 |  |
Tabloids are big in the UK, and its always been a mystery to me why in a country like the US, which is the king of popular culture, there is no real-news tabloid.
I like tabloids cos they are funny and I like Sploid even more because it is like Slashdot meets the Onion, edited by Richard Dawkins.
The really strange thing about the Durst scandal is that they are suing for copyright infringement for ‘linking’ - posting a link to something that may infringe copyright.
So lets get this right, if that is indeed against the law then the everyday business of:
Google
Yahoo
MSN
er… the entire web, is illegal.
Fred Durst Sues Over Stolen Sex Video - March 4, 2005:
“the Limp Bizkit front man has filed a $80 million lawsuit against web sites that posted the footage and stills from the singer’s X-rated romp with a former girlfriend.”
It turns out that the reason there has been 1000 times more complaints to the FCC isn’t just because activists are spamming them in general. It is because a single group - the Parents Television Council - is responsible for 999 out of 1000 complaints.
Activists Dominate Content Complaints
Thanks Nick
- and yes, this may be a shoe on the other foot scenario, but in my opinion its the right, not the left, that tend to be most vocal and indignant online.
The FCC obscenity complaints stats show:
Number of complaints and fines in -
year: 2000, complaints: 111, fines: $48,000
year: 2001: complaints: 346, fines: $91,000
year: 2002: complaints: 13,922, fines: $99,400
year: 2003: complaints: 202,032, fines: $440,000
year: 2004: complaints: 1,068,802, fines: $7,928,080
There have been 10,000 times more complaints in 4 years and 20 times as much in fines.
If complaints are as representative of Americans’ feelings as 4 years ago, and 10,000 times more people really are offended by broadcasting, then the FCC is 500 times less effective (since its obscenity guidelines are governed by popular consensus and fines levied accordingly).
If the fines are legitimate and comprehensive, and that there is therefore 20 times more obscene material being broadcast now than 4 years ago then the FCC has to spend 500 times as much in tax payer money to deal with unwarranted complaints (if it deals with complaints individually).
If, on the other hand, you don’t believe that Americans are between 500 to 10,000 times more prudish or broadcasters 20 to 10,000 times more obscene now than 4 years ago, then there is something wrong with the system of complaints.
This brings about a Malthusian problem, where the fines levied grow arithmetically but the population of complaints (and the cost of dealing with them) grows geometrically. In other words, if the FCC were a company, it would bankrupt them.
The real problem is created by the fact that the cost of making a complaint (via their website or email) is far less - and organized religious activists are exploiting this to swamp the FCC in flashmob fashion. It is the equivalent of a spam email campaign, but we are all paying for it.
Like spam, the only solution to this is to either make it more difficult or introduce a cost to send a message to the FCC, or to deal with large volumes of complaints like spam. In the latter case, the number of programs being complained about has only increased 3 times, so the value of an individual complaint, and the time spent dealing with it, should be inversely weighted when there are a large number about a single broadcast.
Jeff Jarvis points to an LA times piece on the latest antics of the ‘F*CCed’:
“The FCC posted the complaints on its website. One person reported hearing an obscenity; one objected to the male anatomy on a representation of Greek sculpture; another thought a woman’s breast had been revealed; and yet another claimed to have seen a couple making love.”
PDF of Olympic complaints from FCC website - much more entertaining than the Olympics themseves.
The classical architecture of Capitol Hill may be similarly peni ridden and has anyone ever been to a sports event where there wasn’t swearing?
Should all Christian religious programming should be censored - for containing an image of a naked man being tortured to death?
If the FCC is seriously going to waste time and money considering complaints from people who have clearly lost their marbles, then perhaps we should all start complaining about everything being broadcast, to drown out the background noise from the nutcases that the FCC takes seriously.
” Dear MR. Powell, Commmander in Chief, F**,
Since you are now operating in zero tollerance mode, please could you change your name to something that reminds me less of FUCK. I realize that you F*CCers are trying to do your job, but all my family are undergoing therapy at vast expense having been exposed to things that remind us of rude words and playing hide the sausage.
