Tiger Woods, this week's Icarus, grew up with the Web.
Indeed, when he seemed to be flying most closely to the sun, Woods insisted that instead of talking to the police, he would only communicate through his own blog, TigerWoods.com.
News of his striking an iron fire hydrant and a wooden tree with his Cadillac Escalade was generated not by conventional media, but by Web media, principally led by TMZ.com.
While the more conventional media were still telling the story of how Woods' wife had supposedly saved him from a terrible fate, TMZ, RadarOnline, and others (the one conventional medium on TMZ's side was the more traditional Enquirer, but traditional media have always despised this under-rated institution) approached the matter with a cynic's eye, a skeptic's nose, and perhaps even a spy's technology.
Together, they produced many alleged lovers and tales of Tiger's conversations with close friends in which he allegedly confided that only a Kobe Special (the evocatively phrased "house on a ring") might remedy the situation.
And now that, according to numerous online sources, we have rumors of sexted photos of the inside of Tiger's trousers, I can think of nothing other than Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
(Credit:
Cliff 1066/Flickr)
Is it mere coincidence that on the day that Woods' most hallowed reputation was assaulted by rumors not only of smutty cell phone photos, but of an affair with a fascinating porn star, Google's CEO spoke to the world from on high?
In an interview with CNBC, Schmidt declared in what some might feel was his softest, most touchingly moralistic tone: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
His statement was meticulously constructed in response to a question about the trustworthiness of the world's most enveloping search engine. However, surely his answer applies to technology in general.
The problem with technology isn't so much that it immediately reveals, but that it immediately records. That is how Google makes much of its money, by recording the preferences of those who use it.
That is also how photographs, opinions, flings, even drunken nights come back to haunt those who may not wish nor deserve anyone's criticism.
In days gone by, sportspeople, movie stars, even, perish their memory, congressmen could keep their less socially acceptable behavior on the down low because proof was somewhat hard to clutch. Of course, people may have talked. But there was no physical evidence.
Now, the minute Playgirl decides that photographs of Tiger's private life and parts are genuine, all will be revealed in its less than salubrious glory. And Woods' interesting faith in the power of his blog to bring the unquestionable truth to those who admire him will seem like faintly naive bluster.
However, as we watch this whole sad, real, painful and even slightly amusing affair (or, as it seems, affairs) unfold upon our Macs, PCs and smartphones, shouldn't it make us wonder what it is to be free?
In order to live a life of freedom, shouldn't we fly in the other direction from Facebook, put some space between ourselves and MySpace, smash our cell phones and invest in landlines, let go of our laptops and most definitely never imagine that our personal blogs will persuade people that we are who we really think we are?
Shouldn't we attempt to live in a way that no one can observe and no one, especially Google, can record?
Tiger Woods might have gone the old media route--an interview with Diane Sawyer or Oprah. Even a Roger Clemens-like session on "60 Minutes." Perhaps one of those might have garnered him a little sympathy, might have earned him a few points in a game now largely driven by a 24-hour news cycle.
But Woods believed in new technology. And it is new technology that might end up doing him the most damage of all.
(Updated 11.35AM PST Monday, with comment from Amazon)
There's a wonderful Borders bookstore in the middle of London's Oxford Street. Or at least there was. I went there in September and suddenly it was no more. Indeed, the U.K. arm of Borders recently reached for a form of bankruptcy protection.
So how interesting that one of the greatest successes in online book retail, Amazon, is rumored to be troubling real estate agents in its search for retail premises in the U.K. According to London's impeccable Times, Amazon is looking for very fine locations in order to, well, fulfill orders.
Perhaps some might find it a touch amusing that such a dot-com icon has decided to trouble the physical world. However, it appears that the British are suffering from frightful attacks of impatience while waiting for their erudite tomes, wickedly catchy tunes and other more substantial purchases to arrive by ponies that may be less than express.
The Times says that Argos, a U.K. catalog retailer of, oh, useful and useless stuff, has 18 percent of its online orders picked up in store. Indeed, the company believes that 50 percent of its holiday television sales will be transacted in this manner.
Amazon's customer service has become so progressive that its presence in American, as well as British, malls might serve as something of an inspiration to the more complacent establishments.
And now that Amazon seems to be able to sell you everything from woodworking equipment to vacuum cleaners, it surely puts extra pressure on postal services and that nice man in brown who comes to my house and always looks tired.
