Most of the people I deal with on a daily basis would laugh at that thought, but hear me out.

The Internet is a bubble in three ways:

1. A lot of people don’t use the Internet much. Most people don’t use it at all.
I rely on numerous web tools and services to get through my week. I use Yelp to decide where to eat, find a plumber, get the phone number of my local pizza place. I use Google Maps to get me from place to place. I use Skype, Yahoo Messenger, Gmail, Dropbox, Confluence, GoToMeeting, and other tools to collaborate with my colleagues and communicate with my clients. I use Twitter and Facebook to speak my mind. I use Flickr to organize my photos. I use LinkedIn to find new projects. This is the tip of the iceberg.

Those of us in “the industry” tend to think we represent the norm, but many of my friends – and most of my family – couldn’t describe what Twitter is, much less Foursquare. I’m not talking about Ted Kaczynski types, holed up in shacks in the woods somewhere. These are professionals who are savvy about stuff. Some even have careers doing Internet stuff. These people use email a couple times a day or less, ditto Google. They’re 50/50 on Facebook. They don’t live and breathe this stuff. They don’t keep their eyes peeled for the next new thing.

When it comes to the third world, we go beyond distorted assumptions. We simply don’t factor these people into the equation. But the World Bank puts the total number of Internet users at 1.8 billion (2009), which means that more than 2/3 of humanity doesn’t use the Internet at all.

We live in a collective “industry” bubble.

2. The Internet encourages us to live in our own isolated bubbles
I’m not saying anything new here, and indeed the same things were said about the telephone, radio, and television, but the Internet isolates us from each other. For example, my wife and I are expecting a baby. We don’t know how to diaper a baby, and in pre-Internet times, we would have turned to a sibling or parent or close friend to teach us. Now our first impulse is to try YouTube. Similarly, I want to learn how to set up a router (the woodworking kind), and in the past I would have gone down the street to my friend Mark’s house and asked him to teach me. But even though he lives just a few houses down, my first inclination is to go to YouTube. There’s no denying that this kind of shift represents diminished community.

We live in our own isolated bubbles.

3. It could actually kind of go away
The entrepreneurial types in the tech industry like to paint a rosy picture of the future, where everything’s connected, everything’s social. They see technology’s upside and plot its trajectory into the next decade or two, but they’re usually myopic. They mostly fail to consider the likelihood of skyrocketing oil prices, climate change, food shortages, etc.

What will our relationship with the Internet be like if we need to worry about food, water, and power? What if power blackouts lasting several days become a regularity?

We live in a temporary bubble.

Books

I read a number of books this year, but these are the few that especially moved me…

Fiction

Let The Great World Spin (Collum McCann) – Especially the virtuosic passage in the middle, wherein the highwire artist trains for his biggest performance.

Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It (Stories) – Maile Meloy

Tomato Red (Daniel Woodrell) – Not a great book, but a great new voice, like none I’d read before. A smart portrait of haves vs. have-nots. I chose this title because the library didn’t have a copy of Winter’s Bone on the shelf.

Nonfiction

Crazy Like Us, The Globalization of the American Psyche (Ethan Watters) – How America exports its notions of mental illness in order to peddle its so-called cures. More importantly, what we might learn about finding “meaning” in what we perceive as illness.

Essays, Blog Posts & Articles

The pieces I talked about, tweeted and recommended most in 2010…

This Is A News Website Article About A Scientific Paper

This Is Broken (Video)

Daniel Ellsberg on the Limits of Knowledge

The Truth About California

The Shadow Scholar

Manufacturing Contempt, or The Commoditization of Practically Everything (a good companion piece to one of my favorites from last year – Better)

Errol Morris on The Postmodernity of the Electric Chair – In a commencement address to graduates of the UC Berkeley School of Journalism

What Good Is Wall Street? – Much of what investment bankers do is socially worthless

The Case For Revolutionizing How We Teach Web Design

Letting Go – What Should Medicine Do When It Can’t Save Your Life?

The Trafficker – The decades-long battle to catch an international arms broker

Television

I didn’t watch a whole lot of TV in 2010. That said, these are the shows I made time for…

Louie

Deadwood (complete series, on DVD) – Absolutely one of the best things ever produced for the small screen.

Mad Men (season 4)

The Closer (season 6) – I hate one-hour procedural dramas as a rule, but this is one of two exceptions. The Closer doesn’t take the kinds of absurd, intelligence-insulting shortcuts that are staples of Law & Order and its ilk. And it doesn’t dabble in hype and headlines it doesn’t understand (e.g. Twitter & Facebook). Finally, it doesn’t take itself too seriously.

The Good Wife (season 2) – This is the other exception. A lawyer procedural that isn’t afraid to develop sub-plot threads that span seasons.

