In the olden days – say, last year – it was easy to feel put upon by that guy, who would go into that trademark trance at the dinner table while everyone else sat and glared.

But that was before everyone else ran out and bought their own iPhone or BlackBerry or what-have-you. Before iPads ruled the world. Before news of an iPhone software upgrade (like this week’s) was acceptable pub conversation.

The catch is that now everybody has a smart phone, nobody wants to be the first to actually use it. We’ve all been around long enough to know what a Phone Jerk looks like, and nobody wants to be the Phone Jerk.

Clearly, new rules are called for. What’s iPhone etiquette in a world full of iPhones? Is it possible to produce one at the table without being that guy?

I’m here to tell you that it can be done. Consider the four following scenarios:

1. Cards on table

In some circles, phones-on-the-table rules are followed. In these instances, at the beginning of the meal, remove your phone from your pocket and place it on the right-hand side of your place setting. In instances like this, it’s expected that everybody at the table will do the same.

The rationale here is that you, like your companions, are busy social creatures, and important messages could come in at any moment. The office might be on fire. The babysitter might have revelations to share. Company less insufferable than you’re currently suffering might want to join.

This is understood. But do not mistake phones-on-the-table rules for a free-for-all. The table-phone is a device for critical calls only. You are not at liberty to idly poke at your phone just because it’s sitting there. That way lies Phone Jerk.

2. Settling an argument

Behold the great enabler. The advent of smart phones marked the end of a time-honoured social rite: the futile factual argument. Nobody argues a point with more passion than someone who doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Was the Golden Gate Bridge built in 1906 or 1912(neither)? Was Seinfeld shot in New York or LA? Absent conclusive information, these arguments could go on for hours.

No longer. Mobile Internet access has deprived us of the ability to deliberately prolong an asinine debate. It seems one can’t get more than two minutes into one these days before somebody threatens to check Wikipedia. (Bonus points if you alter Wikipedia before they get there.)

This can be a blessing as well as a curse. Resolving a factual argument is an acceptable excuse for producing a smart phone in polite company. Once it’s out, nobody’s going to fault you for doing a quick e-mail check, or perhaps commenting on a few dozen Facebook photos. It’s only human.

3. As a purposeful insult

In 2010, the only meaningful metric for a conversation is, “Are you more interesting than my iPhone?” Nobody misses the point when the iPhone wins.

Smart phone-checking isn’t just a distraction; it’s an escape hatch. Are the people across the table from you boring? Is reality generally not living up to its promise as an entertaining place to hang out? Then pull the ripcord!

The effect is seldom lost on one’s companions. If you didn’t notice that someone’s eyes glazed over in conversation, you’ll have an easier time spotting it when they produce a phone, interpose it directly between your faces, and then let their eyes glaze over.

Remember to use this method judiciously. If you’re constantly pulling out your smart phone, people will assume you’re merely maladjusted and will fail to take it personally. Don’t let them think you’re a jerk when you’re really a culture warrior.

4. It’s iPhone Time

This is the crux of the matter. iPhone Time is a miracle of modern socialization. It’s the flocking behaviour in which – by unspoken consensus – everybody drops what they’re doing and checks their iPhones at the same time.

Nobody wants to be the first to pull out their iPhone, lest they suffer the scorn of their peers. But if it can somehow be arranged that at least half of the people present check their iPhones simultaneously, a tipping point is reached. Somebody will say the magic words – “Oh, is it iPhone Time?” – at which point the remaining people at the table will produce their own phones, and everybody will tap away in silence for five minutes before rejoining the conversation, refreshed.

Of course, iPhone Time only works when everybody present has one, which is why it’s a relatively new phenomenon. I see it more and more. People without phones to check will be left squirming unless you give them something to pass the time. (Try a newspaper or a squeeze toy, if one is handy.)

The trick to iPhone time is achieving it in the first place. How to reach the tipping point, where half the people present have their phones out? Subterfuge can help. Invent a pretext to call someone at the table. Or pick a factual argument (“Unless I’m mistaken, Louisiana was originally settled by Belgians”; see No. 3.) and take advantage of the scramble to check the Web.

Alternately, wait for somebody to go to the washroom. The critical mass will diminish, and when the person gets back from the loo (where, of course, he was checking his own phone), he’ll look at the gathering and say, “Oh, is it iPhone time?” And lo, it will be. Everybody wins.

