Frontline's Digital Culture Could Use A Yeast Infection

"Hi, I'm Bob Executive. Which way is business?"

Frontline, PBS television's desperate attempt to seem hip and cutting-edge, continues its long history of epic fail with its "Digital Nation" episode, which is a tremendous exercise in viewing-with-alarm at all the terrible things digital media is doing to American culture, most notably, rendering shows like "Frontline" obsolete.

They covered "Second Life" in the episode, and I was all agog, of course. The segment dealt with the Philip Rosenthal's claim (billed as "the creator of Second Life") that he wanted to use Second Life as a way of changing the way people interact with one another -- to make them more socially connected rather than less socially connected. And what did they focus on ... Second Life's attempts to lure the business market by hosting virtual meetings. (See image above.)

The episode COMPLETELY ignored the really interesting part of the way Second Life changes human interaction, and the one Second Life is most famous for ... the addition of sexual elements to online life, making the virtual life experience all the real. The self-censorship that was involved there ("It's NOT the sex!") made the episode seem lame, dowdy and hopelessly out of touch, which of course, it was. (I KNEW they were not gonna touch on SL Gor, but they ignored the ENTIRETY of Second Life sex.

Granted, nobody else in the mainstream media has done a hell of a lot to cover this powerful aspect of our culture, so Frontline IS ahead of the rest, but what a pale, pale compliment that is, considering how really retarded and out of it mainstream media typically is. And if any of them DID cover it, you know that most of them would focus on the most out-there sexual elements they could find, to the exclusion of all else. That's the way it goes with the mainstream media with sex, it either ignores sex or goes ape-shit over some aspect of sex. Thinking about it rationally? Not gonna happen.


"Come on in to the Second Life orgy pool, boys and girls! I'm a slave, I'll clean ALL those naughty bits -- the hard way!"