My friends and benighted Twitter followers know my fondness for a catchphrase from the 2004 movie Mean Girls: “Stop trying to make fetch happen.” The short version: One of the main characters in the Tina Fey-written high-school satire is trying to popularize “fetch” as a synonym for “awesome,” but it’s not taking off like she hoped.
Online, though, hope springs eternal.
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As a fan of all things quixotic and a champion windmill-tilter, something inside my heart sang when Daily Dot contributor Fruzsina Eördögh pointed me to a video everyone’s talking about: Dead Squirrel Girl. A three-year-old, Thea Malik , is filmed by her dad as she holds a dead squirrel that’s just been killed by the family greyhound. She’s talking about what she’s feeling: She knows that it’s dead, but doesn’t understand what death means.
Commenters on Reddit, arguably the Internet’s most passionate site for discussing headlines, pictures, videos, and other Web finds, jumped to all kinds of conclusions, from discussing the possibility of catching bubonic plague to Thea’s future as a serial killer to the parents’ questionable judgment.
Sometimes a dead squirrel is just a dead squirrel. Sometimes it’s our collective innocence.
Rather than speculate like the rest of the Internet, I tracked down a phone number for Thea’s father, a Florida acupuncturist named Sean Leonard, and Eördögh proceeded to get an interview with Leonard and his wife, Jenny Malik. None of the doomsday scenarios had come to pass. A commenter, Clare, put it best:
“Yes, the video is shocking. And it’s adorable. And it’s jaw-droppingly icky to those of us who know better than picking up a dead animal and rubbing it on our bodies. But the girl is 3 years old, she has parents who are patient with her, who let her explore her curiosity without making her feel scared or embarrassed. And, after all is said and done, her life goes on, unscathed. Over three years later, we find she didn’t get rabies or ‘squirrel AIDS’ or parasites. She is, in fact, a healthy 6 and a half year old who has a family that loves her supports her learning and growth.”
Stop trying to make death happen, folks.
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Yes, Reddit’s not always pretty. But unlike some Internet message boards, which can be pure and ugly expressions of the human id, Reddit has a healthy dose of ego and superego. There’s something self-correcting about the community, Daily Dot editor-hacker Grant Robertson pointed out to me. It may not be pretty, but Reddit’s “hivemind” — the community’s name for the groupthink that emerges from protracted discussions — usually arrives at the right answer.
One Redditor questioned CNN’s use of an image of a Sikh man wearing the South Asian religious minority’s distinctive turban in a clip about world reaction to Osama Bin Laden’s death, speculating that the network had confused Sikhs and Muslims — a big-media-done-wrong storyline that many Redditors immediately found attractive. It turned out, though, that the image was entirely appropriate : It showed a rally in India with people waving American flags and holding “Thanks Obama” signs. (Despite this, CNN issued an official apology in a statement to the Daily Dot — for what, it’s still not clear.)
The good news, though, is that Reddit went, as its pun-happy users might put it, Sikh in the head. They opened dozens of threads exploring Sikhism from all angles, from unfortunate incidents of discrimination to acts of extremism by Sikh separatists. The site’s operators even outfitted the distinctively adorable Reddit alien mascot with a turban and beard.
The upshot: Redditors now know a lot more about Sikhism. That’s good, even if they had to unfairly slag a cable network along the way.
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There are all kinds of communities online, some far quirkier than Reddit. Some that fascinate me are those that emerge around multiplayer video games.Charlie Cheever, the cofounder of question-and-answer site Quora, posted a list of life lessons he learned from playing StarCraft, the Activision Blizzard sci-fi game. Instead of offering a lot of technical tips on gameplay, Cheever garnered observations about humanity:
“Different people are good at different things.”
“Showing up every day and trying to do the right thing and working hard will probably matter in the long run.”
“If you treat people well your whole life, you’ll find yourself with a whole bunch of friends later on in life and it will be a lot easier for you to be successful, whereas if you rip people off or are just unkind, it won’t matter much in the short term but years later, it’s likely to add up to being lonely and without allies.”
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On that last tip, full of optimism and hope for humanity’s better parts, I can’t help thinking of Cheever’s previous employer, Facebook. He’s just one of many early employees who have left. The company, now running a social network that is the world’s third-largest assemblage of human beings, seems to have gone through its own loss of innocence.
Like young Thea Malik, though, Facebook keeps petting the dead squirrel of its naïveté.
Newsweek reporter Dan Lyons busted two executives at Burson-Marsteller, a big global PR firm, trying to plant a negative story about Google without revealing the identity of their client. Facebook and Burson both blamed each other and have terminated their relationship over the affair.
My apologies, folks: This is apparently all my fault. As Erin Griffith at Adweek reminds me, I suggested three years ago that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg would one day hire Burson-Marsteller, whose CEO, Mark Penn, once helped Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates polish his image.
Is this all business? No, it’s personal. One of the two Burson-Marsteller flacks, Jim Goldman, tangled with Lyons on air as a CNBC reporter over Goldman’s faulty reporting on Apple CEO Steve Jobs’s health. (Full disclosure: I also had my share of run-ins with Goldman when I ran Valleywag, the Silicon Valley gossip blog — and then ended up as his coworker at NBC for a while.)
Let’s not forget, as well, that Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and PR chief Elliot Schrage both previously worked at Google, from whence they’ve poached many employees.
Enough inside baseball, though: The issue Facebook and Google are battling over — whether Google is unfairly using information from its Gmail users to glean data about their friends on Facebook, or, conversely, whether Facebook should be more open about the data its users contribute to the service — is a big and important one.
Facebook has a hard time bringing up this topic publicly, however, since it has such a troubled history with privacy. The deeper issue is never going to get the proper airing if the players — all closely and personally linked — engage in dirty tricks, though.
No one has clean hands here: Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple and the rest of the players all engage in whispering campaigns. And no one has a perfect record on privacy.
Maybe privacy is the real dead squirrel here. We keep petting it, dancing with it, bobbing its head to try and make it talk.
Time for a new catchphrase?
Let go of the dead squirrel, Facebook.