Virtual goods drive some people nuts. I understand this.

Why, you might ask, would sound-minded citizens spend real money for imaginary items in some Facebook game? Would not that money be better going to something useful, like lunch, or the local orphanage?

Besides, (you might continue) how much real money could one possibly want to drop on, say, new clothes for an avatar? To breed virtual puppies? To buy imaginary weapons? Or purchase a virtual pig in that blasted FarmVille game? How much could all this nothing possibly be worth?

I will give you a hint: One billion dollars.

It’s true. That’s the going estimate for how much will be spent on virtual goods in the American market this year. In Asia, the figure is already five times that. These are, by common agreement, very large numbers.

Virtual goods aren’t just fodder for oddball human-interest stories any more. They’re real, bone fide moneymakers, and thanks especially to Facebook games, they’re everywhere. They’re estimated to account for a sizeable chunk of Facebook’s revenue, and the site is now in the process of launching its own currency – “Facebook credits” – to get a bigger slice of the action. It seems the time has come to stop laughing and embrace the virtual pig.

Virtual goods broached the Western consciousness with the advent of virtual worlds such as Second Life and World of Warcraft, which sprouted their own internal economies. Virtual goods serve two distinct purposes. Some, such as weapons, improve a player’s performance in a game. Others, such as clothes, are more like playthings, a way to create an online identity.

But for all the hoopla, virtual worlds remained a niche. Virtual goods, too, might have remained a relative side-show, had we not happened on one of our age’s great alchemic discoveries: When virtual goods are stirred together with two other Internet phenomena – casual browser games and social networks – the product is solid gold.

It’s called “social gaming,” and it refers to the new kind of distraction that’s colonized Facebook and is sweeping across the open Web and mobile devices too.

The idea is simple: take a casual, fun game that you can play in a Web browser. Make the game at least slightly multiplayer; this can be as simple as sharing high-scores between friends. And then, once those friends are looking, give players the chance to get ahead in the game by ponying up real cash.

An intriguing website called FooPets shows how it’s done. It goes like this: First, players “adopt” a far-too-cute 3D puppy or kitten. The virtual pet requires virtual food, and before you know it, you’re at the virtual pet store buying – I kid you not – virtual Purina-branded kibble. (Branding opportunities are many in the world of virtual goods.) To pay, you earn credits by scratching your little brute under the chin over and over, by completing various incentives, or by – ahem – producing a credit card.

The animal thus looked-after, the idea then becomes to decorate your pet’s room with items that can only be paid for in real dollars. A gold harp costs about $12.50, which is a great deal if you a) compare it to a real harp and b) don’t spend too much time wondering what good it will do an imaginary kitten. To drive sales, virtual goods makers will declare some items to be limited-issue. That’s right: FooPets will only sell this $12.50 picture of a harp to 185 customers – and it’s already sold 21. Buy now!

It’s ingenious. And if you’ve played one social game, you’ve played them all. But the pay-or-play model is starting to embrace all kinds of online distractions. Flash games that once were free are now asking for virtual coinage. Even old standbys such as the Atari-era Missile Defense and the puzzle game Bejewelled are getting gussied up with bonuses that can be purchased for coin.

Now, with Facebook throwing its institutional weight behind the genre, it will only grow faster. “Facebook Credits” will be like quarters to feed into its vast arcade.

It’s easy to be incredulous, which I more than occasionally am. The value proposition of virtual goods (“nothing for something”) is weak. But consider the arcade analogy: No one who’s fed quarters into a pinball machine, or paycheques into an XBox, is in a position to scoff. We’re all paying for an experience, it’s just the nature of the experience that varies.

In fact, if anything’s odd, is that it’s taken so long for someone to turn shopping, our favourite past time, into a video game. That’s something to admire about virtual goods: in their fakeness, they’re true to life. They distill our consumer culture to its purest form.