What a revolutionary concept it would be to go to a store and know that the thing you want is actually there. It just might catch on.
UPDATE: According to Reuters, Amazon denied Monday that it would open physical stores. However, the company would not comment on whether it might instead create partnerships with existing retailers, many of whom, Lord knows, could do with the business.
Some industry insiders told me that any potential steps towards physical retail by Amazon might be a reaction to the EU tinkering with distribution regulations.
You may need a little Xanax after observing this. Equally, you may never want to take any drugs ever again.
For Quentin Tarantino, he who makes movies that contain blood, gore, and many homages to Asia, recently shot a TV spot for the Japanese cell phone company Softbank.
As well as an astute grasp of Japanese, you need to have a very firm grasp of existential philosophy to fully appreciate this spot. Without an astute grasp of Japanese, I can tell you that this is the latest in a series of spots that features the White family.
Just to give you a sense of how this ad follows in the rambunctiously absurd tradition of much Japanese advertising, the regular members of the White Family are Me, a Softbank saleswoman, Older Brother, played by American actor Dante Carter, Mom, and Otousan, the talking dog who is, in fact, Dad. (Yes, I am entirely sober.)
I will leave you to create your own version of what is going on here. Though, to my untrained, pained eyes, the story seems to concern Tarantino, whose character is Uncle Tara-chan, and his parading a live dog as some kind of competition to Otousan, the plastic pooch who is, in fact, Dad.
The blond lady near the end of the spot appears to be playing Tara-chan's wife and, as so many wives of famous Americans these days, she doesn't appear happy with her husband. Though she is screaming down the phone rather than wielding a three-iron.
I have embedded the short and long versions of the ad, just because the long version doesn't seem to make the short version any more understandable. Several people made similar comments about Tarantino's "Kill Bill" series.
However, Brad Pitt has already appeared in Softbank spots, so one must suppose that the most understandable part of Tarantino's performance is the fee.
If you were watching Florida impersonate a headless chicken against Alabama Saturday, you might have been aware that Luke Wilson, AT&T's disarming new pitchman, had also lost his head.
For the game was interrupted by Wilson's need to talk, with his filmic features and without.
The battle between AT&T and Verizon has been peppered by startling doses of objectivity. So to demonstrate the clear, obvious, incontrovertible fact that Verizon's 3G is but a Wendy's-stuffing, cake-loving, 15-beers-a-night slob when compared with AT&T's Usain Bolt, Wilson performs a side-by-side that would put the Pepsi Challenge to shame.
On AT&T's 3G, Wilson, finally not dressed in a painful shade of tree bark, downloads himself with the speed of an unfaithful, burglarizing vicar fleeing from the press.
When he tries using the Verizon 3G, which AT&T declares is very much slower, Wilson is up to his neck in it. There is no time to bring his head into the picture.
Naturally, AT&T's hope is that Wilson's charm will encourage people to use their hearts at least as much as their heads. No one using the latter will really believe he is using Verizon's 3G to materialize his headless self.
So smartphone seekers will be left trying to decide between a network that is allegedly everywhere, but is slow, and one which, according to critics, isn't remotely everywhere, but is faster and, oh, has that supposed digitally clueless pageant queen of an iPhone.
It's not quite George Clooney vs. Brad Pitt, is it? It's more, well, Luke Wilson vs. Owen Wilson.
I wouldn't for a moment think that anyone working late on something frightfully significant in Redmond would conceive of alcohol as a means to help them through their engineer's block.
But just in case there is one tortured soul who might be tempted to have a six-pack delivered to his cubicle, I have some difficult news.
i-Booze, the Seattle-based folks to whom you used to be able to turn online for a swift delivery of soothing liquids, seems to have fallen on difficult times.
For Techflash has delivered the information that not only has i-Booze failed to secure a license to sell liquor but that its enterprising founder, Karim Varela, uncorked a plea bargain on two misdemeanor charges of selling alcohol without a license and illegal possession of alcohol with intent to sell.
In truth, i-Booze isn't i-Booze any more. While the idea reportedly came to Varela when he was in jail for DUI, there were those who felt the name might be something of an incitement to excess. So the company recently changed its name to Dilky.com.
Which some might find a more neutral moniker, but I find my neural association membrane immediately goes to "alky."
In speaking to Techflash, Varela did not sound confident of Dilky's resurrection: "We are still working with the city and the liquor control board to regain a license, but it is a difficult battle."
