In Reason, Nick Gillespie gets to the root of Alec Baldwin’s problem with social media:
In an interview with Gothamist, the talented actor and annoying loudmouth inadvertently lays bare the real online dynamic behind his anger with new media — and it has less to do with factually incorrect journalism than you might think.
Baldwin’s real issue with new media — he slags Tumblr, Vine, MySpace, Facebook, and more — is that they level kings and queens and even celebrities into a mosh pit of direct, unmediated exchange that is hard as hell to control. It turns out that there’s really no red carpet or champagne room when it comes to the way that stars (read: world leaders, sitcom heroes, famous authors, former child actors, you name it) are treated.
In the Q&A, Baldwin says,
Twitter began for me as a way to bypass the mainstream media and talk directly to my audience and say, “hey here’s a show I’m doing, here’s something I’m doing.”… But I realized it’s something I’m not really… it certainly isn’t worth the trouble. Rosie O’Donnell is on my podcast this week, and she said that she’s getting off of Twitter, and I said “God, I was thinking the same thing.” I said “you just end up absorbing so much hatred.” You get these body blows of all this hatred from people who… their profiles are almost identical, like “tea party mom, I love my job, I love my kids, I love my country #millitary #guns” and there’s a screaming eagle in the background of their profile, grasping some arrows and tanks rolling in the background and they all want to tell me how much they can’t stand my politics. And I go, “OK.” What kills me is these are people who want to put me out of business, so to speak, as fast as they possibly can, but they don’t want to put BP out of business, who turned the Gulf of Mexico into a cesspool….
Baldwin sputters that the very tools he can use to bypass “the mainstream media and talk directly” to his audience also empowers all those dim people out there in the dark. What’s more, his followers have minds of their own. They may enjoy his turns in Glenngarry Glenn Ross and 30 Rock and guest-hosting on Turner Classic Movies but not really find his views on fracking to be worth a damn. It’s a real kick in the pants for a celebrity to be reduced to asking, “Do you think I’m really changing anybody’s mind?”
[. . .]
Reading Baldwin’s comments, I’m struck by how his comments strongly vindicate what we’ve been stressing at Reason since the dawn of the Internet Age: That the audience has a mind of its own that it’s always been dying to express. What’s different now is that we can. Baldwin’s complaint that “there’s no journalism anymore” (except for the people he likes) and his attack on “tea party moms” who thrill to see the Gulf of Mexico foam with oil are best understood as howls of rage from the ancien regime as new-media sans-culottes storm the gates of privilege and power. Being in charge — of government, of media, of art, of business, of religion — just ain’t what it used to be.
Given his temperament and the massive amount of abuse he seems to have taken, Baldwin’s probably right to vacate Twitter and other forums that allow direct, unmediated access to him. That’s his right to exercise. But among the costs he and other powerful people — pols, pashas, pundits, etc. — will bear is lack of engagement with exactly where the world is literally and figuratively trending.
