What do Google, Obama, a heavyweight fight, and HDTV have in common?

Answer: They all need to get their distance right to be effective. That may not make any sense just yet. Bear with me a moment, if you please. Let’s start with Obama. It’s been a long time since the general public in America connected with a politician on such a personal level. Obama makes you feel like he’s speaking to you individually, like he could be your friend, like — you never know — he just might show up at your Superbowl party. He did that successfully all through his campaign, but it’s one thing to campaign that way and another thing entirely to behave that way when you’re POTUS. So Obama needs to find the appropriate balance between being presidential and being everyman. He wants his constituents to feel like he may stop by with a six-pack and the leaders of nations to feel they should never underestimate him. In short, he needs to get his distance right. A heavyweight fight needs to get its distance right, too, if it wants to have the right impact. I don’t mean the distance between the two boxers — although they need to get that right too. No, what I mean is that the lighting, the crowd, the announcer, and the fighters themselves have to work to create that sense of drama that can only come with a bit of distance. Have you ever seen boxers sparring? The motions are the same as they are in competition. So why is competition so much more interesting? The distance augments the drama. At our house, thanks to my toy-loving fiance, the televisions get larger and larger and the resolution gets higher and higher, and I’ve started to notice something: there is such a thing as resolution that is too high. Like watching sparring in the gym, television drama loses something when the actors stop looking like actors and start looking like regular people you know, people who don’t have perfect skin and are maybe wearing a bit too much makeup to compensate. Soon the cameras and the lighting and the makeup will adapt to the new technology, and TV will regain its distance — and thereby its drama. And this brings me to the point of this post: Google’s distance. You can tell that the search giant is struggling with this right now. They used to be one of us. They used to be our non-evildoing friends. But with size and fame and money come distance, and with distance comes resentment. Nowadays it’s almost fashionable to criticize Google. They’re in trouble for foreign censorship. They use too much energy. And they’re snobby about Twitter — Eric Schmidt calls it a ‘poor man’s email system’. This last act of haughtiness is a particularly egregious sin for an entity trying to get the right distance. It makes them seem aloof and out of touch, as if they’d drunk too much of their own Kool-Aid. Unfortunately, that’s not what we want from Google. We want them to be our friends. We want to feel like we’re a part of the community. We want to be co-creating the future of the Internet. But if they don’t get their distance right, all we’re going to feel is alienated. How close do you feel to Google?