They provide the fun of shopping without the wares; the thrill of unwrapping without the wrapping paper. They offer the joy of conspicuous consumption without the consumption. I don’t know about the virtual pig or the picture of the golden kitten harp, but that’s something people will pay good money for. ]]> http://ivortossell.ca/?feed=rss2&p=114 0 http://ivortossell.ca/?p=102 http://ivortossell.ca/?p=102#comments Wed, 17 Mar 2010 20:49:18 +0000 Ivor http://ivortossell.ca/?p=102 And so the day came to pass: “Your Interview (-slash-Votre-Entrevue) with Prime Minister Stephen Harper” was broadcast on YouTube. It was broadcast an hour late, which turned out to be moot, since the whole thing was pre-taped anyway. It wasn’t a live town hall; it was a video press release.

Was it the gong show some of us had been predicting? No. Gong shows are fun.

It had all the trappings of a broadcast interview, though little of the content. Instead of Peter Mansbridge, we got Patrick Pichette, a nervous Google executive, fidgeting in his chair. (At least he brought a touch of that YouTube amateur-hour spirit to the proceedings.) “This is democracy at work!” he said, knees a-wiggle. Otherwise, it was as standard-issue an interview as anything a broadcast network might have churned out, but without the interesting content.

The event went on for a good 40 minutes; mostly, it consisted of Pichette serving up questions for Harper – some written, some taped – and then letting Harper answer at length, uninterrupted and unchallenged.

Much ado had been made of the exercise’s premise: Canadians were to submit questions on YouTube and then vote on them; the most popular would then be answered. “Unfiltered and immediate access to information” was what the PMO promised. But no sooner had the broadcast begun than Pichette casually announced that “We’ve picked, from the very top tier, a selection of questions.” So much for that.

If the goal was to engage youth or the politically disinclined, the video didn’t do itself any favours. The very first question was in French, and answered in French, without the benefit of any translation or subtitling. Also, it was about structural deficits. If you think listening to a politician run through his talking points about structural deficits is interesting in a language you understand, wait till you try it in a language you don’t.

The Prime Minister looked professional, composed, and grimly amused to be there. After he gave a lengthy response to a question about Senate reform that came from a viewer named Harvey, Pichette – almost involuntarily – burbled “Thank-you, and I’m sure that Harvey would be thrilled by this answer!”

It wasn’t even Pichette’s fault. The format was DOA. Interviews that consist of simply delivering a list of pre-written questions are guaranteed to be dogs. This is why journalists hate doing e-mail interviews. The best interview is a two-way conversation between two personalities that illuminates at least one of them. (Case in point: Craig Ferguson talks to Stephen Fry without an audience, delivering real content in the late-night void.)

You don’t get that when the interviewer is limited to reading a list of questions, even if they come from Bob in Whitehorse or sje7835 in Edmonton, because then the interviewee just reads off answers. It’s ironic that the most interactive of intentions led to the least interactive of interviews.

The format needn’t have been fated to fiasco. Google could have freed their interlocutor to act as a real interviewer – guided by user questions, but not reduced to parroting them – who could ask follow-ups, direct the conversation, and needle the Prime Minister when he needed to be needled, they might have been onto something. They could have broadcast live, and put the Prime Minister in a real town-hall setting, out of his comfort zone, into a setting that would catch people’s attention.

But they didn’t, and what we got was the dullest 40 minutes on YouTube. And that’s enough to turn engaged citizens into a bunch of sleepy kittens.

It’s agenda time in Ottawa. Parliament has returned from that winter break we all heard so much about, and now it’s the season of budgets and throne speeches and responses to throne speeches and whatever it is they do next. But this year, there’s a twist: I read in the news that the Prime Minister is “going viral.” In fact, there’s an announcement on his own website.

“Do you have questions about Canada’s Economic Action Plan or where Canada is headed?” it reads. “Prime Minister Stephen Harper is standing by to answer your questions.”

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the moment they cast his lot in with the dinner-hour infomercial operators of the world was the moment I knew that this isn’t democratic renewal incarnate: It’s another half-baked social media gong show in the offing.

Let’s take a step back. The outreach is a collaboration between the Prime Minister’s Office and Google, the corporate entity behind YouTube. Last week, YouTube rebroadcast a live feed of Mr. Harper delivering a self-congratulatory speech in the House of Commons. The main event, however, comes March 16 when he will participate in a virtual town hall, answering a series of preselected questions from YouTube users. The questions he’ll answer will be determined by a vote to see which is the most popular. Democracy!

