If The Truth Fits

A quick apology and explanation about the lack of posts of late. At this very moment I’m typing from a house in the South of France (right next to the sea!) where I’ve been working for the past week, and will be for the next couple of weeks. The work day here from from about 8:30 to 19:00 and its usually pretty physical stuff, so by the end of the day my brain isn’t ‘all there’ if you know what I mean. Also, I haven’t got as much time as usual to be checking out the news to see what’s happening in the world (I have literally no idea how the stock markets are doing), so that’s why you haven’t been getting your daily dose of my opinions recently.

One story that I have seen in a few places is a rather unusual one that concerns property rights. I know, property rights, you know this post is going to be a barrel of fun. Oh, it also concerns murder, ahhh, you’re hooked now aren’t you. Okay, its not actual murder, its virtual murder, but despite the murder being virtual it is having some very real ramifications.

In Japan (of course), a 43 year-old woman who was ‘divorced’ by her online husband in a MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Role Playing Game) called Maple Story may face time in jail after logging onto her former “husband’s” account and killing his character. Yes, apparently in Japan doing something like that could result in you going to jail, or getting a rather hefty fine at the very least. I’m sure that if it happened in the UK it either wouldn’t make the news, or would be a laffer on page 9, but the police would probably have better things to do. Not so in Japan, where digital life has very much integrated with ‘real’ life and these matters are taken pretty seriously. In cases like this it isn’t actually the ‘murder’ itself which is the crime, its the woman illegally accessing the man’s account, but that wouldn’t be as interesting of a story now, would it?

Personally, I’m undecided as to whether I can really think about this act as a crime. If I opened an account to play Maple Story, and then someone hacked into it and killed virtual Andy I’d probably be quite annoyed, but I wouldn’t think it was a crime. However, if I had played it for months and months, going around completing quests and making friends, I’d probably be pissed off if one of those people I’d met hacked my account and took their revenge, maybe not to the point of calling the police, but still pretty pissed off. If someone hacked into my e-mail, that would be a crime, if they hacked into my Facebook profile, it would be inconvenietn but probably not a crime, if they hacked into one of my websites, I’d be scared to death of losing many years work, and it probably would be a crime, but I don’t think anything could be done about it so I wouldn’t get the authorities involved.

As you can probably tell from this article, this news story has confused me greatly. I spend a lot of my time working on the internet writing articles, blog postings, and designing websites every so often, so I know exactly what the guy was going through when his character was killed (I’ve lost work in crashes before), and yet I can’t quite bring myself to think that someone should go to jail (or even receive a fine) for a virtual murder.

Yesterday I wrote about a few different celebrities and how they weren’t fans of Sarah Palin, one of which was Lindsay Lohan. Just to refresh your memory, between attending glamorous social events and walking around with Samantha Ronson having her picture taken by paparazzi, LiLo blogged on her MySpace that she “cannot hold [her] tongue anymore when it comes to Sarah Palin,” and then laid into her for a few hundreds words (one of the few things that Lindsay and I have in common) before instructing her legions of fans to go out and vote for Obama. After overcoming my own prejudice that someone like Lindsay Lohan (professional eye candy) could have a decent opinion, I read through what she had to say and found that, much to my chagrin, I agreed with much she had to say. Yes, she’s not exactly the world’s best blogger (it’s polite to link to your sources!), but I think that her fundamental points make a lot of sense. Oh, now is probably a good time to point out once again that we here at Pop Vulture don’t necessarily endorse or support one candidate over another, however blatantly obvious it is that I favor one over the other (at least on the Vice Presidential end of things).

It turns out that Lindsay doesn’t want to just soapbox on her blog (one of the many thing Lindsay and I don’t have in common) and offered to host a series of events in support of Obama that would try and energize young voters, because apparently young people don’t like Obama enough yet, but she her advances were rebuffed, which I assume is something that doesn’t happen to Lohan very often. Apparently, a top source from the Obama campaign told the Chicago Sun Times that the Mean Girls star ”is not exactly the kind of high-profile star who would be a positive for us.”

I can see where Obama’s people are coming from, not so long ago it was hard to hear the words “Lindsay Lohan” without them being preceded by “troubled star” or followed by “is heading to rehab again,” but beyond the fairly mild scandal of her getting a girlfriend Lindsay seems to have stopped being being such tabloid fodder. Trust me, I’m pretty surprised at myself to be taking the position of defending a celebrity, but I think that if a girl like Lindsay can turn it around in the high-pressure and high-temptation world of Hollywood that she wouldn’t actually be the worst person that they could have to front a few events.

Y’know, Heidi Montag didn’t have this trouble when she announced she will be voting for John McCain, in fact, he took it really well, saying that “she’s a very talented actress.” (hold up, The Hills isn’t real?). Yeah, its really reassuring when a potential President looks straight at a camera and lies like that, isn’t it?

I’m half expecting this whole story to be an elaborate hoax, or some kind of PR stunt, but I’ll take it at face value since its been pretty widely reported. Let’s just run through that title again bit by bit to make sure I’ve got a firm grasp of this. Okay, “Aaron Sorkin,” he’s the guy that wrote one of the finest television shows of all time, The West Wing, and put his pen to numerous pieces of paper when writing the star-studded A Few Good Men back in the early nineties, and more recently penning Charlie Wilson’s War. Next, “to write a movie,” well, that makes perfect sense, we’ve already established that the man has considerable writing chops. Now for the confusing part “… about Facebook.”

Facebook? A movie about Facebook? Who could possibly think that’s a good idea? I like Facebook, I’m on there every day, and I am a complete nerd that loves pretty much anything to do with the web, but even I wouldn’t watch this. I can’t really imagine Sorkin putting together snappy dialog in which Mark Zuckerberg walks down some hallways at Harvard talking about how cool it would be if instead of calling, e-mailing, texting or IMing your friends you could leave them messages on a website. Boy, my pulse is racing just thinking about the ‘action’ scenes; teams of web developers hunched over laptops slurping away at Red Bull trying to meet deadlines, users anxiously organising games of beer pong using an early, buggy beta version of the events application, and heated boardroom meetings in which executives battle over whether the ‘is’ should be included in users’ status updates. I don’t want to spoil the ending for you, but in typical Sorkin fashion I would presume that there will be a long and inspiring speech by a passionate lawyer trying to ensure that the people are given their inalienable human right of the ability to play Scrabulous, I bet it’ll bring a tear to your eye. All riveting storylines, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Beyond the storyline (or lack of it), something else that’s puzzling me is why Sorkin would be interested in it. He has admitted that his grandmother has more understanding of the internet than him, and she’s been dead for thirty three years. Sorkin’s personal Facebook profile was actually set up by an assistant rather than the man himself because he doesn’t understand how to use the social-networking site. I can understand why someone could find it alluring to write a movie about a fast-growing internet start up that went from being a thought in a college students head to a company that ‘is’ ‘worth’ $15 billion dollars and created the worlds youngest billionaire, it sounds like a pretty exciting story, but come on, its just a website!

Mr. Sorkin, you may well have been able to create a fictional President on the West Wing that I would vote for over anyone that exists or has ever existed (you’ll always be my Commander in Chief, Jed Bartlett!), and I’ve watched pretty much everything you’ve ever done (yes, I even enjoyed Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, I think I was the only one), but there’s no need to try and be cool with all us young kids on Facebook, and don’t worry about not understanding Facebook, most of us on there don’t really know what the point is either, seriously, why would I ever want to poke someone?

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