On the Rutgers Suicide

ABC News has the written story and the video from their broadcast.  The stories are dramatically different.  The print story is a reporting of the news, using facts and interview quotes to convey what just happened.  ABC's broadcast, on the other hand, tells another story altogether.



ABC's broadcast team decided to make this an issue on two fronts.  First, they lightly touch on the callousness of kids, and then they go into a much more in depth discussion on persecution of homosexuals resulting from that callousness.  But is this really the issue at hand in this story?

While certainly it will be argued that our general cultural anti-gay sentiment was a driving factor in creating such a level of shame in Tyler Clementi's mind over having his encounter broadcast live online that he would decide to jump to his death from the George Washington Bridge, I don't really feel like this was the proper topic of discussion in ABC's broadcast.  At least not quite so immediately anyway.

Following the facts in the story, it looks much more like Clementi's roommate, Dharun Ravi, intended to watch him on webcam no matter what was happening.  Ravi has a count against him for attempting to spy on Clementi several days before September 19th in the same manner during a different encounter.  This, to me, points much more to the "callousness of kids" discussion, accompanied by a discussion on invasion of privacy and how our ever-more-interconnected electronic lives are eroding our cultural expectations of privacy.

The facts here are that a stupid kid pulled a stupid stunt with his stupid friend and hurt his roommate tremendously.  The fact that Clementi was having a homosexual encounter, while very likely a leading factor in Clementi ending his life due to much much higher level emotional and cultural issues, was not the immediate issue at hand here.  General respect for other people was.  The discussion of acceptance of homosexuality was going to take place around this event, no matter what.  But by making it the lead topic, ABC really overshadowed what needs to be discussed here.

It is an interesting time that we live in right now.  Daily we become more and more connected at a more and more immediate rate.  For people like Dharun Ravi, a young man who has been raised in this culture of interconnectivity, rather than adjusting to it, this interconnectivity culturally means that the people around him have no expectation of privacy.  He likely felt little to no remorse for the act of invading his roommate's privacy, and was acting to invade that privacy no matter the result.  In this time of an ever eroding expectation of privacy, and an ever eroding respect for one another, we should learn from what has happened here that we need to begin working at showing each other that respect.  It's something that used to be a person's default position in life; to respect the privacy of those around him.  It wasn't something we needed to try so hard for.  It seems we need to begin trying just a little bit harder.

The Future is Now

Arthur C. Clarke makes predictions in 1964 for what is, almost to a T, our present.  Phenomenal.

Art vs. Racism

Jokers Wild!

Deification of Youth

Craig Ferguson really hits the nail on the head with a diatribe about how society has come to deify youth.

(HT: TDD)

I think the point is best driven home by the now infamous moron at the Santa Cruz City Council.

Social media does not make it true!

That is it. I am letting out an angry rant blog finally. I have made it a point to keep my posting civil and thought out, but I am going to vent some. Hopefully there will be a point to all this.

Earlier this week TMZ broke the story of MJ passing away with no confirmed sources. At that time the average person was skeptical of it. TMZ is not the most reliable source always and has a habit of exaggerating somethings, at least in my experience. The story was not truth to many until NY Times or LA Times or CNN verified it. Later that day social media broke the deaths of George Clooney and Jeff Glodblum. In case you hadn't heard, nothing happened to them and they are still kicking.

These stories were pranks in the aftermath of a pretty dramatic day with MJ and Ms. Fawcett leaving us. That is to be expected I suppose. I remember hearing about UFOs on 9/11.

Then Billy Mays died and his son broke it through Twitter and, here is the key part, it was true. It has been a sad week, having been kicked off with the death of Ed McMahon.

Tonight though, Twitter let me know that both Rick Astley and Paris Hilton had died. And Yahoo Answers had the SEO firepower to show up with enough posts to make it seem like it may be true. The truth of it all though is that 4chan members decided to capitalize on the four deaths and the gullible nature of many social media users.

I was told to take everything with doubt by John Kass during a very lucky interview I had with him once upon a time. I took that to heart and dove into the underbelly of the Internet to find the truth. Long story short, I was Rick Rolled, a lot.

So here is my point. Users of social media, take everything with a grain of salt. Nearly the only power major media has left is reputation. Let them use it and confirm information you know and purge you of ignorance. The FTC is planning to regulate bloggers and right now I can understand why, as much as that hurts me.

So, when you get onto Twitter or Facebook or whatever, bring your instincts and common sense with you.

Cheers.

Personal Sidetrack

As many know, Sunday was the Pride Parade again. The parade is infamous for being wild, naked and drunk. Think Animal House covered in glitter and let loose on the streets. Getting to why this is a personal sidetrack, I covered the parade with the help of another intern for The Windy Citizen. My short, photo heavy, coverage of the Mardi Gras like bead throwing and the massive amounts of garbage generated by the spectators, was published on the site this morning. I'm just happy and bragging of my tiny accomplishment.

