who had Kent’s eyes spooned out onstage in King Lear and characters humiliated in unthinkable ways in COMEDIES, let alone histories and tragedies — thought twice before before showing children hurt. In Act 4, scene 2 of “Macbeth,” the evil king has rival Macduff’s wife and children “savagely slaughtered,” but it happens OFFSTAGE, and in the next scene Macduff receives the news and breaks down:

He has no Children. All my pretty ones?
Did you say all? Oh Hell-Kite! All?
What, All my pretty Chickens, and their Dame
At one fell swoop?

You’d think that in the gory 1971 Roman Polanski film of Macbeth — just a few short months after Polanski’s wife Sharon Tate was killed in the Manson Murders — the director would have shown the kids being killed, but Polanski didn’t.

What has changed between 1971 and 2009? Why is OK to show these things now?

Which brings us to “Dollhouse,” the new Fox series by Buffy-creator Joss Whedon, where the protagonist, “Echo” (played by Buffy alumna Eliza Dushku), has her memory wiped and a new identity programmed for each assignment. The pilot ran last Friday night, and Kathi and I caught up with it Saturday night.

The plot of the pilot (real spoiler alert this time) revolves around a 12 year old girl getting kidnapped, watching her father shot (and possibly killed) during a ransom attempt, and almost — almost! — winding up as the sex slave of a pedophile. Echo — of course, because this is television ladies and gents — winds up saving the day.

Kathi didn’t make it through the episode.  I nearly didn’t but decided to finish it after she had gone to sleep.

Dollhouse has an excellent storytelling engine (see John Seavey’s remarkable Fraggmented blog for a deep exploration of storytelling engines in pop-culture), but the child endangerment porn — which was not essential to the engine for the series overall — will keep Kathi from returning to the show.

Whedon, for all his genius, put the wrong foot forward on Dollhouse.

Let me end with something simple: putting kids in graphic, urgent, life-threatening physical danger is a cheap storytelling shortcut.

And I hope that Slumdog does NOT win the Oscar.

Over the holidays, I received a number of Batman-related goodies (I’m a Batfan) and I have my new DVD of The Dark Knight all ready to watch in the new year, so “Batman” was a natural search to come to my mind.

Here’s what I found– Gorgeous, isn’t it?

If this makes you nostalgic for the series, it is curently being rerun on the American Life Television Network.

This is my last post of the year– which is hardly a surprise on 12/31/08.

Happy New Year!

• http://scatter.wordpress.com/2008/12/03/infinity-not-quite-as-big-as-it-used-to-be/
• http://www.oopstime.com/news/health/22008/yes-i-am-afflicted-with-tivo-guilt.html
• http://dailydish.honadvblogs.com/2008/12/03/got-tivo-guilt/
• http://www.fresnobeehive.com/archives/2008/12/what_tv_shows_g.html
• http://www.gizmolovers.com/2008/12/03/tivo-guilt-dont-they-have-a-pill-for-that/
• http://blogs.mysanantonio.com/weblogs/atlarge/2008/12/new_i_refuse_to_believe_1.html
• http://www.tvsquad.com/2008/12/02/yes-i-am-afflicted-with-tivo-guilt/
• http://media.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NDU3MjBiMDNkNjM2N2FmM2RiMThiMGRlNDBmNGIzN2I=
• http://blogs.kxly.com/blog/2008/12/02/tivo-guilt/
• http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1266561/tivo_guilt_too_much_of_a_good_tivo.html?cat=15
• http://truemors.nowpublic.com/?p=34622
• http://economics.com.au/?p=1897
• http://www.tcpalm.com/blogs/thewatercooler/2008/dec/03/tivo_guilt/
• http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2008/12/question_of_the_day_how_far_back_do_your_tivo_shows_go-2.html

Some are taking it seriously and some are making fun, but golly that’s a lot of people!

The sentence most often quoted is my comparison of the moment when you fire up your TiVo to a home work assignment. You can see the original here:

And you can read David Daniel’s article version here.

I’m having great fun with this!

You can see it here:

The interview itself was great fun and it’s wonderfully surreal both to see myself on TV and to be so gee-willickers excited about it: the new media guy on old media!

The new media twist is flavored like Facebook: friends posted the link on Facebook even before I saw it myself. People wrote on my wall. One friend sitting in SFO saw me on JFK and sent me a note via, you guessed it, Facebook.

