Colleen Taylor

I thought Liz Smith was on to something when I blogged back in March about her prediction that "We're going to have the Internet even when we don't have things to eat." But who knew than an off-hand comment from an octogenarian New Yorker would come to bear so quickly right here in San Francisco?

This past weekend's Wall Street Journal reported on the growing number of homeless people with Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, and email addresses. According to the paper, "In America today, even people without street addresses feel compelled to have Internet addresses."

It seems absurd at first, but is it really?

Think about the increasing numbers of people who devote hours to networking on LinkedIn while unemployed. Or those of us who can easily go weeks without speaking to family and longtime friends, but regularly spend hours keeping up with strangers' blogs or "interacting" with Facebook friends and Twitter followers-- many of whom we've only met in real life once or twice.  Are we all really any different than the homeless people staking their claims on the Web?

I know the Internet can be exciting and beneficial-- I mean, I'm here, aren't I?-- but I try to be wary of the allure of "social media" and its rapid rise in popularity. There's something of the placebo effect in it all-- and I think it's important to be vigilant about what we're neglecting or sacrificing in the real world as we're busy cultivating our online "lives."

I hate to participate in whatever's left of the Web 2.0 echo chamber, but I couldn't hold myself back from commenting on the Huffington Post's most recent Julia Allison interview. 

I basically got all John Edwards in there, stopping just short of telling personal tales of helping my dad shop for steel-tipped work boots while growing up in Appalachia. (No, seriously, I could have done that. Red Wing Shoes in Monaca, PA, holler back!)

Normally it doesn't bother me when journalism is a bit elitist, because I understand the need for glamor and escapism. But sometimes it's just distressing how painfully out of touch some publications are from reality.

In the HuffPo interview, Julia dismisses jobs with the potential to pay "$50,000 a year" without directly mentioning how much she makes doing things differently. Well, it was reported earlier this month that her NonSociety venture pulled in net revenue of $60,000 last year. For those of you counting at home, that's $20,000 a year for each of her website's three editorial contributors, before paying for the site's programmers, hosting, servers, et cetera.

The elephant in the room, of course, is how she and her co-'Lifecasters' are really paying for their lifestyles.  I know there is a tiny, lovely, lucky group of people who, often because of a blend of familial support and a lack of student debt, don't have to pursue 9-5 jobs in their 20's. I think that's fantastic, really, and I can't knock them for it-- who knows, maybe someday my future children will be fortunate enough to be included among them. But I think it's strange for someone in such a rare and privileged position to publicly put down a certain occupation, or the kind of salary it can bring in.

What is even crazier to me is that reporters at publications like HuffPo are apparently also so out of touch that they don't call her out on it-- instead, they run stories about how Julia Allison is pioneering a new "business model" and a revolutionary form of "personal branding" or something. Um, what?

My alloted 250 words of real talk below (my comment is still pending, so I'm posting it here in case it doesn't make it past the HuffPo interns):

Have you read Ariel Levy's stuff in the New Yorker lately?  I can't really offer a better critique of her work than Emily Gould's assessment earlier this year: "Ariel Levy is completely taking the New Yorker to school and using it to clean the blackboard and then writing some new stuff on the blackboard which is awesome." 

Levy's article this week is centered largely around her interview with Lamar Van Dyke, a truly free-living Vietnam War era radical feminist lesbian who is now a grandmother in her 60's (but still really bad ass.) Although you really should just pick up the March 2nd issue and read the article-- you can't find it online-- I thought the last couple of paragraphs were especially worth sharing.

Regardless of the different people of different genders she has chosen over the years as her comrades, Van Dyke's primary loyalty has always been to her own adventure.  A woman in her sixties who has been resolutely doing as she pleases for as long as she can remember is not easy to come by, in movies or in books, or in life.

"Your generation wants to fit in," she told me, for the second time.  "Gays in the military and gay marriage?  This is what you guys have come up with?" There was no contempt in her voice; it was something else-- an almost incredulous maternal disappointment. "We didn't sit around looking at our phone or looking at our computer or looking at the television-- we didn't sit around looking at screens," she said. "We didn't wait for a screen to give us a signal to do something. We were off doing whatever we wanted."

And, I know this is my second "Remind me why we are on the Internet, anyway?" post in as many days. I'm not sure what that says. 

Last week, Liz Smith, the New York Post's legendary 86-year-old gossip columnist, gave a pretty fascinating interview about her recent layoff to Lloyd Grove, who also happens to be a legendary erstwhile gossip columnist (he wrote for the Daily News.) 

(Forgive me if any of the aforementioned info was unnecessary-- I never know how much of this semi-insidery media stuff is general knowledge, and how much shorthand I can use when talking about it. When I lived in New York it was pretty much impossible for me to go a day without buying the NYP or the NYDN, because how could I not?  They only cost like 25 cents and were pretty fun to read, if only for the gossip columns and horoscopes.)

Anyway, both Smith and Grove were recently fired from their NYC gossip gigs, so you could tell in the interview they are kind of like old friends, sharing war stories and shaking their heads together about "the world nowadays."

Although a lot of things in the interview did not make sense to me-- who prefaces a $125,000 salary in journalism with the word "only"?--  I did kind of agree with a few of her sentiments. One in particular has kind of been echoing in my head for a few days:

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I don’t think [news websites] mean anything either, except they mean instant success for these very, very energetic and ambitious young people. And it’s perfectly fine, but I wouldn’t give any credence to most of the stuff I read. ... We’re going to have the Internet even when we don’t have things to eat. We’re going to still have it.

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My question is-- is that a good thing?  She doesn't quite seem to think so, or at least she's still on the fence.

But some people, like those at, say, One Laptop Per Child, would argue having Internet access and information is more important than-- obviously not food or water-- but many, many other material things that previous generations may have seen as signs of success. 

As for me, I'm honestly not sure if I think Liz Smith has a great, common-sense point of view, or if she's just missing the point.