Also, generally… 60 Minutes, 30 Rock, The Office, The Daily Show, Colbert

Movies

Didn’t see The Social Network, Toy Story 3, Black Swan or most of the other movies on most people’s best-of-2010 lists (and I didn’t like Inception). In fact, I hardly saw any films released in 2010, or many movies at all for that matter. So the following list includes things I watched on DVD last year (not necessarily released in 2010). The short list of standouts…

Planet B-Boy (Netflix Instant)

The Hurt Locker (on DVD)

3:10 To Yuma (on DVD)

District 9 (on DVD)

Food, Inc. (on DVD)

The Horse Boy (Netflix Instant)

Exit Through the Gift Shop (Netflix Instant)

Winter’s Bone (DVD)

True Grit

Podcasts

To The Best Of Our Knowledge (TTBOOK)

Difficult to choose just a few from all the segments I enjoyed this year, but here’s a selection…

Boots on the Ground (four-part series)

Science & The Search For Meaning

Reality

Lost In The Supermarket

This American Life

Nummi

The House On Loon Lake

Others

WTF With Marc Maron (always great)

iPhone Apps

Angry Birds

Harbor Master

Instapaper

Epicurious

Also… Evernote, Twitter

Art, Websites & Miscellany

Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present, Portraits – Something hypnotic and surprisingly moving about this piece of performance art (almost installation) and the resulting photographs.

If we don’t, remember me – Gorgeous animated GIFs like you’ve never seen, taken from iconic films.

Unhappy Hipsters – Pictures from Dwell magazine recontextualized. My favorite Tumblr of the year

Visualization: Choose Your Own Adventure

Absolutely the Best Chocolate Chip Cookies (Recipe) – Pro tip: Make the dough three-days ahead. For some reason, aging it a bit gives the cookies some extra magic.

I just finished watching the second season of Mad Men, and I’m left with a familiar bittersweet feeling. The same one you get when you finish a great book. I don’t often get this feeling from a TV show, so I’ve begun to reflect a little on what it is that makes the show so good. One thing, of course, is the place and time.

1960 in America

Setting a show in 1960 was a stroke of pure genius. America, having recovered from World War II hit it’s stride in the 1950s. The country was enjoying an unprecedented era of era of prosperity. The big companies that created the machinery of modern warfare reinvented themselves as purveyors of household magic. Plastic revolutionized packaging and changed the whole concept of disposable goods. Chemicals emerged to ensure everything from green lawns to wrinkle-free clothing. A proliferation of new gadgets promised to erase every inconvenience from our lives. This is when Modern America was born. We were seduced by technology, and we never looked back.

At the same time, there was so much about America in 1960 that seems so quaint and primitive now. Often comically so. There’s a voyeuristic joy in watching kids play spacemen in front of their parents by putting plastic bags over their heads. Seatbelts didn’t even exist yet. Pregnant women smoked and drank. Everyone, for that matter, smoked and drank constantly – even at work. Every executive had “a girl” to take care of all the minutiae of meetings and phone calls (plus coffee, dry-cleaning and sometimes other “perks”). “Homos” were perverts, and “negroes” were only fit for household help and operating elevators.

Looking back on this era is to witness the fascinating disconnect between what Americans in 1960 believed about themselves – and their culture and their country – and what we now understand to be the reality. This makes for many gasp-producing, head-shaking moments. But I believe there’s also something much more personal going on. I suspect that in 2009 there is a similar disconnect at play in America.

1960 as a mirror

The Internet has resurrected our reverence for technology and our faith in technology’s ability to solve our problems (if it ever went away). We constantly crave the next new thing – then we adopt it, adapt to it, become disillusioned by it and discard it. This whole cycle can happen over a few months or even weeks.

Today, for example, everyone seems to be excited about Twitter’s third anniversary. At the same time they’re wondering if Facebook’s home page redesign is a harbinger of impending decline.

Women and minorities have come a long way of course. There are whole categories of things we consider unjust today that were acceptable in 1960, but there is still plenty of injustice in the world. And for the most part we still coast through our lives, blissfully untouched by it.

So partly, we love Mad Men for the same reason we love most great stories – because we recognize ourselves in the characters, and we see our world in the one they inhabit.

Dave Eggers wrote a pretty eloquent rant on the notion of selling out (vs. being authentic or cool), which was reprinted by Harpers a couple of summers ago, but what Eggers misses (and which he is somewhat guilty of himself) is the pleasure we get out of being “in the know”. This person is the name dropper. This person is the one who needs to tell you he was at that show – before they were famous.

Of course the need to feel in-the-know extends beyond the realm of pop culture. It’s the whole reason gossip exists at all.

Anyway, I’m guilty myself. I wish I could more often just guilelessly like things.