Political Tactics

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Collecting a bunch of commentary, text and whatever else I can find about rhetoric and propaganda so I can be a better citizen.

U.S. in Pop Culture Export Translation: Screw You; Me First

Oops.

clipped from www.radioopensource.org I think what we project now through a lot of our entertainment is freedom in the sense of libertanism, it’s freedom in the sense of ‘I can do whatever I want and screw you.’ I’ve had people overseas actually say to me that that’s what they think American freedom means. That it’s the freedom of the sovereign kind of self, Orlando Patterson uses that term — the freedom of the master over the slave. It’s not a very pretty side of freedom. And we project this kind of freedom to do whatever the hell you want, unfettered by connections with other people, unfettered by ties to family or community, or any kind of ethical or moral restrictions — it’s a very radical idea of freedom, just as the will of the individual basically to satisfy his or her desires. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Martha Bayles (36 minutes, 16 mb mp3)

Teasing :: Bullying :: Hierarchy :: Love

An analysis of what teasing teaches us.

clipped from www.nytimes.com Hierarchies have many benefits — the smooth division of labor and resources, protecting weaker members of the group — but they can be deadly to negotiate. Male fig wasps chop their rivals in half with their large mandibles. Teasing can be thought of as a status contest with a twist. As a status contest, teasing must walk a fine line, designating status while enhancing social connection. Each tease turned out to be a 30-second morality play. clipped from www.nytimes.com Where teasing provides an arena to safely explore conflict, it can join people in a common cause. To tease is to woo wisely. Studies find that married couples with a rich vocabulary of teasing nicknames and formulaic insults are happier and more satisfied. Teasing actually serves as an antidote to toxic criticism that might otherwise dissolve an intimate bond. Our rush to banish teasing from social life has its origins in legitimate concerns about bullies on the playground and at work.

More Reality TV in Networks' Future = Fewer Eyes

Scripted one-hour dramas in the 10p slots where content can be more adult-friendly are evidently on the way out, at least for networks. The value of cable just went up. Cable has to retain tight control over its shows to keep their value, at least insofar as the interweb is concerned.

It's Netflix that gets cable shows to me anyway. $60/month is too much.

The good news is, cable's doing some great entertainment, dare I say the best entertainment -- next to indie films.

clipped from www.variety.com Then came NBC's Monday move to blow scripted programming out of the 10 p.m. hour in favor of "The Jay Leno Show." "It's a bummer for the writers who are writing for drama," said one agent. "Five less scripted drama shows at 10 p.m. is bad for the business ... Some leaders at NBC said there hasn't been a 10 p.m. drama that's worked in three or four years. But no, they just haven't developed the best dramas." Writers have already felt the primetime pinch in recent years, as the networks devote more hours to reality programs -- as well as repeats on dead nights such as Fridays and Saturdays. "The more reality shows and talkshows the broadcast networks do, the more that dramas will go to cable, where they can be done properly," It will, of necessity, force them to cable, where the atmosphere is far friendlier and the creative environment more conducive to doing original work.

Facial Recognition Software Hits the Big Time

If this is what's possible in the private sector, I can only imagine what's possible elsewhere.

clipped from www.nytimes.com VIDEOSURF’S technology works in part by memorizing components of faces, Dr. Sharon said. It stores away images of Britney Spears’ eyes and cheekbones, for instance, in its collective memory, so it can recognize an image of her despite changes in light. Such expert perception means that the technology can do what many people can’t, he said. “The machine easily distinguishes between Tina Fey and Sarah Palin,” he said. “As videos get longer,” he said, “it’s harder and harder to find the one minute you want to see.” Click on any one of these images, like the face of a guest on Mr. Stewart’s show, or the face of John Oliver, one of Mr. Stewart’s correspondents, and go directly to that part of the video. Users can also select snippets within a video and send them by e-mail to friends.

