clive-thompson

Twittering By Dictaphone

Ryan Tate · 08/24/09 04:35PM

Harvey Pekar is Twittering via surrogate, an advice columnist is complimenting herself via email archive and a radio producer is turning a movie theater into her own personal catwalk. The Twitterati are doing a little role playing.

A Chill Sweeps the Twitterati

Owen Thomas · 01/15/09 04:57PM

Oh, the plaintive tweets about New York's lousy weather! And yet the media elite remained so addicted to Twitter they took off their mittens to overinform the world.

What does online gossip profit us?

Melissa Gira Grant · 09/05/08 07:00PM

In an upcoming New York Times magazine, already teased online, Wired contributor Clive Thompson argues that Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr are not alienating us from one another as human beings, as social-network fearmongers claim. We're just becoming more digitally intimate, present in the lives of our 500 "friends," one update at a time. “Sometimes I think this stuff is just crazy, and everybody has got to get a life and stop obsessing over everyone’s trivia and gossiping,” a 20something Facebook user Thompson interviewed said. We know how well that goes.We can't stop — and that's okay, Thompson writes:

Journalistic Perversity Continues

Pareene · 04/09/08 10:49AM

Canadian celebrity journalist Malcolm Gladwell got in a bit of trouble recently for telling an embellished story about sneaking a funny phrase into the Washington Post. Canadian less-famous journalist Clive Thompson recently received a minuscule amount of press for admitting that he's jealous of Gladwell. This, Clive, is not the healthiest way to work through those feelings: "These tools raise a fascinating, and queasy, new ethical question." [SilverJacket]

Science Proves You Just Like Music Because It's Popular

Nick Douglas · 01/29/08 09:33PM

Buried in the bottom of Clive Thompson's interview with the man who rebutted The Tipping Point is a description of a neat little study of how music catches on in subcultures. Yahoo research scientist Duncan Watts gave eight online groups of people the same collection of songs and let them rate and discuss them. As people rated and talked in each group, certain songs became popular hits — but each time it was different songs. But wait, it gets worse.

The best article you'll ever read about web fame

Nick Douglas · 05/14/07 01:20PM

NICK DOUGLAS — I always wanted newspapers to come with standardized "This is good" stamps on the right articles; it turns out they already do, but the stamp reads "by Clive Thompson." The writer interviewed top bloggers for a New York Magazine thought-piece on their success last year. (Unlike most shallow articles that quote C-list bloggers and draw USA-Today-level insights, Thompson went for the big guns and gave a realistic picture of the (scant) money and (scant) fame made by bloggers. Now he's done the same in-depth look in the New York Times at online musicians. He checks on OK Go, the Hold Steady, and nerdstar Jonathan Coulton, who sang the famous acoustic version of "Baby Got Back." Thompson has no agenda (no "Internet killed the video star!" or "The cult of the amateur is dead!") so he actually lets the subjects tell their stories. If only all journalism about the Internet were like Clive Thompson's.