Photo by hyku via Flickr

For those of us who prefer to spend our “working” afternoons in pursuit of player transaction gossip, Major League Baseball’s winter meetings are the highlight of the season. For a few days each December, the front office honchos from every MLB team, the agents who represent the millionaires who play for them, and the media whose job it is to report it all (and we mean all) gather in the lobby of some hotel room and try to swindle each other. In the process, general managers do their best to end up on the post-trade Frank Robinson/Babe Ruth side of things, agents do their best to have their players end up on the Kevin Brown side of things, and sports writers do their best to not end up on the Rob Neyer (scroll down) side of things. With so much action — and the scoop-hungry masses who are tasked to cover it — concentrated in one place, the winter meetings turn into something of a perfect storm for rumor-making.

Until this year, the worst to come out of all this might have been the hurt feelings of a player or two. But that was before the combination of Twitter and what one Winter Meeting press attendee characterized as the “mom’s basement contingent” conspired to make a mess of things in a manner that can only lead us observers to conclude that this whole new media democracy set-up is actually capable of policing itself.

On Monday at 3:00 p.m., Rotoworld senior baseball editor Aaron Gleeman tweeted that he and his colleagues were “going to learn a lot about everyone’s quality/standards of reporting this week” and that “[s]ome people aren’t gonna look so good.” Presumably, this was a reference to the same mom’s basement contingent that his fellow baseball rumor monger Jason Rosenberg had implied was polluting the proverbial well. Gleeman followed that up six minutes later with a response to a tweet from MLB Trade Rumors‘ Tim Dierkes (who’d taunted the rest of us with promises of a “spreadsheet that I will never share, with the major reports that were wildly wrong”) where he claimed that he wasn’t “going to go nuts ‘outing’ anyone,” but that it would “be tough not to remember what’s going on.”

We here at Unfit tried to get a hold of Gleeman so that he might enlighten us as to what was going on. But since we don’t seem to have the clout of, say, Peter Gammons, we got no response. So here’s a guess: Mom’s basement reporter-type hears some crazy rumor. Mom’s-basement reporter-type prints said rumor without so much as vetting it with any sources. Report gets tweeted, retweeted, and kind of becomes news. Until, that is, a not-so-mom’s-basement-reporter-type susses out the truth, sinking mom’s-basement-guy’s rumor and maybe his or her (well, we’ll guess his) fledgling career.

‘Course, without the ability to so quickly and widely publish his rumor, mom’s-basement guy is left with an audience of exactly his mom. A fact which should bring the whole Twitter thing home to those of us who are totally stoked about being able to receive news in real time. That’s nothing new. But that the mom’s-basement joker(s) got so jumped on serves as proof that not all media types are so blinded by the relative shiny newness of social media that they can’t police themselves. And that’s encouraging — even if the end result is that those of us who crave instant updates have to wait just a bit longer.

Disaster Twitter, a New Wrinkle

Of all the iconic images associated with the attacks of September 11, 2001, the footage of then-President Bush’s fuck-me stare — delivered, now-infamously, as he was about to grace an audience of Florida school children with his best reading voice — is perhaps the most honest summation of the mixture of horror and panic that most of his fellow citizens felt as they watched the World Trade Center crumble on national television: At least for a day — and, in most cases, probably longer than that — U.S. nationals were left in the very unfamiliar position of post-national-trauma lockdown. And, though the news media did its best to service us — parked as we were in front of our TVs, with little else to do but wonder about when the next plane would hit — with a stream of reliable information, there were, naturally, a few rumor-fed hiccups in those confusing first few hours.

Lucky for us, there was no Twitter. Or Facebook. Or any other web 2.0 gadget that might have been used to turn what was already an uncomfortable level of panic into something that might have, in its ability to undo civil order, made us long for the likes of Al Haig.

Picture this: The 9/11 sequel hits. Old media either waits to source unconfirmed reports or runs them in a crush to beat both their competitor networks and the social-media machine. By now, the latter group has already produced a collective avalanche of tweets and status updates, which — in their first-person anecdotal nature — are generally inaccurate and vague, but are, nonetheless, submitted for network-viewer consumption. And as the whole thing starts to spin out of control, the first victim post shows up. Maybe it’s a heart-rending farewell. Maybe it’s a horrifying call for help. Maybe it’s a citizen’s APB for a possible attacker. Whatever it is, it gets tweeted and retweeted. And picked-up by blogger after press agency after network until the thing is ringing in the collective heads of an already frightened public. But this time it’s not a report of one-last-cell-phone-call from a doomed plane; it’s the actual thing — and it’s happening in real time.

A small-scale example of the sort of frenzy that our new media reality can create was blogged about on TechDigest this past April. There, Daniel Sung reported on the information spread associated with DIY swine-flu reporting. “There’s been a Chinese whispers effect whereby a host of tweets built around anecdotal evidence, to put it kindly, have produced a mixed bag of misinformation and hysteria,” Sung wrote. “My personal favourites [sic] are the opportunist: ‘Simple cure for the new BHS (Bird/Human/Swine flu) as reported on TV last night is the drug Tamiflu…already a prescription on the market’ and the poetic: ‘In the pandemic Spanish flu of 1918-19, my Grandfather said bodies were piled like wood in our local town…swine flu = danger.’”