On one hand, it’s hard to argue that any project to boost voter engagement isn’t a good thing. Google has put together a neat little site to collect questions, which it somewhat hopefully titled “Your Interview with Prime Minister Stephen Harper.” And the Tories have been trumpeting the proposal as an outreach to a new generation of Canadians.

With the Prime Minister poised at his keyboard, thousands of hopeful interviewers have put their questions in the box. The clear leaders right now are variations on “Why won’t you legalize cannabis?” The Internet wants what it wants.

As an online broadcast, a public-relations exercise transmitted over the Web instead of the airwaves, this is all well and good. But let’s not confuse it for actual social media engagement, the kind that – as the Tories imply – will reach out to the country’s disaffected citizenry and their distempered children. In fact, the Government of Canada, and the various parties that form it, seems constitutionally incapable of managing real social media involvement.

Stephen Harper has a Facebook page, which is very good at sitting there. He already has a Twitter account, which somebody uses to issue 140-character press releases of marginal interest in his name. I know he’s not using it to tweet himself; I was watching him deliver a self-congratulatory speech on YouTube when a tweet rolled in from him announcing that he was, at that moment, delivering a self-congratulatory speech on YouTube. This is not how it’s done.

The thing is, social media doesn’t work with the iron-grip communications strategy that the Tories are so fond of. Even the Tories know this, and yet this is the government that thought it would be exciting to barf out the federal budget on Twitter, one line at a time.

“Social media is changing the way Canadians interact with politicians,” read the boilerplate statement from the Prime Minister’s Office, announcing the YouTube project.

Indeed it is. It lets Canadians interact with the famous Facebook group called “Can this Onion Ring get more fans than Stephen Harper?” (So far, advantage onion ring.)

It gives Canadians access to the online groups that drummed up anger against prorogation, putting a technical issue on the national agenda and eventually leading thousands into the streets.

And it gives Canadians a peek into the lives and minds of politicians who are genuinely willing to share. In fact, Mr. Harper’s own tech-savvy Heritage Minister, James Moore, provides a great example of how a high-ranking politician can use Twitter to simultaneously connect with constituents and promote his agenda.

But it doesn’t inspire Canadians to watch Commons replays or canned Q&As. Social media doesn’t mesh with the way governments in general – and this one in specific – do business.

Succeeding with social media comes down to being honest, having a frank, unfiltered voice and letting personality go along with policy. So much of the communication that’s come out of this government involves enforcing message discipline, stonewalling unwelcome enquiries and not saying anything that may make the wrong kind of news. If you want to succeed in social media, give us something human to socialize with. Is there any more than an infinitesimal chance that Mr. Harper might say anything unexpected or interesting in his YouTube live chat? I’d wager not (though I stand ready and eager to be surprised).

If you want people to pay attention, give Helena Guergis a Twitter account and strand her at an airport. Put Jason Kenney on ChatRoulette; it’s good for opening minds. Maybe if Mr. Harper used his Facebook account to make his case against the onion ring, he’d get some traction. And therein lies the great injustice of social media: Governments can’t use it the way the rest of us do.

There’s nothing wrong with harnessing YouTube to stage an ask-the-Prime Minister event. But it’s not the future of democratic engagement, it’s not the evolution of social media. Mr. Harper’s not going viral, he’s just got a new communication strategy. It is what it is. Call now! Prime Ministers are standing by.

The first thing to know about Chatroulette – the latest gonzo fixation to sweep the Web – is that it’s not safe for work. It’s not safe for children; it’s not safe for the squeamish; it’s not safe for any purpose. It contains people.

Chatroulette is a website that does one thing: It connects users to live video chats with complete strangers. There’s no browsing for partners, no picking and choosing, no filtering out the rude, the nude and the outright bizarre, of which there are plenty. Chatroulette simply picks another anonymous soul who’s using the site, and bam: There you are, looking bemusedly at each other across the ether.

This thing is as popular as it is astonishing. University kids gush about it. People drag their housemates on to the site. People sit in coffee shops chatting up random people online instead of the random people next to them.

It seems, at first blush, as nihilistic and void as interactions come. What could possibly be appealing here?