The interview is related to this post from a while back: “Why Does On Demand Feel so Demanding?”

On an amusing side note: we get our cable TV via Time Warner, henceforth in this post to be referred to as The Evil TWC. For some unfathomable reason The Evil TWC decided NOT to show this story on Headline News. Every time we came up on minute 24 or minute 54 of the hour, they broke to local news coverage.

So even though I was on TV I couldn’t see it on MY OWN TV in the living room. Thanks to The Evil TWC Kathi and the kids and I all decamped to my brother Evan’s house on our way out to a midday hike because Evan has satellite.

A big raspberry to The Evil TWC.

Dish Network, why don’t you come up and see me sometime?

Earlier this week Sony’s Crackle.com announced a new season of original-to-online video content, includng a new series called “The Hustler” starring Mark Feuerstein– one of those “oh yeat THAT guy” actors who you have seen in a million things but can never quite place.

Over at TV Week, Daisy Whitney reports that, “Crackle carries original Web shows and releases them in four 13-week schedules each year, with new episodes debuting on the same day each week to build a regular audience.”

But the key sentence — and the mistake that Crackle, Hulu and every other original video creator keep making — from the Variety piece is, “Each webisode will run three to five minutes.”

Somewhere, somehow, the media industry decided to accept as fact the conventional wisdom that mediasnacking is where it’s at.  Crazy kids today, such wisdom goes, have the attention span of a guinea pig on crystal meth, and that to these A.D.D. viewers a three minute video is the equivalent of a marathon session of all three extended DVDs of “The Lord of the Rings.”

I disagree.  We know from gaming, virtual worlds, online community, instant messenger sessions and many other data points that millenials and other digital natives are perfectly capable of hours of extended engagement with online content– if the content is any good.

Moreover, three to five minutes — even released at reliable weekly intervals — just isn’t enough story to satisfy anybody– viewers or advertisers.  You can’t have a story with a beginning, middle and end in three minutes unless it’s a one-shot joke, and people don’t come back week after week for the same joke. You need to live with a story, let is slip around in the back of your mind, remember it later, and have it be complex enough to digest before you’ll bother to come back.

To extend the nutritional metaphor, to win my heart media needs to have at least the level of engagement as a chili dog. Nobody has a passionate opinion about which gumball machine dispenses the best gumball, but as my old friend Leslie says, “you’ll fight to the death for the honor of the chili dog of your youth.”

The TV sitcom has trained our modern media culture to accept 22 minutes as a compressed and efficient unit of video narrative, with eight minutes of monetizing interruptions. Why can’t online video do the same?

Sure, online viewers are less patient than folks on the couch. Online, we suffer from S.O.S. (Shiny Object Syndrome) where there are lots of thing hopping up and down and shouting, “click on ME!” But that doesn’t mean we should only give viewers a snack when they want a nice lunch.

Instead of dribbling out weekly doses of three-to-five minutes over the course of 13 weeks (a maximum total of 65 minutes), online video creators should have six episode arcs where each episode is the conventional 22 minutes long. (At 122 minutes, this is twice the amount of content as what Crackle is doing.)

However, each episode should be broken out into 3 to 5 minute chunks that can be distributed widely, widgetized, linked to each other and spreadable in the Henry Jenkins sense.

So Hulu, give me Gemini Division, but give it to me three episodes at a time so that if I want more I can get more RIGHT NOW. I can’t bond with your characters in just a handful of minutes: I need more.

Doing it this way is also better for your advertisers: if episode one of a show hooks me and I can see episode two and three right away, that is three or more exposures to the advertisers… particularly if we’re talking branded entertainment.

Other resources:
See “Snack Attack,” the March 2007 Wired cover story for a good overview of this, and don’t miss Steven Johnson’s rebuttal, “Snacklash: In praise of the full meal” in the same issue. And I’ve written about this myself here.

It’s odd when the late-night media cycle infects and affects my dreams, but I slept poorly after the net burst out with the news that Jerry Yang is at last saying toodle-oo to the CEO slot at Yahoo! (see the New York Times piece if you missed this.)

Waking up, I wondered who would line up to buy Yahoo. That seems to be the only scene left in this drama, with Microsoft having tried to rush in to marry the unwilling bride and later rebuff her when she changed her mind. While the matchmakers in Redmond might merely be playing coy, all rumors have it that Mr. Ballmer has genuninely moved on.