This is not an argument for some sort of disaster-sensitive Twitter censorship. That sort of thing would only serve to compound such a tragedy. Instead, this should be taken as a neurotically instructive take on the relationship between new media and the stuff so many seem to be ready to (at least) supplement it with: If you find yourself still marveling at what you believed on the afternoon of September 11, 2001, maybe you should reconsider your need for instant information.

Nogochocinco? The NFL Wants To Kill Fun.

At the end of this past August, Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver Chad Ochocinco announced his plan to circumvent National Football League anti-tweeting regulations. For Ochocinco (nee Johnson) — a guy already responsible for an impressive list of self-branding antics — it was just another brilliant marketing move: Each week, in advance of every game, he’d pick one luck fan and fly him or her out to wherever his Bengals were playing so that he could — through a set of pre-arranged hand signals — indeed tweet from the field. But for the NFL it was some kind of threat, and less than a week later they had Ochocinco ready to delete his Twitter account. Critics might argue that this is the worst kind of showboating — that Ochocinco, through his actions (they’d say), so misdirects the focus of the game from the team (they’d say) on to himself that the ultimate goal (winning, they’d say) is lost in the shuffle. This is total horseshit. And, thanks to all of the various anti-showboating regulations put in place by most of the major North American sports leagues — the NFL in particular — fun is fast disappearing from the sporting landscape.

Funny, then, that the sport most associated with spectator boredom remains the last, best hope for truly spirited competition. What the NFL misses in such folly as its ridiculous treatment of Ochocinco, and the NBA loses in similar misguided attempts to control the personalities of its players (the NHL still doesn’t count as a major sports league), Major League Baseball — despite its best efforts — fully, unabashedly exhibits in the brilliant celebrations that often accompany the walk-off home run.

Take Manny Ramirez for example. In his time as a member of the Boston Red Sox, the … mercurial left fielder was overshadowed, at least in the clutch, by teammate David Ortiz, whose ability to orchestrate a walk-off was the main reason that team was able to overcome 86 years of futility in 2004. But orchestrating a walk-off and turning the event into an epic celebration are two different things. And, insofar as the latter is concerned, Ramirez was king — mostly thanks to this. For those of you unwilling to click, that is a photo of Ramirez standing at home plate, arms straight up, feet planted as he watches a playoff-game winning home run sail out of Fenway Park. Best part? He takes so long to begin his home run trot that the opposing team’s catcher can be seen walking off before Ramirez has even left the plate.

Recently, however, big-bat first baseman Prince Fielder and his entire Milwaukee Brewers’ squad surpassed even the great Ramirez. Check out this clip from a game against the San Francisco Giants. Here, after hitting his game-winning shot, Fielder rounds the bases, heads toward a mob of waiting members of the Brew Crew, jumps in the air, and watches as his whole team falls over when he lands on the plate. Brilliant. Simply fucking brilliant.

And — here’s the operative part — it’s wholesome. The showboat haters would have you believe that this stuff is bad for sport — that any amount of extraordinary celebration detracts from the rest of the game in such a way that it cheapens the experience for fans and stars alike. But they’re wrong. This sort of thing is the only way, in this era of instant athlete millionaires and super-agents, that we can all get on the same plane and share in the base-human enjoyment of a brilliant moment. Which is to say: The NFL shouldn’t just reinstate Ochocinco’s Twitter account; it should make every player, coach, and trainer sign up for one, too.

Philip Roth

Once not so long ago, it was understood among those who thought about such things that writing was a dying art form, a relic from an era when things like time, opportunity, and audiences were available and things like authority, expertise, and artistry mattered. Scholars and critics and other old sticks in the mud mourned the death of the written (and read) word in American culture like other old sticks in the mud in other times mourned the death of gas-powered lamps or the art of conversation or the silent movie. Writers no less important than Philip Roth, who felt his influence waning along with everyone else who made a living behind a typewriter, once told David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker – another relic with waning influence – that the evidence “is everywhere that the literary era has come to an end.” And stodgy pundits and cultural critics like John Humphrys and John Sutherland attacked texting as “bleak, bald, sad shorthand which masks dyslexia, poor spelling and mental laziness” and texters as the linguistic heirs to Genghis Kahn. Even this author may have said a thing or two about the dangers of our “tweeting” culture – all 140 characters of it – in a moment of pre-middle-aged grumbling.

This was the sad reality of the situation. But as disheartening as circumstances were for these defenders of the word, at the very least they all knew that their point about the less-than-slow death of written language was indisputable, that they were unheeded prophets in a decadent age. And they found comfort in their sanctimony.

But then Clive Thompson – a writer himself – came along with a shocking bit of news: It turns out, according to a study by Andrea Lunsford, professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, that college students’ writing isn’t getting worse as a result of all that texting, tweeting, and Facebook-updating; it’s getting better. According to Thompson, “[f]or Lunsford, technology isn’t killing our ability to write. It’s reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.”

