‘Fake Steve Jobs’ built his career on the slogan, ‘Dude, I invented the friggin’ iPhone.’ But in reality, the man behind the impersonator ‘-‘- a blogger and journalist named Dan Lyons ‘-‘- was contributing to the reinvention of journalism.
Lyons spoke to about 40 attendees at the Boston University Photonics Center on Wednesday night about his experiences as a journalist and underground blogger, offering his insight about the future of journalism online.
Lyons started ‘The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs’ in 2006. Though now defunct, he provided a comical take on technology news through this blog, written from the perspective of Apple CEO Steve Jobs.’
Lyons said he chose to draw on Jobs’ character to parody what he described as the ‘darkness that drives Jobs’ brilliance.’
‘At the time, all the tech blogs were pretty much just propaganda,’ Lyons said. ‘I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if one of those CEOs just came home and told it like it was?”
Though his online persona might suggest he knows Jobs, he said he has never actually met the Apple creator. He said he was shocked to find that interest in his blog had sparked hundreds of readers to comment on his work.
‘At first, I blogged for about six weeks on Blogspot, and then I just deleted everything,’ Lyons said. ‘The next time I logged on, somebody had reposted the entire blog.’
Originally a print writer, Lyons said he recognized that the rise of the Internet represented a decline in print media and forced himself to learn about blogging and Internet writing.
‘As a print journalist, you just write,’ he said. ‘Somebody else worries about editing, somebody else worries about layout. You just write.
‘What we’re moving towards in the Internet media world is way more exciting and way better,’ Lyons said.
The immediacy of the medium and the discussion and community created through readers’ comments on his work give him the ability to reach a larger audience through the Internet, he said.’
Lyons spoke of ‘Fake Vladimir Putin’ and ‘Fake Noam Chomsky,’ two readers who adopted Internet personas of their own and repeatedly engaged Fake Steve Jobs in heated, and often hilarious, debate.
‘So many different people were commenting,’ Lyons said. ‘You had so much user generated content available. Not all of it was good, but it didn’t have to be. That’s part of its appeal.’
Mac BU, the Boston University Mac enthusiast club, hosted the lecture. Mac BU Vice President Joe Levin said Lyons was their top choice because of his wit and appeal to Mac fans and journalism students.
‘We were excited to hear about his experiences as a journalist, and we wanted to hear the inside story,’ Levin, a College of Arts and Sciences sophomore, said.
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences student Alex Yip, a long-time reader of Lyons’ blog, said he was excited to meet the man behind computer screen.’
‘I’ve been following Fake Steve Jobs pretty much from the beginning,’ he said. ‘It was great to see what he was really like. He was even funnier in person.’
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