Rove Pushed for Hollywood Propaganda Abroad

No surprise there.

clipped from www.nytimes.com Hilary Rosen, the former chairwoman of the Recording Industry Association of America, who was also present at the post-9/11 meetings, said that Mr. Rove and other White House officials were looking for the kind of support Hollywood gave the United States during World War II. “They wanted the music industry, the movie industry, the TV industry to produce propaganda,” she said. “Rove was putting a lot of pressure on us.” In 2003, the domestic box office brought in $9.2 billion for American studios, and foreign countries generated $10.9 billion, according to the Motion Picture Association of America. In 2007, domestic was $9.6 billion, while international rose to more than $17 billion. “But then you ask the follow-up questions and you see that American culture remains attractive, that American values remain attractive. Which is the opposite of what the president has said — that they hate us for who we are and what we believe in.”

Repost :: "You okay?"

.:. Faux Press .:.



So many scripts have characters say, "You okay?"

Gah.

Kindly invent some other way to inquire.

Please.

I'm begging, now.

More later.

Also filed under "Political Commentary".

Formats available: MP3 Audio (.mp3)

Tags: faux_press, commentary, mashup, podcast

Tags: Faux Press Art Metaphrasty

Haskell Wexler's "Who Needs Sleep?"

Must research where I can get my hands on this film.

Ah-ha! One may order the DVD HERE.

Current job "City Island" has been darned civilized, I'm guessing primarily due to the producers' and director's inherent humanity, and less so, budgetary concerns, since by our contract after 14 hours the crew goes into triple time.

[Film's web site]
[Haskell Wexler's Blog]


Tags: Faux Press Art Metaphrasty

Fallen

Fallen
Originally uploaded by Jannie-Jan

Working in Manhattan. Fallen paper boxes.


--

http://fauxpress.blogspot.com
- Taken at 3:54 PM on March 22, 2008 - cameraphone upload by ShoZu

Stuff I'm Thinking About This Morning

[Craigs List Ad]
Gathering a brain trust for brainstorming a North New Jersey Interweb Broadcast of local news.

[Faux Press FreeSound Uploads]
Enjoying the positive response to recent sound effects uploads.

[Show in a Box]
Contemplate moving over to a WordPress / ShowinaBox site.

[Noodle Scars]
Bonnie & Lan are here through Monday.

[Local North New Jersey News - on the Interweb]
Research.

[$3,500 Video Résumé - NY Times]
More research.

[$3,500 Résumé in Action]
And more research. Not that impressed with what's up there. We can do much better.

“We live in an on-demand world where people want the most detailed information to make a decision, as well as the ability to make that decision quickly,” said Nicholas Murphy, 27, the co-founder of WorkBlast.com. The site, which made its debut last week, aims to help users create online video résumés. It also allows employers to videotape themselves so they can advertise to prospective employees.

The trainer Dr. Rawitt hired, Bill McGowan, is a former anchor, reporter and producer at ABC, and he specializes in the visumé— a two-and-a-half- minute visual résumé. He has created about a dozen in the last year, at a charge of $3,500 each.

Tags: Faux Press Art Metaphrasty

Faux Press :: Live @ Mogulus

Tags: Faux Press Art Metaphrasty

Results of Vloggersation w/Mike Meiser

In The Know: Are America's Rich Falling Behind The Super-Rich?

Thanks, Mike.



Tags: Faux Press Art Metaphrasty

Bill Moyers' Podcast :: Whoo-whoo!

Moyers is a poet/journalist/political analyst. Aaaah. He's also the real faux press.

Not watching television, I missed his PBS thing when it was on. And then, he got canned or left or both, so I bought his books.

Now with the podcast, I may hear his poetical analysis of the world as we wish we knew it.

You may view videos of Bill Moyers Journal online at PBS, HERE.

"The closer you are to power, the further you are from the truth."

Every now and again, I say a prayer to whomever's in charge: please let Bill Moyers be President.

