New Line has sent Michel Gondry on a tour of indieWIRE events at Apple Stores to promote Be Kind Rewind. But is actual, physical globetrotting even necessary in today’s wired world? I thought it was kind of ironic that on the first stop of the tour, which took place last night in San Francisco, several of my Bay Area-based Twitter friends were essentially live micro-blogging the event––no doubt in some, if not all cases, using Apple devices.

So several days before Gondry’s tour is scheduled to come to my city, I was eating dinner in New York, and effectively getting a play-by-play of the San Francisco version of the event via Twitter updates on my cellphone. This morning, I woke up to find that Jackson West (who, in addition to being a Twitter followee, is a colleague at a site that I freelance for, NewTeeVee) had uploaded audio of the event and was making it available for download by anyone who reads his Twitter stream.

All of this says something about our new global-cultural-techno-econo-sphere, I’m sure of it; I’m just not sure what it is.

When the audience is using your own technology to broadcast your event globally, the idea of seeking out face time with individual communities based on geographic location takes on a quaintly retro quality. The question is, is that a net positive, because it makes the communities feel more valued that you’d expend resources on them individually? Or is it a net negative, because at that point, the audience is making you appear to be out of touch by beating you to the virtual broadcast punch? OR, is THAT a net positive, because it shows that you’re trusting the audience enough to let them spread the meme past geographic boundries to their own virtual communities?

My head is spinning, but let me know what you think. Gondry will be at Apple Stores in Chicago and New York, tonight and on Friday.