Sincerely
Condo Lisa”
It would be fun at least.
Business Week on the New York Times:
“A majority of the paper’s readership now views the paper online, but the company still derives 90% of its revenues from newspapering.”
That’s a problem indeed, but nothing compared with local newspapers’ loss of classifieds to Craigslist and the like.
I can’t help but feel that there may be an opportunity for newspapers in premium, Zagat-like online directory businesses.
Instead of meeting halfway with consumers, the music and movie industries seem to have shifted their attention to hardware and software media players in a war of attrition.
As a result consumers are being ripped off. A Byzantine maze of restrictions, poorly thought out and being debugged on-the-fly by end user guinea pigs stops people from viewing or listening to things they have legitimately bought. (I can’t watch UK DVDs in the US for example which really pisses me off). This is clearly going to get worse.
Is there already a specific consumer rights group to tackle this? If not, someone like Cory Doctorow would be great as a DRM Czar.
Below, Jenny, AKA The Shifted Librarian, wrestles with a Kafkaesque DRM nightmare:
“I spent about an hour trying to play back a disc I legitimately bought and went as far as installing and updating a 3rd party application to my system that would allow me to do so, and now I’m only being given a temporary license, where’s my rights as a consumer?”
Arguably the first music video ever, and possibly the first Powerpoint presentation, in “Don’t Look Back,” Bob Dylan holds up cue cards with words from the song Subterranean Homesick Blues on them and flips them, while staring at the camera, as the song plays:
‘Johnny’s in the basement
Mixin’ up the medicine…’
Slideshow presentations went downhill from then on:
Times Roman font, meaningless bullet points, a blue blend background, droning presenters wearing company polo shirts and pleated khaki pants. Powerpoint is an art crime.
Because of this, I rarely pay much attention to conference presentations. However, one of the best things I saw at at Web 2.0 was how Larry Lessig has perfected his trademark slideshow.
Like in Subterranean Homesick Blues, the slides flow along nicely with the lyrics. A lawyer defending the right for people to create digital collages produces a presentation that is an art form in itself, his mash up being a pretty good example of the type of creativity that he defends so well.
What makes a Lessig presentation different?
Style: Lessig uses a cracked courier typewriter font. It is a perfectly ironic use of something intrinsically analogue, used in a digital medium.
Structure: Each slide in a Lessig presentation is a piece of microcontent, it can be a word a symbol or an entire movie clip. There is no notion of a page.
Timing: As Lessig raps to the slide presentation, the rhythm of the slides has a non-linear flow i.e. a slide may emphasize a point ’so and so: slide 1 - did this: slide 2 - which resulted in this: slide3″ where each slide is punched out subliminally to the rhythm of him talking.
So, all you fathead music industry types, if you want to prevent people from making collages, all your slideshows are going to suck, and nobody will listen.
Gawker launches 3 new blogs:
Screenhead a funny-stuff compilation.
Jalopnik a cool-cars blog.
Kotaku a video games blog.
My car is crapped out and I have to avoid video games, because I will play them till my eyes bleed, but I’ll be a regular reader of Screenhead.
Niall McKay:
“the philosophy and theology in the first movie that prompted books like The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real and Taking the Red Pill: Science, Philosophy and Religion in The Matrix are replaced by a series of platitudes such as “believe,” it’s just about “choices” and “that’s karma,” baby.”
From Aristotle to Russell philosophers have always been good at asking questions but bad at explanations or conclusions. No surprise then that the conclusion of the Matrix trilogy wasn’t exactly profound.
The audience for the Matrix at the IMAX theatre in downtown San Francisco was more entertaining than the film. 1:30pm on the opening day and every seat taken by under employed engineers. The guy next to me was wearing a combat kilt and started talking about mac clusters and OS X. Apple seem to have taken their ubiquitous movie product placement to a new level, with avatars that sit next to you and pitch - classic.
You are currently browsing the archives for the media category.