In defence of Techcrunch and Michael Arrington - Telegraph Blogs

In defence of Techcrunch and Michael Arrington - Telegraph Blogs.

No, rather than turning this into a debate about Arrington’s (lack of) ethics, I’m more interested in what it tells us about our prurient interest in Internet start-ups like Twitter. The real story in this non-story is the convergence of pop and tech culture. The level of hysteria greeting this intimate yet generally worthless information about Twitter speaks to the way in which technology start-ups have become the hottest celebrities in an America starved for sexy success stories. Technology gossip publications like Techcrunch and Gawker feed this prurience, publishing more and more intimate details about the private lives of prominent entrepreneurs. Guys like Twitter founders Ev Williams and Biz Stone are the new rock stars of the early 21st century and they are receiving the same kind of obsessionally intimate coverage from the media that was once reserved for kings of pop like Michael Jackson or Elvis.

We get the media that we deserve. In defence of Arrington who, I suspect, would be honoured by the epithet of William Randolph Hearst 2.0, he only decided to post this material on the Internet because - like publishers of sensational news or pornography - he knew that people would want to read it. It’s the same with the senior editors at Random House who decided to publish Accidental Billionaires, the aggressively marketed new “non-fiction” book by Ben Mezrich which claims to be “a tale of sex, money, genuis and betrayal” about Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. I don’t hear anyone in the media calling for the resignation of Random House executives because Accidental Billionaires makes all sorts of unproven and quite possibly untrue assertions about Zuckerberg’s private affairs. But just as we are prurient about the intimate details of Twitter’s business practices, so we are also a little bit too keen to know the intimate details of Zuckerberg’s sex life.

Yes, the Twitter data was stolen and Arrington’s self-interested decision to publish some of it certainly doesn’t elevate him into the Woodward and Bernstein of the electronic age. But if you don’t approve of what he did, then don’t read Techcrunch.