Word: bitting
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...Steven Johnson sent a tweet to his more than 500,000 followers on Twitter, informing them that he had written this week's cover story about how Twitter is changing the way society communicates. That tweet is also this week's cover image. I know this is all a bit meta and like trying to capture digital lightning in a jar, but we thought it was a way of illustrating how new platforms and social networks are changing the way we communicate and live...
...generation President. Jay Leno replaced him in 1992, just before baby boomer Bill Clinton defeated our last greatest-generation President. Now, just after Barack Obama's Inauguration, NBC has put another tall, skinny young guy, Conan O'Brien, behind the desk. (O'Brien and Obama, who did a guest bit on Conan's second night, may be technically a hair shy of Gen X status - but as the saying goes in the TV biz, they skew young...
...course, like Clinton, Jay - who got his 10 p.m. show for fear he would jump to ABC - has a wee bit more clout than the average elder boomer pushed out for a younger employee. Conan - simply by having wanted forever to host The Tonight Show - is something of a throwback. The very idea of caring about big-network late shows is retro, now that Comedy Central has so much buzz. Conan's comic style also owes heavily to his elder, and now competitor, the 62-year-old Letterman...
Conan, in other words, revels in being the outsider, the underdog, the geek. (Jay's signature bit, on the other hand, was "Jaywalking," where he went on the street to ask people news and history questions and made them look ridiculous.) This is both a defining Gen X trait - think Judd Apatow's movies and Beck's "Loser" - and a sensibility suited to the 12:30 p.m. Late Night, the slacker sibling to The Tonight Show. Some doubters wonder if that can translate to a broader 11:30 audience. By promoting Conan and moving Jay, NBC is betting that this...
...President is every bit as much a product of the show, but it's not just his age and mastery of the alphabet that make Obama the first Sesame Street President. The Obama presidency is a wholly American fusion of optimism, enterprise and earnestness - rather like the far-fetched proposal of 40 years ago to create a TV show that would prove that educational television need not be an oxymoron. Unlike Captain Kangaroo and Mr. Green Jeans in their idyllic Treasure House, or the leafy land of the suburban sitcom, Sesame's characters were colorful, their milieu was urban; there...