Cheers!

Chicago Pride Parade 2009: The Fabulous and the Filthy

Open Source Your Company: Salvation

It seems every major company is crying for help now. And all claiming the death of them will be the death of our economy. I am going to call bullshit.

I get it, there is all this government money going around, you are bleeding money, and it is a lot easier to be handed bags of cash rather then solve your own problem. I want to avoid the rather trivial argument, is it more or less American to help these companies.

Instead, let us assume there is no stimulus at all, Uncle Sam is going to be our non-biased third-party observer. So, with none of this money being pumped into the system, where would we be? There would be fewer companies now, and the big ones would be bigger. Not drastically different from where we are now, the government shot of anabolic money isn't supposed to come to fruition for a while.

OK, so we have big companies that shrank, and big companies that got bigger from buying up all these dying ones at post-Thanksgiving sale prices. Eventually the big ones will sell off these new buys at a higher price after the economy balanced itself, or the government would step in and do it when they got to monopoly level.

How do these dying giants save themselves though? I am going to look at newspapers and automobile industry because I am most familiar with those two.

The one industry that is not crashing horribly, and is even prospering despite everything, is digital media. Obviously automobiles cannot go digital... yet. So I will come back to them later, let's look at newspapers.

Newspapers have been trying to succeed online for a while now. They just cannot get the sort of success they need to live though. There is hope though, New York Times made over $30 million in online revenue last quarter, which has been dropping along with all their revenue. A drop in the bucket for them, but shows there is money out there.

The Chicago Tribune is making a good first, new, move into online media. It is late, but better late then never right? Chicago Now is their concept. A Chicago based blogging community, with a goal of 80 bloggers at the end of 2009. Some big names like Steve Dahl are already involved. The site is all developed by the Trib and allows for some community interaction. The Trib wants to keep this theirs though, as I found out from a few sources. They won't let everyone blog, so the community will be forced to turn other places to have a voice.

Here is the problem with newspapers. They never learned how to share growing up.

Cory Doctorow in a piece I reference far too much, “Why I Copyfight”, said, “culture's imperative is to share information: culture is shared information.” Well this is an obvious issue when it comes to those that supply information are having trouble sharing.

There is hardly a person that does not share something online now. I get emails from my father everyday sharing something that someone else shared with him. We love to share and talk and it has made culture successful.

Google has done an amazing job sharing. They just call it open sourcing. Everything isn't given away though, to the point Google fights regularly with keeping their search algorithms very secret. Because through those, is how they make money with their advertisements. Their cell phone operating system, Google maps and Chrome, are all free and open to toy with. These are services that have created community based on their one money producing service.

So back to Chicago Now. The cash flow will come from the content created by their 80 or so bloggers and from their community of readers. So why not let everyone write. Out of their massive target audience they claim as their goal (which includes pulling traffic from Google which is just stupid) there has to be one blogger that has talent and can make them some money.

Newspapers can open source a lot, while keeping their hard news gathering and reporting private, so that they can still tell advertisers to pay them money. All this really takes for them is getting around the idea that community and interaction is good.

So, open sourcing can save a company Jonathan? Maybe, but doing what is going on now sure as hell isn't working. How does an automobile company open source though?

Well, this is where my theory crafting finally comes into play. Open source means, simply, that you share what you create freely. Well, automobile companies make money by creating a car that is unique compared to everything else out there. But when I see a car advertised there are four things that always stand out. The cost, miles per gallon, safety rating and how the car looks. There is a hell of a lot more that goes into a car, but I really don't care.

So, what makes a car company money are the top selling cars and the more expensive ones are really what separate one company from the next. So, American car companies that are getting stomped on by foreign competitors, share! Volkswagen is about to bring their 60 MPG diesel powered Jetta to the U.S. Ford, Chrysler, GM, you guys really think your shitty 30 MPG cars will hold up to that because you have nine cup-holders?

If the American car companies worked together to develop new engines, structures, breaks, and everything else that goes into making a car work that 90 percent of the population knows nothing about I predict they could beat out foreign competitors. Then each company goes back and designs their own cars around the new tech that was created. And when the super bowl commercials roll around, there will be 10 unique looking and sounding cars sold that were created because the dying giants teamed up to overcome their own short-comings.

I know I am not an expert. But I am an observer, and trained to watch, digest and think. This just seems like common sense to me. Your business model sucks, so look at one that isn't sucking and is newer. And steal from them.

Digital Crack: Video Games, Addictive?

