Zooey on 28/4/2009 at 21:22
It's change, baby. Don't be an old fogey lamenting news printed on paper and long books. You're on an internet forum after all.
As for the circus, that's no different to what it always has been, see the yellow press. On paper.
demagogue on 28/4/2009 at 21:33
I'm a big fan of the digitalization and democratization of information. Don't get me wrong.
I thought I was making a pretty standard point that goes along with it, too, that didn't deserve so much scrutiny, but if you want to push it...
The fact it's an old point was actually my edit, since I don't like my posts getting too long. I had a last paragraph there saying that it's not actually a new point I'm making, but a very old one about media that keeps recurring, if you follow media studies or whatever.
So yeah, it's an old concern; there's always a bit of circus that perpetually wants to jump under the cover of 'news'. But I do think today is different in the sense of being its own beast. Internet media works differently than print media, so old worries have new faces.
Also, just because the antics we see today remind us of yellow journalists of the 1910s doesn't mean you can just shrug it all off as harmless. The media dropped the ball in 1898 in pushing us (the US) into the Spanish-American war, and it dropped the ball again in 2003 being waaay too uncriticial of the lead up to the Iraq II War and not pressing important questions. Even if history looks like it's repeating itself, you still have to keep an eye on what's going on.
Zooey on 28/4/2009 at 22:26
Yes, cursory or biased journalism can be dangerous, no doubt. But why do you think the internet is more prone to fall into this trap than older media?
I'm not talking about blogs or infotainment sites, because that's more akin to asking the pimp on the corner what he thinks about the economy, than buying a newspaper.
june gloom on 28/4/2009 at 23:30
God I love 4chan sometimes. The worst people on earth go there and yet they consistently pull off some of the most wonderfully funny shit the internet's ever seen.
gunsmoke on 29/4/2009 at 16:02
Quote Posted by demagogue
Newspapers are dropping like flies; tv now feels like it has to go online; novels are adjusting themselves to handheld consumption... And then you get to the content.
I get that you were making a modest point, but to me it was part of a bigger picture: Media in the helluva wide sense is faced with an increasingly online public, which as that guy properly implied, is the champion of the irrelevant... They still want to go through the motions of saying they're reporting 'news', but read any newspaper or news magazine, watch any news program, and they are all under the same kind of pressure to add this kind of circus routine to their repertoire. So for me, the question "why bother?" is more and more relevant for what all kinds of media are being pressured into, also.
Gotcha.
Peanuckle on 29/4/2009 at 18:33
4chan had a huge, multi-day campaign to pull this off. People even created scripts that would endlessly run 50 voting programs at once, both to boost moot and to lower his top competition.
All in all, it was very amusing to watch.
Ostriig on 30/4/2009 at 01:11
This does have a precedent, you know. I'm having a bit of a dilemma as to which incident is more full of win.
Quote Posted by Wikipedia, Rick Astley
Astley was voted by Internet users "Best Act Ever" at the MTV Europe Music Awards 2008.
gunsmoke on 30/4/2009 at 01:25
It has hundreds of precedents...that's the point.
PeeperStorm on 30/4/2009 at 04:43
Quote Posted by dethtoll
From the (
http://headostate.com/) creepy fanclub who can't shut up to the folks who refused to vote because "he black", there's no denying Obama has entered the global consciousness.
Apparently there's (
http://headostate.com/home.htm#) a few other places that he's been entering as well.
