links for 2010-10-01

Enthusiasts for social media would no doubt have us believe that King’s task in Birmingham would have been made infinitely easier had he been able to communicate with his followers through Facebook, and contented himself with tweets from a Birmingham jail. But networks are messy: think of the ceaseless pattern of correction and revision, amendment and debate, that characterizes Wikipedia. If Martin Luther King, Jr., had tried to do a wiki-boycott in Montgomery, he would have been steamrollered by the white power structure. And of what use would a digital communication tool be in a town where ninety-eight per cent of the black community could be reached every Sunday morning at church? The things that King needed in Birmingham—discipline and strategy—were things that online social media cannot provide.

To hear Linda and Vince McMahon talk about their "family business," you'd think they were florists. You'd never imagine that the day after the great "Flyin'" Brian Pillman was found dead in his hotel room, Vince would drag his grieving widow on television for an interview and force her to call her just-dead husband a drug addict. It's hard to imagine that this mom-and-pop operation forced Owen Hart to wear a ridiculous costume and descend from the rafters at a pay-per-view — a stunt which resulted in Owen falling to his death in front of tens of thousands of horrified fans. That night, as always, the show went on as planned.