To use Chatroulette is essentially to channel-surf, but with humans. When you stop talking to one person, it automatically connects you to another. It happens so quickly that it takes a moment to realize that you’re actually looking at another person in real time, and that he’s looking back. You look at him, he looks at you, and then, almost invariably …

Click.

One of you changes the channel, and moves on to another partner without saying a word.

Click. The people of Earth start scrolling by. There’s a roomful of emo teenagers. “Where u from,” one types. “Canada,” I type. They flip away. A young man, his face glowing with laptop glare. Click. Another. Click. Naked guy. Click. Some teens in Boston, who accuse me of looking like a teacher then curse me roundly when I refuse to help them with a school paper. Click. Frat boys. “Hey big dawg. What’s upppp?” they type. Click. Click. Click click click. It’s so easy to get discouraged.

A man in a plush tiger suit appears; he looks at me and flips away in disgust.

Live video sites have been around for a while, but most of them have followed a more structured approach, letting users pick and choose who to chat with. I found that experience almost universally hellish; it was like being stuck in an elevator with a series of malignant non-entities, mumbling nothings instead of staying anything. Chatroulette’s innovation is to couple anonymity with an environment in which everybody’s holding a rip cord. Don’t like it? Bail.

The upshot is that Chatroulette users go belting through pairings at such a pace that, almost out of necessity, some kind of interaction emerges out of the murk.

There appears a young man who’s waving a wad of brightly coloured bills. He does this little fan dance for a moment. I pull out a $20 bill and hold it to the camera. His eyes bulge. “YEAH!” he screams. Click.

Naked guy. Naked guy. A woman appears, smiles, flashes me and vanishes. Then two more young women in a dark room in Philadelphia, so all I can see is one’s hat and another’s glasses. They are blasting Michael Jackson. I notice they type in complete sentences; one, it turns out, is a copy editor, and soon we’re talking – about M.J., about snow, about naked people on the Internet and about the feeling of attendant doom that comes from working with words in 2010. This goes on for half an hour. The folks from Philly and I agree that humanity has been redeemed for the night.

It’s familiar. Sometimes, on the street corner, I’ll hear people talking to each other very much like I talk to my friends – with the same idioms, the same tone, the same drawl – and I realize that it was just happenstance that I befriended who I did in this world. Had I shown up at a different place and time, these strangers might have been my closest friends.

On some level, we’re all interchangeable. We have our tribes. You know yours and I know mine.

The next night, I do it all again on Chatroulette. Click, click, click, through the whack jobs and the dullards, the peep shows and the dozens of blank squares. Hilarity, then discouragement, then finally as I’m about to give up, a black square says hello.

Her webcam isn’t working, so there is nothing where her face would be, just a dark box.

“Very mysterious,” I say.

“Slightly,” she says.

The black square says she’s from California, and is a she. I tell her I’ll choose to believe that.

“Most people skip past me because of the whole black box thing,” she says.

We talk of IKEA, and hockey, and what makes a good conversation (specifically, not talking about pets), and pets.

Life is the process of filtering out the people who don’t click, and glomming on to the people that do. What a rush when we find our own! So much of what we’ve tried online in the past decade, from the escapism of virtual worlds to the labours of Facebook, has been an extension of this simple project.

Now we come to the simplest implement of all: whirling through people for that thrill of connection. Chatroulette is life sped up: bewilderment, alienation, drudgery, distraction and redemption – when you find something that clicks.

I’m sympathetic to the head-scratching. If all that hype turned out to mean nothing, we’d be cast into some kind of existential crisis. So I’ll tell you what the iPad means.

The iPad means that, within a couple of months, there will be no physical position in which we won’t be able piss away time on the Internet.

Let’s consider this for a moment.

These are the days of iPad backlash. It’s perfectly understandable – before it was unveiled, people were routinely referring to it as the “Jesus tablet.” Inevitably, the iPad didn’t prove to be as revolutionary as some had hoped. It amounts to an oversized touch-screen iPod, and completely lacks the ability to cure leprosy. (Though I understand someone’s working on an app.)

However, its size – and its ability to work really well at that size – is all the innovation it needs. With its 10-inch screen, the iPad will be a window onto the Internet and all its riches, to say nothing of the music, movies and books that Apple would like to sell you. The iPad will be a device for consuming content, consuming lots of it, and consuming it anywhere.