Prohibition is not quite at hand, though. Anne Radford of the Washington State Liquor Control Board said the board will look into the matter over the next couple of weeks.
Meanwhile, Varela is hoping that former customers and those who would like to be current customers might lobby the board with a human rights appeal. Or perhaps offers of a free wine-tasting trip. (Some details exaggerated here.)
What hope he has, Varela is putting into the presence of a new Seattle City Attorney Pete Holmes, who replaced someone called Tom Carr.
"We feel our downfall was mostly due to ex City Attorney Tom Carr's battle against bars, clubs, and alcohol in Seattle and we just got caught up in the middle when really we're providing a beneficial service for the community," Varela told Techflash.
A beneficial service, indeed. I would happily use it were it to descend to the Bay Area. However, it might also have helped if the service had benefited from a name such as i-Pinot or i-(De)liver rather than the somewhat provocative i-Booze.
Perhaps you have already become used to Verizon's Droid tossing names at the iPhone like an 8-year-old boy behind his teacher's back.
However, the latest ill feelings directed at Apple's little cutey seem beyond even anything heard in an elementary school.
In a new TV spot, Droid asks an important question: "Should a phone be pretty?" To which many sane people would say "yes," and many emotionally challenged beings made of metal would say, "Huh? What?"
Its answer--the latest in its presentation of the Droid as a robotphone--is to hurl metallic-tasting custard pies as if the Apple store was a state fair.
"Should it be a tiara-wearing digitally clueless beauty pageant queen?" belches the ad's rhetoric, clearly referencing the iPhone, while wrapping the pie in a question.
I know many Socratically-inclined Apple fanpersons will object to the notion that beauty is only skin deep. But they will surely rail against the mere suggestion that the iPhone is digitally clueless.
Of course, this ad implicitly suggests that the Droid is, well, one of Cinderella's sisters, which might well affect its abilities to entice certain sectors of the populace.
Actually, the suggestion is more than implicit, for the deeply hirsute voice declares: "Is it a precious porcelain figurine of a phone? In truth, no."
So do you wait for a design that is pretty and is, as this ad so elegantly puts it, "racehorse duct-taped to a Scud missile fast" or do you have to compromise?
I know they say you can't have everything in life, but surely there must be some very attractive engineer out there who can give us everything in a few square inches of cell phone.
An increasing number of people are meeting the loves of their lives, or at least of their months, on Facebook.
However, a consequence of this might be that an increasing number of people think they will encounter love's intrepid arrow by socially networking. It seems, indeed, that some might be making advances toward their psychologists. Or even their proctologists.
The U.K.'s Medical Defense Union, an organization whose goal is to "defend the professional reputations of our members when their clinical performance is called into question," is concerned that some of its members resort to politeness when patients request the pleasure of their company via Facebook.
According to the Telegraph, the MDU believes that doctors have become well aware of the need to be careful about material they post on their Facebook pages.
But Dr. Emma Cuzner, the MDU's medical-legal adviser recently wrote in the MDU Journal: "Doctors may be less prepared for patients using sites like Facebook to ask them out on a date."
Some doctors apparently feel one ought, at the very least, to politely reply in the negative. However, Cuzner contended: "Given that this is not a professional route of communication, any correspondence of this sort would clearly stray outside the doctor/patient relationship."
But sometimes even the definition of what is professional is open to interpretation.
What if one of your patients happens upon you at the local corner shop and suggests you have coffee? It would hardly be possible to look him or her in the face, say nothing, turn away, and recommence your search for peanut butter and a large tub of Ben & Jerry's Magic Brownies.
So one can perhaps understand a doctor's natural urge to at least politely decline. What if that patient then badmouths them to other patients? What harm can possibly be done by a simple "no, thank you"?
Moreover, the thing about the Web is that if someone wants to find you, if someone wants to contact you, they can and they will. Yes, you can have better privacy controls on your Facebook account. But information tends to take on a freedom that is hard to anticipate and approaches can come in ways that one least suspects.
The MDU's first priority is protection. Yet one can imagine that some doctors, when approached in any kind of public forum, might feel more inclined to reply in that same forum, however politely, just so that it can be clear and known what their reply really was.
Of course, they could always reply by sending a "Which Kind of Drug Are You?" quiz. Or perhaps the even more popular "What Kind of Evil Creature Are You?"
That's the thing about Facebook. It just brings you so many new, fun ways to communicate.