Chicago Tribune has gone ahead and posted a piece online about video game addiction. It follows a study that shows 8.5 percent of kids show signs of addiction with video game play. Why is this considered breaking news? Ten years ago when Everquest launched I remember it picking up the nicknames Evercrack and The Widow Maker — after causing numerous couples to split — within a few months.

Before that I remember many people maxing out the timer on Final Fantasy VII on multiple saved games before long. I have logged at least 24 hours on every Final Fantasy game to come out. My record was nearly 400 played days on Final Fantasy XI.

When you hear of someone die from a speed overdose to play longer, or having their children taken away, that is addiction. Enjoying playing a game over sitting in class is not addiction. That means the class is either being taught by someone who teaches for a job rather than someone who wants to excite children, or geometry isn’t your thing. Does addiction exist? Yes, that is why addiction centers started recognizing it years ago. But these studies should really put it against other addictions — don’t see a lot about 8.5 percent of heroin users being addicted.

Reports like this create a stir for a while, parents will take a kid’s games away and they will get pissed and unhappy. Then the parents will assume it is because their kid is addicted and set rules to how much they can play. And the kid will do worse in school and the parent will think that only time will change it. Guess what, the kid is pissed because the parent took away his hobby, he is doing worse in school because he is unhappy, and time will fix it because he will move on eventually.

When did having a hobby you love turn to addiction because you are unhappy when you are kept from it? I know people who are like that when they can’t go for a jog. Last I checked, people aren’t publishing stories about “running addictions”.

Take a deep breath Jonathan, not all that bad, maybe the Trib is publishing anything to bring in the customers now. Cheers.

Source

Hello, World.

I was invited to help contribute to this blog and have jumped aboard. I am a Journalism major among other things. I have my own personal blog and working on launching another site based around the subcultures that exist in bars in Chicago. I have recently started to cover the idea of freedom of information, with a focus on torrents, for a class beat.

Enough with that though. I don't really have a lot to say right now, but felt that this needed to be added. This video from College Humor may be best summation of culture on the internet, and set to a catchy tune. Enjoy, mahalo.

EDIT: College Humor, like so many other sites, for whatever reason has gotten their new viral video taken off youtube in fear of free and mass distribution and advertising. The most amusing part of it all though is the fact it was taken down on the basis of copyright. The music video is a mash up essentially of all copyrighted material. Oh, College Humor, you really are funny. Anyway, in playing by the rules, here is the video on thier page. Be sure to click on all their ads so they continue to remove content from youtube!

"I don't drink PBR to be ironic, it is all I can afford!": The reluctant hipster's lament

My name is Christine and I am a reluctant hipster. I maintain that my hipster status was not willingly adopted, but determined for me, as I was forced into vintage clothes and cheap booze via government enforced poverty. However, many people (including the organizer of this blog) maintain that I "listen to The Smiths, Therefore I am." Now according to the definition provided by Urban Dictionary of Hipster,I would qualify as a full blown, Parliment smoking, PBR drinking, English majoring pustule of irony. But what condemns me to subculture exile is my continuous and irreverent denial that I am a card carrying member of this generally loathsome faction of society. In the process of writing this blog, which was originally intended to disprove any and all allegations that I find it hip to be square, I have been confronted with certain inalienable "Coincidences" that make my disposition towards being a victim of social profiling feasible: I happen to prefer a style aesthetic that makes me look like an extra from a Wes Anderson film, I belong to a Beat book club, I watch foreign films because they are "avant garde" but really because I like the intellectual implications of embracing the general alienating nature of subtitles, I pretentiously judge others for being "pretentious" as I talk about obscure subjects that I specifically read up on just to so that I can highlight their obscurity and ipso facto my coolness...the list goes on.

In light of what I just wrote, I still maintain that my alignment with the hipster culture is largely incidental; I don't aspire to achieve irony (though I do enjoy it when it manages to make an appearance in normally mundane situations and locations, such as in line at a coffee shop or the used record store) I am almost 30 and have become a victim of circumstance because things that I appreciate (because I was alive for their original incarnations) have become symbolic of the college freshman bid for acceptance through perceived alienation. Despite all of the aforementioned, I am capable of recognizing that all signs point to Hipsterville, but how does the desire for individuality, which I believe to be at the root of any popular cultural trend: prep, emo, goth or hipster, make you an outcast amongst your own people? E Tu American Apparel guy? Ok I don't want to highlight my existential crisis of the week, so I will move on...

In Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk writes " you are not a beautiful and unique snowflake." This statement rings true for all of us; the one thing we all share is the desire to forge an individual claim on the rest of the world. Hipsters just do this while standing together and apart from the rest of the gen pop while sipping on PBR. This is why, despite my own protest, I cannot hate on the Hipster fraternity; the more we all want to be different, the more we are the same. But, for the record, I drink High Life.