But don’t we have this already? It’s been pointed out, by pundits and thoughtful observers alike, that the iPad is a middle-child device. It’s not small and portable like a smartphone, or big and practical like a notebook. But like caulk, a well-designed tablet will fill up the gaps in daily life where neither antecedent quite fits.

Consider the couch. Laptops are still ungainly things; sharing what you’re doing with someone sitting at the other end of the couch becomes a dance of cradling creaking screens, avoiding hot surfaces, and not garotting the cat with the power cord. Smartphones, no matter how shiny, still require people to squint at small print.

A well-implemented tablet, on the other hand, offers screen space enough for two people to watch at once, along with the cordless, throw-it-around form of an iPod. It’s simple, it’s social, and it cuts down on the tiny real-world annoyances that prevent people from being at home with technology.

Apple knows this. Clearly, it’s pitching the product as an around-the-house convenience. Its centrepiece promotional video for the iPad is full of models on couches, using the thing in increasingly languid states of recline. As hands glide over the iPad’s surface, pinching, flicking and dragging, an Apple vice-president in casual wear pops up to share some thoughts: “For the same reasons that it just feels right to hold a book or a magazine in your hands as you read them, it just feels right to hold the Internet in your hands” – and here he pauses, his eyes going a bit googly – “as you surf it.”

As a rule, Apple vice-presidents should not gush about getting handsy with the Internet, especially when wearing zip-up sweaters. The man, however, has a point. The Internet is no longer trapped in a boxy monitor, on a table in the corner of one room in the house. In fact, it’s not even confined to cyberspace any more. The Internet is becoming palpable.

In the days of desktops, the only way to surf the Web was to stay sitting. But when laptops came about, one could surf while reclining, lounging, stooping, sprawling, loafing, and lying flat on one’s back, metabolizing. But this was nothing next to smartphones, which we now use while perambulating, stretching, strolling, sprinting, jumping, shopping, toweling, and, in especially bad cases, reproducing.

And even then, phones and iPods are still small and awkward, so now we have a tablet that’s perfect for the couch, and the restaurant table, and the party, and the lecture hall; for reading in the bathroom, for floating in space, and possibly for using in the space-bathroom. Who knows – the future is grand.

I think these will be successful machines, and I want one, irrespective of the fact that I don’t need one and can’t afford one. (Behold, the magic of Apple.) And yet I watch these devices colonize my waking hours with increasing ambivalence. Embodied in shiny Apple products, and the products of Apple’s imitators, the Internet follows us around like a determined terrier, loveable and impossible to put down. There is no escape; only abstinence.

The iPad isn’t a gadget: It’s the Web incarnate. Toteable, fun and painless, it will be the ultimate tool for scarfing down online content. And it arrives at a time when we’re only just starting to have the conversation about whether consuming vast amounts of online content is really any better than consuming vast amounts of television.

The question, in the end, isn’t whether you want to spend hundreds of dollars on a new tablet computer. It’s about whether you really want the Internet lying around the house like that.

There was the small matter of going to war with China. Last week, Google threatened to pull out of the country, chafing at censorship laws and all but accusing the Chinese government of hacking its networks to persecute human-rights activists. This quickly escalated into an international incident, except that one of the nations wasn’t a nation, it was a company.

But before Google’s swagger into geopolitics, another, smaller story had caught the attention of the Internet’s commentariat. A feature called Google Suggest appeared to be self-censoring results that would have disparaged Islam – and Google found itself accused of cowardice. If ever you needed an illustration of the bind Google has worked its way into, here it be.

When you start typing a query, the search engine tries to complete your sentence, popping up suggestions as you type. It draws them from what other people have searched for in the past, ranking them by a secret-sauce combination of popularity and longevity. (It will also take your own search history into account.)

In other words, it’s a picture of what others are searching for. Oftentimes, the results are useful. However, it didn’t take users long to figure out that entertaining results can be had by entering leading phrases. When you punch in the words “why does my,” for instance, Google Suggest pops up options such as “Why does my cat bite me?” and “Why does my belly button smell?” When you punch in “all I want to do is,” we learn that others have been searching for “All I want to do is eat your brains.” It’s fun, in a hell-is-other-people sort of way.

