This morning, Google announced a collaboration with the band Arcade Fire and writer/director Chris Milk.  Sounds weird, right?  Well, the result of their work together is truly cool: a personalized, interactive music video experience constructed in HTML5.

You’ll do better to skip my description and check it out yourself.  The gist is that, using Chrome or other HTML5-compliant browser, you enter the address of your childhood home and hope that it has some Google Street View imagery associated with it (sadly, none among my three childhood homes did!).  Then you launch the experience, and sit back to watch.

Throughout the session, your browser opens, closes, and moves around several different windows containing different images.  Often, the content in the windows will interact.  At some point, the video incorporates satellite and Street View imagery from the address you entered into the experience.  I don’t want to ruin the message or anything so, again, I suggest you try it out yourself.

It’s easy to fall into my regular pattern of painting this as pointing towards the “future” of music videos: personalized, social, interactive, etc.  To be honest, I doubt it’s the case that all music videos will eventually resemble this.  But it certainly is a compelling innovation, and points to a larger trend of crafting media to speak more directly to the user by soliciting their interaction.

The weird outcome of this trend, as with that in other “broadcast” mediums, is that we’re falling slowly away from the mass culture where we all experience the same exact content.  What will this fragmentation of experience do to our culture?  Is it good?  Is it bad?  Does it matter?  Hard questions to be solved in the years to come…

The dean went over a few important dates, and then offered us a piece of advice.  I paraphrase:

The single most useful and important thing that you can do in these first several weeks is to investigate and think carefully about the images and information about you that exist on the Internet.

He went on to propose two hypotheticals, in both of which we should assume the role of a hiring partner at a national law firm.

1. You gain access to a promising candidate’s Facebook profile, and find a picture of the candidate sitting on the beach in her swimsuit with two of her friends, raising beer cans in a toast.  Do you disqualify the candidate based on this image?
2. In researching a different but also promising candidate online, you come across a college newspaper article complete with photo that says, referring to that candidate: “SGA Secretary Convicted of Stealing School Supplies.”  Turns out, it was the April Fool’s edition of the newspaper, but it is not clearly marked on the article and not apparent from the writing style.  Do you disqualify the candidate based on this discovery?

The dean didn’t answer the hypotheticals for us, but heavily implied that they were in fact abstracted from real examples in which candidates had been removed from consideration for jobs.  He then reiterated that we should attempt to find the information available about us online, and again encouraged us to “think carefully” about getting rid of it.

Now, I’ll try as hard as I can to be a realist.  I understand that competition is fierce for jobs, especially in the legal market, and that recruiters will look for the tiniest things to differentiate one candidate from another.  I certainly think anyone seeking a job should know what is available online about them and consider the effect of that information on their professional reputation.

That said, both of these hypotheticals bothered me.  First, I think the “beers on the beach” photo is pretty innocent.  The candidate is almost certainly 21 or older.  There is no first-hand evidence of a law or regulation prohibiting consumption of beverages, alcoholic or otherwise, on the beach.  What is the problem?  That the candidate is drinking?  Shocker, folks: lawyers drink.  When you’re a summer associate, they wine and dine you and then wine you again.

In the April Fool’s scenario, the firm is guilty of the conduct for which many older folks chide younger generations: believing that everything they read on the Internet must be true.  Where is the continued research into the matter?  Where is the follow-up question or demand for explanation?  Congratulations: you might have lost a great candidate because you took things at face value. (I realize that the concern here is that someone might use this information agains the attorney, but this one’s a situation that can be fixed by contacting the school newspaper and asking them to publish an addendum or other clarification on the article.  It hardly warrants summary dismissal!)

The dean asked us if we would have reconsidered hiring these people.  The real question is: do we want to work at a firm that is so obsessed with petty and superficial details like Facebook photos and fake news articles?  Do they not want lawyers who have a social life, who don’t mind being playfully made fun of by their peers?  Maybe not.  But I’m not sure I want to work for that kind of place, so I hope they’ll state it up front.

William & Mary puts a lot of emphasis on the ideal of the citizen-lawyer: the attorney who is not only a great legal mind, but also a great member of the community.  How can we build citizen-lawyers for the 21st century when we ask them to censor their leisure time?  Again, I’m not saying that all pictures or digital records are appropriate.  If you have an incriminating photo of Phelpsian proportions online, by all means seek to hide it.  But there is a difference between presenting a decent profile and sterile one.

I do hope that my new classmates and colleagues will think carefully about how they appear online.  But I hope they won’t overdo it.

I organized a group outing last Friday via our class’s Facebook group.  We had a really strong showing, almost 25 folks.  It was great to get to know some people before we were all thrown in together at the Welcome Reception this afternoon.  Everyone seems really nice, smart, and excited about the coming adventure.  It’s going to be a fun time, I think.

The decision to take the “southern” route across the country was made mostly because I wanted to see my brother in San Diego and visit my friends in San Antonio.  It was certainly a fascinating experience.  We were driving through Arizona right when a judge there handed down the decision about their contentious immigration law.  I saw Mexico for the first time, right across the border from El Paso.  I saw “the wall” along the border in a few spots.

Here are some other observations from the trek:

• Arizona is really hot.  We got out of the car for, oh, 4 minutes to put my bike inside.  We were drenched in sweat by the time we got back in.
• Texas is massive.
• There are actually some radio show hosts out there who claim that Islam is an instrument of the devil.  It was really disturbing.
• Glen Beck observed on his radio show that his new iPad attempts to correct many words, but it doesn’t attempt to capitalize the word “god.”  ”Just pointing it out,” he said.  ”Not saying anything besides that whoever programmed this apparently didn’t think ‘god’ ever needed to be capitalized.”  Thanks Glen.
• There are parts of the country where you hit the “seek” button on the radio and it cycles forever without finding a signal.
• FedEx trucks apparently have a vendetta against me.

I’m now getting quickly settled into my new digs in Williamsburg.  I’ve been pretty productive the past few days.  The DMV only took 45 minutes or so.  I have received most of my books via Amazon, and I’m all supplied up in terms of pens, highlighters, legal pads, and coffee.  I have yet to hang any pictures and we still don’t have our own internet (thanks unknown neighbors!), but otherwise it’s shaping up very nicely.  I’ll try to get some pictures together soon.

Orientation starts Monday.  Wow.  The first week is called “law camp” and seeks to introduce us to the school, our classmates, and to law school in general.  Then the real thing starts the following week.  I’m still a mix of excited and nervous, but above all I’m just ready to get started instead of having it build up anymore.  Thanks to our class’s Facebook group, I’ve organized a pre-Camp outing on Friday, at what is supposed to be the best bar in town.  It’ll be good to get to know a few folks before we’re all thrown into the craziness.

More (hopefully) soon.