by Diane Wild | Nov 7, 2007 | Uncategorised
Today comes a chilling reminder that horrible news does not mean something like a writers strike, and that television is not to be taken literally. A school shooting in Finland left at least eight dead, including the killer. The photo CNN and other outlets are using is from his video manifesto posted to YouTube, and the t-shirt he’s wearing proves that having common affection for a particular TV show is not necessarily a heartwarming bond.
Media reports are playing up the YouTube angle, of course, because as the AMPTP would tell you, this Internet thing is new and scary. But as Greg Sandoval of CNET News points out, that’s as ridiculous as blaming the US Postal Service for the Unabomber.
Danah Boyd is an academic who studies social media, and posts more casually about it on her blog, Apophenia (which, coincidentally, means basically what my blog title is trying to convey – “making connections where none previously existed”). She’s written frequently about the media’s demonization of the Internet. One of her best starts there but gets into the idiocy of pointing fingers at things like YouTube instead of the root issues. Growing up in a culture of fear: From Columbine to banning of MySpace was written two years ago, but not much has changed:
Post-Columbine, we decided to regulate the symptoms of alienation rather than solve the problem. Today, we are trying to regulate youth efforts to have agency and public space. Both are products of a culture of fear and completely miss the point. We need to figure out how to support youth culture, exploration and efforts to make sense of the social world. The more we try to bottle it into a cookie-cutter model, the more we will destroy that generation.
Today, Sandoval writes his Perspective: In Finland shooting, fallout for YouTube?:
So what’s YouTube’s role? YouTube is a tool anyone can use, not an edited newspaper. It’s policed by the community that uses it. If something is indeed offensive, it can be removed. Yes, it’s a change from the old days, when a few people controlled who gets to speak at the bully pulpit. This is the democratization of information. No one gets to control who gets to say what anymore.
The finger-pointers would seem to want to control what troubled teens like Pekka Eric Auvinen post to YouTube instead of wonder why he would post what he did and do what he did and look for meaningful solutions to prevent the motivation for both. The Internet might be a wilderness, but if someone’s crying into it, it’s not just because it’s there.
by Diane Wild | Oct 31, 2007 | Uncategorised
My new workplace is in a dog-friendly location:
But in our parking lot, speed and go to hell:
Speaking of going to hell, Stewie was spotted in San Francisco:
by Diane Wild | Sep 20, 2007 | Uncategorised
Pop Candy, Whitney Matheson of USA Today’s blog “unwrapping pop culture’s hip and hidden treasures,” is pretty much the only thing you need to read to keep up with the cool. She covers music, TV, books, movies, and Internet phenomenon, posting several times a day (in defense of slacker bloggers like me — or maybe it’s more of a defense of her — it’s her job). There’s bound to be at least one or two great recommendations that suit your taste in the plethora of links she throws her readers’ way. I’ve linked to her a few times lately for fun things like this:
That’s me in letters and symbols, from t.y.p.o.r.g.a.n.i.s.m.: ASCII-O-Matic. You can also convert pictures into boxes, and either black and white or colour.
Pop Candy is going on vacation for a couple of weeks, but now would be a great time to catch up on what you’ve been missing.
by Diane Wild | Sep 6, 2007 | Uncategorised
The Tyee has posted duelling articles about the Dove Real Beauty campaign and parent company Unilever’s Fair and Lovely product campaign in India. It’s enlightening, literally and metaphorically.
How I Became a Dove Girl by Shannon Melnyk is about the empowering message of that Dove campaign, which I and many women I know love … though I’m reconsidering that position now:
It was in this moment I realized how necessary campaigns like this are. No matter how cynical we choose to be about the marriage of our market economy and social responsibility, the simplicity behind the hoo-ha is the more positive and balanced images we see in the media, the more our young girls have a fighting chance in the culture of over-sexualized youth, designer-label-driven peer groups, anorexic heroin chic, booby hooter-girl bar scenes and the cover-girl perfection that drips with the cruel message: “look like me and only then will your life will be perfect.”
This week’s rebuttal by Munisha Tumato, Real Beauty … If You’re White, is about the hypocrisy of a company that pats itself on the back for celebrating women’s “curvy parts and wrinkly parts and saggy parts” in its Dove ads while promoting skin whitening products as the way for Indian women to be respected and successful:
What’s more is that by claiming that a whitening cream can increase your chances of being happily married and financially successful, Fair and Lovely appeals to the most vulnerable (and usually the darkest) segment of the India population: poor and often uneducated women for whom a leg up, by any means necessary, is a highly desirable proposition.
This revelation of hypocrisy shouldn’t be much of a surprise, of course. Whatever aura of social responsiblity they want to reap from the Dove campaign, Unilever is a business, and marketing depends largely on cashing in on the target market’s vulnerabilities. In North America, Dove capitalizes on women’s preoccupation with beauty products while reaffirming the war cry that’s arisen over airbrushed superskinny models pushed in our faces, creating a campaign that sets them apart from their competitors. In India, Unilever capitalizes on a culture that values fair skin and owns the market on skin lightening products (that are not, by the way, anything more than a sun block) with their ubiquitous ads:
But Unilever can afford to be hypocritical. Skin lightening products are by far the most popular product in India’s $318 million skin care market. Fair and Lovely, meanwhile, commands over half of that.
The skin whitening business is so lucrative that several skin care companies have launched new whitening products targeted at Indian men. The most popular? Fair and Handsome, produced by Emami and advertised like Fair and Lovely: by telling brown men that fair women will only love them if they are fair themselves.
Great. Equal opportunity neuroses.
by Diane Wild | Sep 5, 2007 | Uncategorised
On July 7 this year, an unremarkable day in my life, suddenly I’d visited 2 of the 7 Wonders of the World. That’s the day the New 7 Wonders Foundation announced the results of public voting. Says Very Short List, introducing a site with stunning panoramas of the new wonders:
Sure, the Colossus of Rhodes and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon sounded cool, but since — like all of the other original wonders (except for the Great Pyramid of Giza) — they no longer exist, we were glad to see that their replacements are equally spectacular. The new wonders — Machu Picchu, the Colosseum, the Taj Mahal, Petra (the ancient Jordanian city, not the Christian rock band!), the statue of Christ the Redeemer in Brazil, Chichen Itza, and the Great Wall — are open to tourists, but now you can visit them without using up frequent-flyer miles, thanks to the Website Panoramas.
These aren’t the panoramas from that site – you have to go there for the full breathtaking effect – but they’re the 2 I’ve checked off my list. Just 5 more to go … someday.
Machu Picchu
Chichen Itza
by Diane Wild | Aug 29, 2007 | Uncategorised
Thanks to commenter Corien, I learned a new acronym recently: lolstc. I’m possibly the only person on the Internet who had to Google that to find out it means “laughed out loud, scared the cat.” I put it into real-life practice when my brother sent me a link to the Art is Not a Scam blog:
New “realisticats” internet phenomenon takes world by storm – top bloggers claim proper grammar next hot trend.
Today comes a chilling reminder that horrible news does not mean something like a writers strike, and that television is not to be taken literally. A school shooting in Finland left at least eight dead, including the killer. The photo CNN and other outlets are using is from his video manifesto posted to YouTube, and the t-shirt he’s wearing proves that having common affection for a particular TV show is not necessarily a heartwarming bond.
