Blog Posts by Virginia Heffernan

A short documentary now playing on the Internet is the best movie about Mark Zuckerberg yet. It's studded with clues to the workings of Zuckerberg's brain, and possibly even clues to the future of Facebook, which made its initial public stock offering on Thursday.

The film is called “Facebook IPO Roadshow,” and it runs a little over 30 minutes. The ingenious and disturbing film was conceived as the centerpiece of the dark-charm offensive that Facebook launched to beguile new investors. (Those investors, who didn't feel properly courted by the canned appearance, soon began demanding to see Zuckerberg in person, presumably so they could touch the hem of his garment rather than watch a Facebook-produced video that any schmo could see.)

But as an ambitious propaganda piece that doubles as gloss on the current state of the digital everything, “Facebook IPO Roadshow” is well worth watching. The film is at pains to deny it's a commercial. As the flat-affect movie puts it, its

As a masterpiece and a cultural catastrophe at once, Facebook is distinctly American. It represents a social regime that’s scintillating and hideous. The values intrinsic to it—velocity, wit, growth, exhibitionism and “connectivity”—can seem superficial, but they’re ours.

This week, the Facebook brass are making housecalls to investors, using razzle, dazzle and astral projections to justify valuing the eight-year-old company at a big, round $100 billion. This comes in preparation for Facebook’s midmonth initial public offering—what’s expected to be the biggest I.P.O. in the history of the Internet.

At the same time, government officials have started to cast a cold eye on Facebook, making sure it—and Apple and Google—don’t get a regulatory pass from Washington just because they’re cute. Facebook not long ago had to agree to a 20-year settlement with the Federal Trade Commission over allegations that the company violated users’ privacy.

Many consumers are even wary of Facebook.  A recent

First, they came for the thinspiration pictures.

Internet censors are always agitating to ban one thing or another, and it’s rarely the same thing twice. Instead, there’s a revolving carousel of images that are deemed in succession to be beyond even the online pale. Each one seems to present a plausible occasion for, this once, curtailing free speech. The king wearing a pig snout. A swastika. Naked children.

Right now it’s seminaked women that the distressed classes want to cover up—the very images on which the entirety of Western visual culture is founded.

This time, the anxiety about graven images has nothing to do with how they might arouse desire in men. We’re afraid of what’s known as “thinspiration,” it seems, because glamorous photos of very skinny women, together with admiring captions, might arouse self-loathing in women, and thereby inspire self-mortification, and in particular anorexia.

The fact that thinspo, as it’s sometimes called, is sassily named and designed to

“Journalists are very liberal,” Chuck Grassley—Republican senator from Iowa, farmer, onetime sheet-metal shearer and proponent of a “pimp tax” and W-2s for prostitutes—explained to me this week.

That belief has long bedeviled him. But Grassley nonetheless spoke to this occupationally biased journalist for two hours about President Barack Obama’s raw intelligence, Mitt Romney’s chances in November and, above all, the uses and misuses of social media.

“Obama is protected by journalists,” Grassley said. “And we aren’t. If you’re a senior senator like I am, people say to you, ‘How come you aren’t confronting the president on this or that?’ And I say I could speak out on something, but if they don’t print it or put it on television, it doesn’t happen.”

About five years ago, Grassley alighted on a simple solution to what he sees as the obstructionism of a liberal news media. Twitter. One hundred forty characters—straight from the heart of a Republican old-timer to the people. No gatekeepers!

Every bright-eyed presidential candidate deserves some top-shelf data at the start of the campaign. Alone in his hotel room, hoarse and exhausted, he lays it like a bridal trousseau: a portrait of just the kind of voter he’s courting.

For Mitt Romney, the acquisition and cultivation of data was time and money well spent. Having all but clinched the Republican nomination with his win in Wisconsin this week, the ludicrously handsome Mormon chief executive has coalesced something that might credibly be called Romney’s America. And he did it with data—digital, hypergranular data, not mere polling. Back in January when Gingrich and Santorum were still on his heels, Romney set loose a team of metadata-crunchers to find out who was persuadable. Who belonged to his righter-wing rivals. Who was sticking with Barack Obama.

