The Internet, with Maura Johnston: Martha Stewart Show Embraces Twitter, Grills Founder

Two weeks ago, MTV's Video Music Awards embraced the liveblogging concept, hiring Internet personality-construct iJustine to preside over mentions of the show on the microblogging service Twitter—and they reaped Internet rewards when Kanye West ran up on stage and sparked a million angry blog posts. Martha Stewart's eponymous TV show took a similar tack yesterday, when it taped a show to air this Friday devoted to what the domestic empress described as "all you need to know about tech and social netwworking" [sic]. Attendees were encouraged to Tweet and blog throughout the taping; there was even an official hashtag that the warm-up comedian confusedly announced to the audience between segments. Martha's studio is as well-apportioned and spacious as one might expect, and the combination of bright-eyed audience members and open laptops kept bringing to mind a particularly well-designed lecture hall on the first day of fall quarter.

The whole "liveblogging" directive, though, was sort of odd, and not only because of the apt etiquette tip she gave out in a recent ad for Macy's. (It's "No Tweeting while eating"; one audience member asked her to utter it in the post-show Q & A scrum.) For one thing, the show was actually taped days in advance of its airing, meaning that all those #thetechshow-tagged Tweets were coming ahead of any regular old Martha viewers being able to follow along with them. And thanks to the screens in front of them, the audience seemed oddly distracted, trying to get on the studio's overloaded wireless connection and angling to appear on camera, even if it was only via icon—when they weren't staring at their devices, as captured nicely by this photo by Amy Oztan.

Not to mention that the Internet, despite its being confined to screens, is not the most televisual of mediums. The depiction of its non-streaming-video aspects on TV and in the movies hasn't evolved much since Sandra Bullock had her identity stolen in The Net—look at the screen, cock your head in a "concerned" way, maybe mouth along with what you're typing. Much of the show was like that, particularly a segment with a Yahoo!-employed talking head who made much of her stay-at-home-mom bona fides as she ran through her parent company's latest iteration of the portal concept. (The more things change….)

Twitter was the show's main focus, with three of its seven taped segments given over to it. Martha is a fairly active Tweeter—she noted during her powwow with co-founder Biz Stone that her 1.5 million-plus followers make her the 38th-most-popular member of the service, not that she's counting—and she's a great example of how the 2009 version of the Internet has hyper-compressed plain old celebrity culture. She posts brief updates on her dogs' health and truncated recipes, receiving replies from people who follow her empire. It's a low-risk, medium-reward proposition, and Twitter has relished its embrace by the star set, even going so far as to recommend famous peoples' accounts to follow to brand-new users. Meanwhile, the replies received by Stewart (and the other members of her galaxy) are the Web 2.no version of the fan letter, usually with trifling details about the non-famous person edited out and the agape adoration kept in.

That's not to say that the whole show was filled with bubble-borne puffery, though. In the first segment, Stewart cocked her eyebrow and bluntly asked Stone about Twitter's recent billion-dollar valuation. (I pretty much fell in love with her at this point.) Instead of being bowled over by This Thing Called The Internet, as so many other talk-show hosts might, Stewart exhibited more skepticism than 99% of the business reporters and other so-called "experts" out there, some of whom have tried to garner attention for themselves with claims that the microblogging service is really worth five to 10 times that. Of course, this could be in part because Stewart's a mogul in her own right, and she's acutely aware that her own company—which, you know, has actual revenue-generating arms—has a market cap at around one-fifth Twitter's.

So aside from freeing up money that might be spent on celebrity publicists, how exactly does Twitter's value come into play? Martha and Biz did bring up the service's parallels with Google, which was also seen as a probable money pit back in the day. But timing here is important, and in a society where people seem to be increasingly averse to ponying up for information, a service that relies on disseminating news in the briefest way possible seems to be something of a losing proposition for the long term. (Perhaps Twitter will become the new fan club?)

Revenue stream or no, Martha further showed her savvy when she told the cameras what her next show would be about: unplugging and heading into the great outdoors.

Maura Johnston is the editor of Idolator and the pop critic for NPR's Weekend All Things Considered. She has been on the Internet longer than you.