The trouble started when the trick was tried on world’s religions. It was soon discovered that typing in leading questions about different faiths turns up a series of uniformly disgruntled suggestions: “Christianity is a lie,” “Judaism is a cult,” “Buddhism is not what you think,” “Hinduism is wrong” and so on.

However, if you type “Islam is,” Google Suggest suggests – nothing. Google Suggest happily reflects users’ derisive queries about every other religion, but when it comes to Islam, it’s mute. It gives the appearance that Google is self-censoring to avoid trouble with a religion whose extremists are increasingly militant about slights.

The discovery caused a minor sensation online. “Google, now serving cowardliness,” read a missive that went to the top of the charts at Digg, the influential portal. News outlets left and right picked up the story. Was Google – that bastion of honesty – fudging its own results for political expediency?

It’s the kind of accusation that most companies wouldn’t blink at, but it’s a serious one for Google. One of Google’s foundational principles is that it does not tinker with search results. The algorithms it uses to generate them might change, but Google promises that they’ll be applied consistently and neutrally. This isn’t just for public relations: Google’s entire business of selling ads next to search results relies on advertisers trusting it not to play favourites.

Google says that the Islam omission is “a bug.” This explanation has been greeted with more than a little skepticism. To offer suggestions for terms from “Alabama” to “zygote” and then choke on “Islam is” is one oddball technical difficulty. Google employees are known for many things – being bad at programming is not one of them. (As of press time, the quirk is still there.)

The flap over its “Islam” non-suggestion will come and go. But the controversy illustrates the bind that Google finds itself in again and again, as it tries to play the role of reality’s honest broker. Real life is a dirty, tarry thing to have on your hands. As Google inserts itself into every corner of our information-consuming lives, it has to play an ever-bendier game of Twister to satisfy competing demands.

As it looks up our information, suggests our search terms, pulls up our maps, photographs our streets and stores our books, Google also has to flex to meet national copyright laws, local taboos, rules about hate speech, various censorship regimes and now perhaps even religious sensibilities. And it has to do all this while still saying it’s neutral.

Google Suggest puts the firm in a tighter spot still. Google can legitimately wash its hands of much of the awful content it has to index by pointing out that it’s just a conduit by which to reach other people’s information. But Google Suggest is more active. Even if its suggestions come from other people’s searches, the uninformed (and the willfully ignorant) may not draw that distinction.

It’s a pickle. For all its devotion to openness, Google can’t afford to hold up a perfect mirror in which to see ourselves, because between blasphemy and felony, the view isn’t pretty. At the same time, Google’s users demand transparency as a prerequisite to their trust. When Google even gives the appearance of mucking with its search results, its users go up in arms because we fear skewed results will distort our view of the world.

You don’t have to go to China to learn that small differences in search results can make a big difference. The best we can hope for is fairness and consistency. The sooner Google fixes this “bug,” the better.

You know Gary Brolsma. In 2004, he was a round, reclusive young man. One evening, he sat down in his bedroom, put on his headphones and pressed “play” on a piece of catchy Moldovan pop music, chiefly notable for repeating what sounds like the words, “Numa Numa yay!”

Then he all but exploded in front of his webcam. He bounced in his chair; he waved his arms; he mugged the lyrics with the abandon that comes out only when someone doesn’t realize he’s about to become a global item.

Mr. Brolsma uploaded his video to a minor video-sharing site. What he thought would be a recording of marginal interest became globally popular. (In the days before YouTube, the very idea of viral video was a novelty.) He also became a worldwide curiosity. The news media arrived at his doorstep, discovering one profoundly embarrassed teenager.

Even as the song and the video both wormed their way into mainstream pop culture, the story reeked of derision. Mr. Brolsma became a charter member of the freaks-and-geeks club of YouTube celebrities that briefly threatened to overrun popular culture a few years ago (remember Star Wars kid?). South Park eventually lampooned the YouTube crowd in an episode in which all the stars wind up fighting to the death. Society, the episode intimated, would be no worse off for the loss.

Mr. Brolsma could have left bad enough alone. Instead, he embraced the fact that the universe, in its wisdom, had appointed him the Numa Numa kid. He released a succession of follow-up videos, creating a network of websites to support his new band and other creative ventures. Cleverly, they all play up the fact that he seems to be a genuinely sweet, shy, roly-poly character – the underdog everyone can get behind.