That’s how he came to learn about his people’s online browsing habits. As The New York Times reported this week, would-be Romniacs evidently like to take online quizzes. They

Not all gaffes are created equal. Some gaffers like Sarah Palin expose their ignorance: "We've got to stand with our North Korean allies." Some like Dan Quayle butcher slogans: "What a waste it is to lose one's mind." Some just tell the truth where propaganda might be expected, as Mitt Romney did: "I'm not concerned about the very poor."

But the latest political blunders—Romney's recent "humorous" anecdote about his father's shuttering a factory in Michigan; Rick Santorum's salty smackdown of a New York Times reporter; and President Barack Obama's Machiavellian-sounding suggestion into a hot microphone that he'd be "more flexible" to discuss missile defense after the election—open a window on these politicians' psyches.

What so-called gaffes have in

Actual women—instead of phony gynecological issues—pervaded the last election. Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, Elizabeth Edwards, Michelle Obama, Katie Couric and even Tina Fey can each credibly be said to have changed the outcome of the 2008 presidential election, as Rebecca Traister documented in her rollicking chronicle of that race, Big Girls Don't Cry: The Election That Changed Everything for American Women.

And those were just the women at the podiums. In Traister's account, each campaign hired women aplenty on the understanding that they could help their candidates, in one way or another, to attract voters. Got that? Women didn't come around to discuss obscure lady matters, but to help campaigns win votes.

Yet this time around, genuine women have disappeared, in favor of sex talk smuggled under the rubric of "values." The conversation recalls nothing so much as the days when the nightly news shows couldn't stop running pseudo-health segments that featured male reporters

At this point in an election season, a campaign's every utterance shimmers with significance. At the same time, this time around, the campaigns have embraced social media. And the social networks, like whiskey, promote disinhibition. (Just ask Anthony Weiner.) Services like Twitter, Facebook and, more recently, the photo-sharing site Pinterest require that we let our guard down. They also mercilessly sideline participants who seem too repressed or officious.

Perhaps none of that crossed Ann Romney's mind when, on joining Pinterest last week, she added the gorgeous "Anna Karenina"—a heart-shattering work by Leo Tolstoy from the 1870s that both Dostoevsky and Nabokov believed was flawless—to her two-entry list of "Books Worth Reading." (The other entry is "The Forgotten Garden" by Kate Morton.) Yet in the kind of book-club circles that also use Pinterest, a passion for "Anna Karenina" usually signals a romantic disposition. It sometimes makes you seem like you're open to an extramarital affair.

To illustrate her choice, Romney posted an image of the makeshift gold-and-crimson digital cover of the public-domain edition of the novel. "One of my favorites," she wrote.

"She does a lot of it herself," Zac Moffatt, the digital director of the Romney campaign told me, explaining Ann's Pinterest choices. "She'll send us stuff like 'Here's a recipe.' We might post things. But those are her recipes. It's all her choices."

I asked about "Anna Karenina." "That I can't speak to," Moffatt said.

Ann's presence on the female-dominated site, which she also used to feature family photos and down-home recipes, was probably an attempt simply to humanize and feminize her husband's campaign. She also was positioned as the tech-savvy member of the couple. On Feb. 21, Mitt Romney tweeted, "Ann's way ahead of me on this one — check out her Pinterest page here pinterest/annromney/."

But the way Romney's private literary canon then ricocheted around the Internet is an object lesson in the anarchy that characterizes online communication. It's now virtually impossible for a campaign to follow the imperative to use social media while also staying—as the hopeful phrase used to go—"on message."

Off-off-message is more like it.

Posting stuff on Pinterest—or on Twitter or Instagram—is less like issuing a carefully crafted statement and more like doing a spontaneous Lana Del Rey impression at a White House reception. It feels expressive and modern, but it's going to be judged and interpreted in ways no handler can anticipate or control.