There are many, many things I like about Gawker Media: the journalistic aggressiveness of Nick Denton’s bloggers; their focus on original content, not rote aggregation; their broad and ever-shifting definition of “original” and refusing to define it as an endless cascade of lists and slideshows; its endless inventiveness that keeps alive a formula that should have grown stale long ago.
That admiration is why it hurts to say that Gawker’s latest journalism-as-PR-stunt is wide of the target. The former journalism student in me is far from offended by the idea of hiring a paparazzo to shadow Mark Zuckerberg for a few days, turning his mundane moments into a slideshow of photos. This is the world we live in and the private lives of celebrities have become fair game. And Zuck qualifies as a celebrity. I’m not sure what the official test is but I’m pretty sure that running one of the most important tech/media companies around and having a major motion picture made about your college years qualifies.
Gawker’s lofty notion of “turning the tables” on the guy who turned Facebook’s 500 million users’ “intimate moments into riches” is not a bad one. But there are a few problems with how it’s executed.
First, there’s the whole making the “punishment” fit the “crime” thing. I’m no fan of Zuckerberg’s broad dismissals of the idea that people should enjoy some level of privacy. In our day, privacy is probably more an ideal than something terribly practical. Nevertheless, it does seem important for anyone who operates a social platform whose revenue model is based on the upload of large quantities of personal data to give users the tools to control the flow of that data. That’s basic product design and transparency with your customers. But Facebook has failed on that score enough times, offered an apology while proceeding to screw up again that its whole approach to privacy seems more kabuki theater than real organizational focus.
But for all the playacting, what Facebook doesn’t do is hire photographers to butt into the everyday lives of its readers. True, Zuckerberg has created a platform that is helping to disintegrate most conventional notions of privacy, while offering varying degrees of utility to web users. But he’s at worst an enabler, a high-tech indulger of the most preening, narcissistic human urges, not a perpetrator who deserves like-for-like punishment. Degree of severity makes a difference.
The other thing that makes a difference is the goal of an exercise like this. Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems more about embarrassing Zuckerberg than anything else. I know we’re dealing with Gawker here, not ProPublica. But when humiliation or mere annoyance is your endgame versus, say, education or creating dialogue around the issues at hand, making Facebook’s many, many users understand what’s at stake for them in the privacy issue, it’s tough to defend.
As an example of the latter approach, I’d point to this piece, strange as it may be, in which a former colleague decided to see just how much personal data she could divine from the online presence of a person who happens to be a friend of mine, present it to him, and then publish it. Creepy and especially strange for me, but interesting. Another good example was a 2005 table-turning on Eric Schmidt. There CNET used Google to see what information it could turn up about its CEO, thus using his own platform — not gossip rag tactics — against him.
Both examples make privacy and digital life worth talking about. Rather than push the dialogue further, Gawker’s approach would just seem to just toss another turd into the privacy shitshow.
Finally, there’s the whole issue of whether Zuckerberg will actually care. Before yesterday, he was rich (at least on paper), powerful and famous. He was also unknowable, a little shady, a little sweaty. Today, he still has that paper wealth, power and fame, but his image has sloughed off a bit of that aloofness that made him so aloof. The Gawker snaps depict his lifestyle as relatively modest. His Palo Alto home is unspectacular, his girlfriend far from a model, and he seems to enjoy cakes that come in plastic clamshells ans Smirnoff Ice.
He also has bigger fish to fry. As I mentioned, hundreds of theaters around the world will soon be showing a two-hour movie that, by the looks of all the brow-furrowing, stink-eyeing and maniacal grinning going on in the trailer, strongly suggests that he ripped off the idea for Facebook from a friend and that he is, generally, a scheming bastard.
With all that going on at the multiplex, it’s hard to imagine he’ll get at all that wound up about a gossip blog publishing some pictures of him.