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Kim Voynar

By Kim Voynar Voynar@moviecitynews.com

Is Google Plus Really Doubleplusgood?

My social life is getting too complicated. Or perhaps it’s more correct to say, my online social life has too many channels, and I don’t want to spend half or more of what remains of my existence in this lifetime shuttling back and forth between Facebook and Twitter and Google Plus and whatever idea some other tech brain comes up with next to take up more of my time and make him/her super-rich. (I already jettisoned MySpace long ago. Sorry MySpace, it was good while it lasted.)

So all of a sudden in the last couple days I’ve been flooded with inbox announcements letting me know that this or that person is now “following” me on Google Plus. And do I want to add them to my Circles? Er, sure, I guess, but first I have to figure out what Circles are and how they work, and where the hell do I go to keep track of what everyone’s doing — what if someone eats a doughnut or gets a haircut or has a thought and I’m NOT in the know?! — and where do I put that guy who thinks he’s my BFF but really I have to read his nametag at Toronto and Sundance every year to remember who he is? No, I’m not talking about you. Of course not.

I jest a bit on that … most folks in this industry, myself included, would be totally screwed at fests were it not for those ubiquitous badges emblazoned with our identity, reduced to coming up with all sorts of contrived ways to not admit we don’t always have the best memory for names and faces, right? Please say that’s not just me.

All of which is by way of saying: I’m willing to give Google Plus a try, but in the end I’d like it to be Google Plus OR Facebook, not both, and Twitter may eventually have to go hang out with MySpace in the ex-friends corner, because I do not have enough time in a day to keep up with all of you in all these various online places.

And yet, that insidious voice of peer pressure whispers in my ear, “But Kim, if everyone else is on Google Plus, what might you miss?” What, indeed? I don’t know, and therein lies the rub that sucks us all in to the Next Big Thing. They count on it. They’re always doing that, aren’t they? And the more They convince us that our lives are online, the less we actually get together with people in person, and the more awkward and weird it is when we finally do meet. I know people who have had entire relationships — beginning to breakup — online, without ever meeting in person, touching, having sex, or interacting IRL (that’s “in real life” for all you oldsters not hip to the terminology these kids today use … you know, what we used to just call “life”).

In truth, I do have many friends who are mostly “online” friends. I use Facebook as a tool to keep up with far-flung work colleagues, which allows me to work in this industry from Seattle and keep up with people in NY and LA. It’s a good tool for that, it works for me. It’s not broken, and I’m not convinced yet that I need to replace it with a new one.

Besides which, it’s starting to feel like part of the point of all this technology, is to depersonalize everything to the extent that we don’t have to actually interact with anyone in person. Or at least, isn’t that the inevitable end result, even if unintentional, of where we’re heading? A world where people can dive-bomb-angry-bird-attack strangers in blog post comments and Twitter wars, where you’re free to be as hateful and inhumane — and inhuman — as you want to be, because there are zero consequences in the online world for being an asshole?

Maybe I’m just getting too old and too crabby to keep up with all the technology that seems to be necessary to be one of the cool kids, a member of the Inner Party, so to speak. I still use an iPhone 3 (I know, I know … at least I finally upgraded from a flip phone!) and probably won’t update to an iPhone 4 until the fifth generation comes out this fall and the prices on the 4 drop significantly. I guess I will forever be a step behind the curve when it comes to those things.

Or maybe I just need to be sent to technological joycamp, where I can learn to surrender my oldthink ideas and accept the march of technology. I’ll get right on that, right after I organize a local chapter of the Junior Anti-Sex League. Because we wouldn’t want the youth to get any subversive ideas of ownlife, would we? That would be doubleplusungood.

In the meantime, just in case, I guess I better practice my blackwhite doublethink: Google Plus is the place for all online social interaction. There has always been Google Plus, and there always will be Google Plus, and there has never been anything else. World without Orwell, amen.

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon