One of the internet's most important legacies is its absolute destruction of credentialism. So who better to explain it to the world than New York Times TV-watcher-and-internet-looker-and-writer-about Virginia Heffernan, the one person that every American too old to figure out how to get onto the internet turns to to tell them about said internet, in a magazine column? And tell us, Leon Neyfakh, could the book have a name and theme commensurate to the preposterousness of its ambition?

In the proposal [for the book, tentatively titled The Pleasures of the Internet: How to Live in the New Online Civilization], a copy of which was obtained by the Transom, Ms. Heffernan's book is described as "a complete aesthetics of the Internet" that will treat the Web as a complex work of representational art, complete with "a poetics, a scale, a palette, a rhythm, a sensibility, a set of rituals and spectacles, a system of metaphors and an emotional range."

Haha yes. Very good. A good book to give to, say, your grandmother who retired as a college literature professor a long, long time ago. Explaining the entire internet in a book: Actually a very internetty type of thing to do!
[NYO]

What happened to poor Julie Klam? Six months ago, the writer was "the best updater on Facebook," according to the Times' Viriginia Heffernan (pictured), excelling in a burgeoning genre of "perfect... spontaneous bursts of being." Klam was grateful for the value placed on her prolific Facebooking, but it seems her experience quickly went downhill; in a column published Wednesday, the same Klam was quoted by the same Heffernan as saying Facebook "felt dead" as of a few months ago — in other words, right after she "friended" Heffernan on the social network. "I have noticed the exodus, and I kind of feel like it's kids getting tired of a new toy."

The moral of the story: Journalists cannot be bothered to find fresh sources in the dog days of August for their specious (the New York Observer debunked it by the numbers earlier today) trend stories. Also: Under no circumstances should you "friend" Virginia Heffernan.

(Pic via)

ONN plays, loud and proud, what you sometimes think you hear in mainstream news. On a typical news day, it’s like an auditory hallucination, that note of contempt, present in phrases like “the human cost” and “area man.” The contempt rings in the booming baritones of spokesmen and anchormen, and in the sneers of correspondents: over-the-top jingoism, xenophobia, snobbism, disgust, dismissiveness.

Who is this relic from the past, touting the virtues of what is clearly nothing more than a new media disaster? Find out after the jump.

Oh yes: it's Virginia Heffernan, 2007 edition. Forgive us our confusion. Sadly, we may have to agree with the 2008 side of this intra-Heffernan conflict:

The depressive, contemptuous voice that works so well in print for the Onion franchise can become suddenly loud and shrill. ONN embodies its misanthropic stereotypes in flesh-and-blood actors, and that means the occasional stab of sympathy can overwhelm the viewer’s willingness to laugh.

While The Onion's mastery of the print form doesn't seem to be dimming, the Onion News Network is so self-congratulatory in its humor that it might as well play with a laugh track.

The genius of The Onion was that it looked like real news. A video podcast doesn't look like real news, not after Weekend Update, The Daily Show, and Heffernan's preferred alternative The Colbert Report. The words 'Time Magazine Releases Its Least Influential People List' are best never spoken aloud.

Broadcast Spoofs [NYT]

Xcaliber was early social-networking technology developed at Dartmouth College. In the heyday of Dungeons & Dragons, its vaguely Arthurian theme appealed to both hackers and preadolescents.

We evolved a whole cutesy shtick that, in this text-only interface, chiefly meant giving up mixed cases. In the name of enhancing adorableness, we stuck to little letters and as few spaces as English semantics could bear. Our classic squinched-up opener was "hi-howre you?"

At 13, Megan and I introduced our friends to the conference, and as early adapters she and I felt obliged to play the pros and make the whole thing look ungeeky. When someone on the network asked me what I was up to, I replied — without fail — "music, sports and parties," which was true, strictly speaking...

Once again, the big Hollywood dudes have come to town—fit and tan and bearing gifts— to tell us how sorry they are, and what jerks they've been, and how it's all going to be different now. Because they've been to a workshop about love and life and nutrition, and it's all clicking now. Yeah, baby, I know "The Apprentice" is weak, and I'm gonna rethink all that, and comedy's tough, but I'm not trying to blame anyone, and "Studio 60" was—aw but baby now you're just hurting me.

It's time for a clean slate, right? That's what the upfronts are all about. Beginning with NBC's affair today at 3 p.m. at Radio City Music Hall, the networks will say they misjudged audiences this way and that, and it's time for some changes. They'll get all penitent, admitting they failed to make money or gain viewers. And then they'll make big promises.

TV Upfronts: Baby, Can We Start Fresh? [NYT]
Scrubs renewed for one last season [RTE]

The word loner has shown up regularly in the news media's descriptions of Mr. Cho, and it seems to have struck a chord with users of Facebook, for whom would-be friends—other users who respond to electronic overtures, often reciprocally—sometimes seem more numerous than strangers. (To those familiar with older connotations of the word "friend," a Facebook or MySpace friend might be better described as a "correspondent.")

Online, Students Say 'Reach Out to Loners' [NYT]

[I]f you review that longest-running live-action sitcom, and you praise it, the creator with the super-wholesome reputation might even reveal his unsavory secret when he calls to say he thinks he named the couple of "The King of Queens" — Heffernan — when he saw your name in a magazine.

'King of Queens' Sex Video! [Screens]

Earlier: 'Times' TV Critic Really Making the Most of That Harvard Ph.D

Just as "The Pilgrim's Progress" begins when the everyman comes upon a book, "The King of Queens" begins when Doug comes across a television set. That anachronism, a pre-digital, 70-inch technology coffin, is intended for enshrinement in Doug's basement in the series's pilot episode. He hopes it will attract his slobby friends to the rec room for sports viewing and dissipation. But Arthur Spooner (Mr. Stiller), Doug's father-in-law, shows up to wreck the plan when his house burns down. Doug adapts, but Arthur's arrival is this comedy's original sin. Anyone who suggests that it's Carrie who gets the raw deal in the marriage is not thinking straight. As far as I'm concerned, the spouse who brings a parent into the marital home puts everything in hock to the other spouse, and must spend a lifetime paying for it.

Hey! Never Underestimate the Average Joe [NYT]

Slim, swan-necked, with the upright bearing of a dancer or cadet, she doesn't exactly lean in for intimacy with the viewer. She's not relatable. She seems a touch abstemious. The news, it seems, kind of grosses her out.

Amanda Congdon [ABC
An Online Newscaster's Appealing Bafflement [NYT]

Earlier: Gawker's coverage of Amanda Congdon

Then maybe we'd have some idea what the hell you're talking about in the last graf of your Six Feet Under review:

But that precious ratio — which recalls the balance of silliness and beauty in Trollope and some of Hardy — has always been the show's strong suit, a 19th-century tone ingeniously invented and confidently maintained over five seasons. It's rare that a sensibility remains so unified and so unshy on a fancy soap opera; melodramatists too often get scared of being called hysterics and betray their genre, blowing it off for dumb stunts or trying, in some 11th hour, to sober up and turn manly. But the producers of "Six Feet Under" never cared about impressing the "Wire" or "Deadwood" audiences. They had their ratio, and they saw it through. "Six Feet Under" was a beautiful series, and its finale will suffice.

All we know is that for the last ten minutes or so, we were simultaneously sobbing and hating ourselves for it. If that's a precious ratio reminiscent of Trollope and some Hardy (but not all Hardy, of course), then, yeah, OK.

And They All Died Happily Ever After, Sort Of [NYT]