Noah J. Nelson

Oh, what a mess.

By now you’ve heard about the dust up over the This American Life episode that aired this weekend— “Retraction”— in which the show did the unprecedented. It took back a story it had aired on the grounds that some of the material turned out not to be factual. You may have also seen the story arc for the past few days of Mike Daisey, the monologist whose work is at the center of it all.

The build up to the most anticipated tech initial public offering (IPO) since Google hit the market has officially begun after years of speculation and hype. On Wedensday, Facebook filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including in their documents a lengthy letter to potential investors from founder Mark Zuckerberg that reads in places more like a hacker manifesto from a mildly Disneyfied William Gibson novel than it does from a cut-throat businessman:

We made our way to the 2012 Sundance Film Festival this past week in Park City, Utah to get a sense of where the state of independent cinema is going this year. What films we will be talking about? What issues are on the forefront of documentarians’ minds?

What follows are five lessons we learned while slogging through snow, striking up conversations with strangers on the shuttle busses, talking with filmmakers and seeing every film they’d let us.

The State of Independent Cinema is Strong

All eyes are on Park City this week as the 2012 Sundance Film Festival gets underway. In the midst of the snow and stars scores of films will be screened, many looking to get picked up for distribution after an arduous road to the festival. In an earlier era hot buzz at the festival led to multi-million dollar bidding wars. But in this age of Netflix, Video On Demand, and recessionary caution those deals are thought to be a thing of the past.

Conspicuous, thoughtless consumption just isn’t cool anymore.

The most buzzed-about thing to come out of the Consumer Electronics Show this week? A lurid, Hunter S. Thomspon-esque “fever dream” by Gizmodo writer Mat Honan that captures the disorienting nature of a big trade show, CES being just about the biggest.