I am consumed, as I am sure all imperfect beings are, by the furor surrounding Tiger Woods' sudden and somewhat vertical descent from his image pedestal.
There will be those who will have much sympathy with his plight, as there will be those who will have none.
However, I was reading a quite brilliant editorial on Yahoo Sports offered by Dan Wetzel.
I was fully absorbed by Wetzel's strong, persuasive arguments that Woods should really not bleat about the tabloid world, when my right eye was drawn to an ad from the Professional Golfers Association. I immediately took a shot of it, because, well, please look at it.
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(Credit:
Chris Matyszczyk)
Some clever word-associating media planner or algorithmic program has managed to juxtapose this article about revelations in the life of Woods with an offer from the Professional Golfers Association to reveal the secrets of Woods' great rival, Phil Mickelson.
His, um, golfing secrets, as far as one can judge.
This touching coincidence approaches the poignancy of the Twitter billboard seen recently in Mobile, Ala. And one wonders how quickly anyone will notice that perhaps this is not in the finest of tastes, especially as it is coming from an organization that makes quite a lot of money from Woods' exertions.
As I am typing this sentence, the "Phil's Secrets Revealed" ad has moved on. One wonders just how quickly it will return.
If you thought that all wireless carriers know just how good their competitors' networks are, you might be suffering from a dropped conception.
In a recent speech to the Association of National Advertisers, posted on the AdAge Web site, Verizon Chief Marketing Officer John Stratton explained that his company couldn't get hold of any good data on just how reliable AT&T's network is. So it commissioned a third-party survey, one that seems to have sent it giddy with joy.
"What we saw, we sort of suspected, but it was almost astounding," he said.
So almost astounding, in fact, that Stratton said the company canned its fourth-quarter holiday campaign, which had already been produced but not yet aired (and presumably did not mention AT&T), and began mapping out its besmirchment of its rival's alleged network deficiencies.
"There was a bit of fact here that needed to be expressed aggressively to the marketplace," he added.
The bit of fact, which AT&T feels has been stretched into the part of the bookstore entitled "fiction," revolved around the accusation that AT&T's network has more holes than your average chunk of emmental.
The new Verizon ads seem certainly to have stirred a girding of loins in the marketplace and perhaps helped sales of the Droid, which are approaching 1 million.
Stratton added that because people are using cell phones in so many more ways, the strength of a company's network will be an increasingly important factor in consumer choice.
Strangely, he said nothing about Verizon one day offering the iPhone on its network.
There again, with the agility the company showed in producing the anti-AT&T ads so quickly, perhaps they're already shooting some happy Verizon iPhone ads. You know, just in case. You know, somewhere in Fiji, perhaps. You know, with the money they're saving now that AT&T has dropped its lawsuit against the map ads.
You know that apocalypse thing we're always being told might be just around the corner? Well, do you feel the chilling breeze? Do you feel the troubled twittering in the trees?
For here is a tale that I know you will discuss with your loved ones, perhaps with other people's loved ones, even with your psychological professional, the minute you hear it.
It appears a man called Dana Hanna is standing at the altar on November 21. He utters those most solemn vows about how he will love and obey or whatever it is that married people claim to do these days.
The officiant pronounces that Dana and his lovely bride, Tracy, are now married. Does Dana weep? Does he kiss his bride?
Ah, no. For Dana's Twitter moniker is TheSoftwareJedi and his first loyalty is to his digital followers. So, much to his wife's surprise, he whips out his cell phone and updates his statuses on both Twitter and Facebook. Right there at the altar. He also hands his wife's cell phone over to her.
Now that he has uploaded the evidence (which we're assuming isn't staged), Dana insists that this was all done for fun.
Indeed, he explained on YouTube: "I have a lot of family scattered around the country and we all use Facebook a lot to keep in touch. So when Tracy and I were engaged, most of my family found out via Facebook because we updated our statuses."
If you're wondering what it is he tweeted from the altar, here it is: "Standing at the altar with @TracyPage where just a second ago, she became my wife! Gotta go, time to kiss my bride. #weddingday"
However, another tweet sent on Monday night by Hanna, who is chief architect of NextDayPets.com and president of Torian Technologies, might perhaps offer an even greater insight into his complex and socially networked psyche: "Just changed over the laundry for @TracyPage and was thrown off by the fact a bra was in there. Not used to living with a woman again."
Oh, Tracy, are you sure about this? I only ask because I just tried to access the Tracy Page Twitter feed and received the message "this page doesn't exist."
