Sometimes, the internet is wrong

Which I learned today, when I walked down a quiet Brooklyn street and rang the doorbell of an unassuming brownstone. A heavy-set bespectacled man wearing paint-splattered khakis laboriously opened the door.

He doesn’t look quite like a yoga instructor, I thought to myself.

“Hi, uh, is there a 12 o’clock yoga class here today?”

He laughed. Not hard, but in a situation like this, a laugh is a laugh. “Nope, hasn’t been yoga here for years. Sorry.”

“Oh, ok, thanks, no problem. Thanks. Bye.”

Aside from the awkward/mildly embarrassing encounter and the waste of my time (though, really, I had nothing else to do, so this is a minor point), I find myself mostly confounded by my unquestioning loyalty to the internet.

I Googled “Yoga Bushwick”, looked through all the entries on the first page, found one that had a class during the timeframe I was looking for, Google mapped the address and directions from my apartment, and set an alarm ensuring I would be up in time. Never once did I stop and think “Hey, lady, maybe you should call just to make sure.” Why on earth would I do that? The internet said it, it’s true, dammit.

Well, this was a swift kick in my yoga-deprived ass. A reminder (or first introduction to the concept) that the internet is not always right.

So, with that, I now solemnly swear to remember this the next time I go frolicking around town looking for the perfect yoga studio/restaurant/bar/museum/coffee shop/theater/book store/thrift store/grocery store…

Jeez. That’s a lot of phone calls.

What would Miss Manners say?

Tonight I was confronted with a digital question that I thought a lot about and still haven’t resolved. Here’s how it came about:

I read a really great article in the Village Voice and decided to share my thoughts about it with Twitter.

I read the article in the newspaper. The actual, tangible, ink-gets-on-your-fingers newspaper. I was on the train when I decided it was time to tell the world how I felt about the article. I follow @villagevoice and gave them the appropraite shout out. I do not follow the reporter, and since I was on my mobile phone, I didn’t take the extra effort to find him and mention him in the tweet (the contact line at the end of the article listed his email address but not his Twitter handle). But, this was not my dilemma so I digress.

Since I had read the article in the print paper, it didn’t seem natural to me to go to the Village Voice website, find the article, copy the link and paste it in my tweet. I figured I had offered enough context in my tweet that people would know how to find the article if they wanted it. Someone I didn’t know @ replied me to ask for the link. Here’s where I got stuck. First I thought “Awesome, someone read my tweet!” then I thought, “hmmm, I could go to the Village Voice website, find the article, copy the link and paste it in my @reply, or, he could go to the Village Voice website, find the article and read it.” The latter seemed more like the shortest distance between the two points (especially because I was on my mobile phone), so I responded that I had read the print article so I didn’t have the link but that it shouldn’t be hard to find on the Village Voice website.

Right after I sent the @ reply, I felt guilty. Should I have just searched for the link and sent it to him? Should I have included it in my tweet in the first place? Was I doing a disservice to the article by not making the link a prominent part of my post? Would the Village Voice have preferred the hits to the article page, or the increased time on their site as users navigated from the homepage to the article page?

Hyperlinks are social currency. Hell, they’re what the whole web is built on. I get it. And, ok, full disclosure, another reason I didn’t include the link was because I wanted more characters to use for my own personal commentary. I don’t exactly feel guilty for that, because that’s what I, and pretty much everyone else, use Twitter for. I do, however, feel bad if I somehow gave the Village Voice the short end of the stick. And I certainly didn’t want to annoy the dude who took the time to read my Tweet and found it interesting enough to want to actually do what I had suggested. But, I dunno. I guess I just didn’t think it was too much to ask that people take a couple extra steps to reach their destination.

So, while I continue to ponder that one, here is the link to the article I was talking about in the first place:
http://www.villagevoice.com/2011-08-31/news/9-11-the-winners-profiting-from-september-eleventh/