And then, a couple of months ago, the most wonderful thing appeared online: a video filmed in October at an U.S. college football game. It’s half-time at Michigan State, 75,000 people are in the stands and the marching band is on the field. Up to a podium at the front of the stadium steps a round young man. It’s Gary Brolsma, there to conduct the band in a rendition of his timeless classic. Partway through, he turns to the crowd, puts down his baton, and with a look of deliberation, leads the band through the same arm-waving dance he captured six years ago.

Trumpets and trombones, by the hundreds, wave through the air in sync with him. Sousaphonists hop up and down in rhythm. From the videographer’s perch, halfway up the stands, the crowd’s pumping arms can be seen following the lead of the guy who was once a laughingstock. As his image is projected on the big screen, the crowd roars with delight. It’s a triumph.

I watch this and wonder: Does society shape the Internet, or does the Internet shape society? It’s a question that underlies so much of what’s proved vexing in this still-young century. So much of what the Web has thrown at us has proved unsettling. So many of the ways it works seem arbitrary and capricious. Can we bend this tool to our will, or is it destined to alter the way we relate to each other in ways that are beyond our control and beyond our comprehension?

The story of the Numa Numa kid points us toward an answer. On the one hand, it is a reminder of so many of the changes that have swept over us. We have a new form of mass culture, one that works independently of the broadcast media. We’ve seen the rise of user-created adaptations and remixes as vectors for propagating things that tickle us. We live in the age of social media, of crowd dynamics, of mass whimsy.

On the other hand, the more things change, the more potent that aphorism about things staying the same seems to become. The Numa Numa kid reminds us that we’re always looking for new ways to tell old stories. Every tale worth telling boils down to just a few fundamentals: love, revenge, betrayal, redemption. You could say that the tale of Mr. Brolsma is about technology or viral videos or the power of the crowd, or social media. But fans at football games don’t cheer for social media.

They cheered because the fat kid made good.

Social media have already transformed so much, and yet I can promise you that no matter what changes those media undergo in the years to come, we will use them to keep telling the same stories over and over. That’s the horror of the future, and the beauty, too. We’ll still be us.

If only they had. If only they had.

In my Monday Globe column, I wrote (and here, at the Globe) about Facebook’s new privacy scheme – which, for many users, defaulted to settings that would have exposed their accounts to the entire Internet. I argued that the change probably wasn’t a bad thing in the long run: Facebook is a public place, and nudging users into the open helps dispel the myth that it’s a place for confidences to be kept in perpetuity.

At the time – I wrote the piece on Thursday – the announcement was pretty fresh, and I have an aversion to trashing something in print before I’ve completely got my head around it. (This might be a weakness.) But the week since – a week in which Gawker, especially, has been sounding the alarm with head-exploding abandon – has left me wondering if I was wrong to tread so lightly. And it seems increasingly clear that, while this is probably still a positive move in the long run, the way Facebook implemented it is little short of reprehensible.

The way Facebook rigged up the change, users who had previously altered their privacy settings saw their new settings default to private, too. But people who simply trusted Facebook’s default settings, which had already left them semi-exposed, were presented with default settings set to almost entirely public.

In other words, Facebook pandered to savvy users, and took advantage of the rest.

Savvy users, who had already changed their privacy settings, are the ones who have shown they know how to look after themselves. They’re the ones who have demonstrated the capacity and desire to take ownership of their accounts. (Not coincidentally, these are also the power users most likely to be the most vocal, either as Facebook members, or as bloggers, journalists, and commentators.)

The rest of the users – the as many as 70% – 80%, according to the Canadian Privacy Commissioner, who have never changed their settings – are ones who have demonstrated a willingness to follow Facebook’s lead in setting their accounts, putting an implicit trust in the company to act in their best interest.

So wouldn’t it have made more sense for Facebook to have been extra-cautious with a demonstrably trusting demographic? These are the people who have demonstrated a willingness to click ‘OK’ and follow default settings; therefore, these are the people that Facebook should be treating the most conservatively.

Instead, it took advantage of its most vulnerable members, while looking after the users who had already shown they could look after themselves. This meant that online criticism was blunted by the fact that the people who would have complained loudest were treated well. And in retrospect, that’s a side of the story that should have been aired.