Mark Steffen – Writer, Editor, Digital Everything'er

Earlier today, Jimmy Fallon’s site put up a promotional video for the holiday season. On one hand, it’s another marketing gimmick that involves Fallon, his band–The Roots–a bunch of very innocent looking children, Mariah Carey, and a now classic Christmas song.

On the other hand, this is all it involves. Somehow, in an age where everything I see go viral has some sort of undertone or joke involved, this little video with no joke was posted everywhere I looked today. Which is wonderful.

How easy would it have been to instruct the band to act disaffected or Carey to act scared of Fallon? How easy would it have been to have Fallon stare at Carey’s “endowments” the whole time, peppering the holiday spirit with a lustful incongruency? How many endless gimmicks could a late-night talk show host easily build into a holiday promotional? And yet, this tiny modern-day classic of a song, sung by a bunch of happy (admittedly, famous) people playing instruments in an amateur manner warmed everyone’s hearts.

So if making something simple and joyful a popular, viral video (one of the few measures of success in my strata) makes me a part of the so-called irony generation that so much of media is railing against right now then, y’know what? I’ll take it.

This American Life recently aired a story about the working conditions in the factories where many of your favorite products are built. Turns out, a lot of that story was false. There are a lot of arms moving in this machine, a lot more than you might realize at first:

1. Part of This American Life and people’s enjoyment of it (and its success) is that it’s generally deemed to be “true” from the listener’s standpoint.
2. Unless things are obvious. Generally, they are always obvious (i.e. David Sedaris telling a story about chipmunks that speak and listen to jazz).
3. There are times when fabricating things really does make a story better. Fabricating, embellishing, all of that stuff is what makes storytelling more interesting than, y’know, real life.

Frankly, the topic has been beaten to death and you can hear all about the lies and horrible deception in a massive 1-hour long, conniption-fit inducing, neuroses-filled follow-up episode of This American Life. (Or if you want to read a great post about the technicalities of the entire debacle, there’s a great post on Daring Fireball that’ll wrap it up for you faster than listening to both episodes.)

I’d like to talk, briefly, about this story’s impact on storytelling. There’s a lot of embellishing that goes on in storytelling. Look at Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius or any of the countless essayists like David Rakoff (writing from personal experience about personal things). Everyone walked away from those books with the impression that the staunch majority of it really happened.

And therein lies the rub. There’s a certain amount of cognizance that what you’re reading isn’t necessarily true, but it mostly is. And it’s a great story. So you believe. Hurray, that work is a success. I’m fairly certain that if I were to see Daisey’s stage show (where the segment is on the radio is pulled from) then I’d notice that he’s embellishing. That was the original medium, the story was crafted for that medium, not radio. Pile on the whole bag of shit hits the fan when you reference Apple in anything and you very naturally have people sounding alarms before thinking.

No, This American Life should not have aired it. Yes, Mike Daisey is an idiot for leading them astray during fact-checking. Yes, things are being set straight. What’s more frightening to me, at this point, is that people believed it to be true in the first place. Where do you draw the line?