Yahoo shareholder and board member Carl Icahn (whom the media refer to as “activist investor Carl Icahn” as if the first two words were his Homeric epithet like “the grey-eyed Athena”) will want to mend fences with Microsoft or look for another like buyer– a portal with search, email, IM and content. That’s an audience scale play in an era when scale is eroding quarter after quarter.

Microsoft is the wrong buyer for Yahoo. Sony Corporation is the right one.

Sony has massive consumer electronics, a movie studio, immense television production, PlayStation and gaming, but no owned-and-operated TV distribution. It’s the only big media company that doesn’t have easy in-the-house distribution. Fox has Fox, lots of cable and everything else in the News Corp empire. Disney has ABC and Family Chanel. Universal has NBC, Bravo, USA, Sci-Fi and more. Paramount had CBS and still has a close relationship with it. Warner Brothers has, well, The CW.

Given the fragmentation and spread of the TV audience (I’ve written about this before), Sony could entirely bypass TV, keep its non-affiliated and powerful TV production platform, and also use Yahoo as an alternative ad-supported distribution platform with existing online community.

And imagine adding this power to Sony’s consumer electronics and gaming empires. A Bravia TV might come embedded with Yahoo’s Flickr; PlayStation games arrive pre-equipped with Yahoo Instant Messenger; the Blu-Ray player in PlayStation could have an easy link to Yahoo’s entertainment pages to encourage more purchase and rental… particularly of Sony TV shows and movies.

In the Terry Semel years, Yahoo wanted to compete with the studios and failed. The stock price dwindled (yesterday it was at a Filene’s Basement low of $10.63). Yahoo couldn’t spend the money on the kind of content that the studios make, and so it failed. Yang stepped in to reduce costs (watching the trail of tears of long-time Yahoo employees has been sad for a while) and miss the Microsoft bus.

But Yahoo doesn’t have to be absorbed into a similar portal and doesn’t have to die on the vine. It could be the glue that binds the different parts of Sony together in new and exciting ways.

Sir Howard, are you listening?

Despite a few innovators — mostly, I think, on the feature side of the entertainment industry — the gap between content creators and marketers persists.

I caught up on Monday’s Gossip Girl episode a little while ago and was struck by one exchange between Dan and Vanessa, where Dan’s advice to Vanessa about helping another character is to consult the evil Blair. “If you Google ‘revenge’ it comes up ‘BlairWaldorf.com,’” Dan observes.

Thinking about it later, I went to Google and typed in “revenge.”

No BlairWaldorf.com.

No Gossip Girl content of any kind in either the paid or so-called “natural” listings.

How expensive could the keyword “revenge” possibly be?  Here are the current bidders on the keyword:

1. Poopsenders-revenge
   sweet revenge-the ultimate gag gift
   mail cow, gorilla, or elephant poop
   www.poopsenders.com
2. Impossible To Find Plans
   Rare info on computers, spy, money
   Revenge, electronics & 100′s more
   www.theinformationcenter.com
3. Be Invisible – Stay Safe
   Say It With An Anonymous Letter
   Postmarked From Random Zip Codes
   www.PostalSecrets.com
4. Get Revenge Now
   Revenge Books & Ideas
   High-Tech & Old-School Tactics
   Absolute-Revenge.com

I somehow doubt that Poopsenders has a bigger marketing budget than The CW.  (And we have a winner for today’s, “I didn’t think I’d see those words strung together” contest.)

Now, the folks behind Gossip Girl — certainly the execs at The CW — KNOW that the show is watched online as much as if not more than it is watched on conventional TV.  When they tried to pull episodes offline last season there was immediate fan backlash.  Even though The CW has trouble monetizing Gossip Girl as much as a conventional TV hit (e.g., Two and a Half Men, forsooth), that doesn’t excuse them from heavily marketing the show online.  And this episode was shot WEEKS ago, and written weeks before that. “Duh… we didn’t know that dialogue was in there,” is not a credible excuse.

What this says to me is that there is nobody from marketing — probably nobody who even KNOWS anybody from marketing — in the writers’ room thinking, “how can we use this?”

This huge missed online marketing opportunity comes from a show that has as its central conceit the notion that tony high school brats in NY communicate largely through their mobile phones and an online social network.

Let me make this easy for you, CW folks: get an intern to spend half the day in the writers’ room and half the day with the marketing department.

Sheesh.