Just look at all the writing these “young people” are doing, Lunsford argued: more than any generation before. “That’s because so much socializing takes place online,” Thompson wrote, “and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it.” Like the fella said, you add 140 to 140 to 140 to 140 and pretty soon it starts adding up to something.

Turns out these kids weren’t putting the written word to bed with all their grammatically indifferent updates about the emotional state of their goldfish or their preference for pizza over hot dogs as it relates to an upcoming lunch break; rather, they were rivaling the ancient Greeks with their mastery of the rhetorical art of kairos – “assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across” – and creating a new golden age of literacy in the process. Sure, it seemed to many that they were squeezing all the life-blood out of the language – leaving trifles like beauty, subtlety, ambiguity, and syntax dying on the floor in the name of quasi-confessional narcissism – but actually they were mastering a new kind of prose, one based on “haiku-like concision” that was designed with its audience (of one or millions) in mind. In interviews, this new generation of Bashos declared that the best prose was the prose that had the greatest effect on the world, whether that effect meant convincing a friend to see this movie rather than that or letting the world know that, indeed, you are bored at work and, yes, you are looking forward to the weekend, and, quite right, you plan on spending the weekend  making tiramisu.

And with that all the grumbling stopped. Suddenly the Roths and the Remnicks and the Humphrys and the Sutherlands of the world were satisfied. They too picked up their iPhones and started grousing about the weather and Brad Pitt’s new hair-do to their friends all over the world. All of a sudden, they ceased to see the point in flaying themselves for months, even years, at a time, in some garret somewhere, trying to map some hidden corner of the human tragedy, when they could let the world know what they were feeling right then and there and still have time to make it home to watch the season finale of Mad Men. They came to the realization that we aren’t living in an artistic age but an age of access, where aesthetic notions like “good” and “bad” and “beautiful” and “meaningful” seem almost comically geriatric and the only thing that matters is availability. They realized, like the Catholics did thousands of years ago, that confession is good for the soul, and so they traded their lonely writer’s rooms for the warmth and comfort of the modern electronic confessional booth that is the Internet, and they were happier for it. And the written word lived to fight another day.

Needled to Death: The Ubiquity of Tattoos Kills Their Deeper Meaning

In October of 2008, Gawker ran a quick take on a Wall Street Journal report that detailed the coming of mall-based tattoo parlors. The trend, says the Journal, was aimed “to capture more of the growing market of young people” who’d like to, presumably, plunk down 60 bucks for a butterfly on their ankle. “This is happening in Vegas, Beverly Hills, Staten Island, and Jersey,” flipped Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan. “I guess they deserve it.”

And maybe they do. But lost in the stultifying questions of relative edginess that make Nolan’s kicker — and permeate the Journal’s poor effort — is the fact that this guy might be coming to a mall near you not just because the stigma that’s been attached to ink for say, three-hundred years, has kind of disappeared (though that’s certainly true). Nope: The real reason that Hot Topic may soon find itself printing up hundreds of permission slips is the same one that finds Twitter thinking that it will eventually become the first Internet application to boast a billion users. Which is to say that, just over two decades into the existence of the World Wide Web, we have become totally convinced that everyone else cares about what we say, think, and do. However insignificant that may be.

This all fits with the history of tattoos — at least according to the Smithsonian’s Cate Lineberry, who notes in this 2007 article that “the Greek writer Herodotus … stated that amongst the Scythians and Thracians ‘tattoos were a mark of nobility, and not to have them was testimony of low birth.’” So back in 450 A.D., the things were, for ancient Siberians, a status symbol, a way of telling their world exactly who they were. This of course would have been significant — and would seem (in a world of universally graded significance) to be the diametric opposite of, say, Jessica Alba’s tramp stamp.

But there is no universal scale on which we could weigh the skin-and-ink statements of Alba and Anacharsis the Scythian. (Really, that bow right above her crack might be just as important to her as any symbols of life rank that any ancient duder might have scrawled down his or her bicep.) So, lucky for us, we have the Internets: Could Anacharsis have crunched his philosophy and identity into 140 character segments to be digested every 45 minutes or so? Technology aside, he probably could have. But the resources of his time made the presentation of the written word into something of a precious task. So far removed from any such appreciation for print, our world is freed from the pressure to keep every little scrawling as a sacred contribution to knowledge — which is probably appropriate. As a side-effect, every tattoo idea becomes an acceptable form of communication.

And so we prattle on. Tweets. Facebook status updates. Bloggish thingies. And tattoos. Tons of em. All minor statements of identity which, just two decades ago, would never have seen the light of day. Our assumption — confirmed by our fittingly-entitled Followers? That the greater world really cares about what you made for dinner. Celebrity. Democratized.

Not that the proliferation of fragmented ideas that comes along thanks to all of this is necessarily a bad thing. Indeed, our now-steady jabbering probably goes a long way toward bringing us all more informationally (if not intellectually) closer. That we can never hope to have the same impact on humanity that our more deliberate forebears could boast is the price we pay — with or without the edginess.