Here's the feed: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/podcast.xml

[source]


Tags: Faux Press Art Metaphrasty

It's the End of YouTube, For Sure

It's the end of YouTube, I tell you. And all the rest who find it fun to be or play with the 'Big Boys.' Yeah. It's all fun and games until the Big Boy hits you over the head with a baseball bat and walks away with your muse, your very-popular significant other: pop culture.

Big Boys are ruthless that way.

I too have noticed a plethora of videos removed for TOS violations, not least of which a Hillary Clinton presidential announcement video scraped from CNN.

This is most certainly NOT the end of user-created, user-mediated media. Not by a longshot.

With copyright-based systems springing up all over, it will become increasingly more challenging for content creators and their audiences to create and find interesting works, but we shan't allow video culture to die just because we can't legally partake of popular culture.

No-siree-bob.

My advice? Don't be a pussy; take a few more steps back from the popular center of the walled garden.

• Live, consume and create from the edges
  
• Support those Big Boys who open the gate to the IP garden with your dollars, eyeballs, links, and content
• Spend lots of time listening to Creative Commons-licensed music
  

These things will require more of you.

Pay more.



Tags: Faux Press


Revlog :: PBS' Frontline Addresses the War on Journalism

Frontline's recently-aired News War is an important piece of documentary work that features (among many others) indie journalist Josh Wolf.

In Federal prison on civil contempt charges for having refused to turn over raw video footage of a 2005 G8 demonstration that turned violent, Mr. Wolf is the longest-jailed journalist in American history.

Frontline writes on its site:

"In a four-hour special, News War, FRONTLINE examines the political, cultural, legal, and economic forces challenging the news media today and how the press has reacted in turn. Through interviews with key figures in print, broadcast and electronic media over the past four decades -- and with unequaled, behind-the-scenes access to some of today's most important news organizations, FRONTLINE traces the recent history of American journalism, from the Nixon administration's attacks on the media to the post-Watergate popularity of the press, to the new challenges presented by the war on terror and other global forces now changing -- and challenging -- the role of the press in our society."

Great to see Josh's fight / plight on television; you can see Parts I and II now, but eveutually, the whole show will be available online, and in Quicktime format if you wish.

HERE is the link to the enclosed media.

Josh Wolf Legal Defense Fund

Don't want to use Paypal?

You can send a check
to Josh's Mom instead:

Liz Wolf Spada
P.O. Box 2235
Wrightwood, CA 92397

I've sent Josh some money. What scares me almost as much as the fact that Josh is in prison, is that I'm scared that having supported Josh's cause exposes me to personal attack from the government.

Courage.

Tags: Faux Press Metaphrasty

Revlog :: The Carol and Steve Show - Episode #32

Play Quicktime Version

Photo (cc 2.0) by Steve Garfield

This revlog of The Carol and Steve Show Episode #32 is a pleasant walk down memory lane, inspired by revisiting the Vlog Press Kit, a site I "maintain" mostly by virtue of an automated collection of dynamically updated sidebar links to press coverage of vlog-issues. (Here's a post in which I explain how to do this.)

Revisited the Press Kit because I intended to test the Blogger Beta to Alpha upgrade. Upgrade angst. Yeah. If you've ever done it you'll understand the gastric uproar that accompanies the act of pressing the 'Save Template Changes' button. The Vlog Press Kit is my least-visited site, so it made perfect sense. Still, I worried that upgrading one would upgrade all. Thank God that is not the case.

A podcast that addresses this darned-near-seamless, simple Blogger upgrade process will follow later today or tomorrow. Blogger evidently did it right. And I'm loving the new, more-streamlined look.

Memory lane has only two steps:

• July, 2005. A conversation with Steve Garfield about advertising.
• August, 2005. The first ever paid vlog-ad appears at the end of the enclosed "Carol and Steve Show" vlog.

Do you forgive me for being a little proud of being the first human being ever to pay for a vlog ad?

Folks who know me well are not shy to characterize me first and foremost as a pioneer.

Yeah.

A role increasingly less easy to play in an ever-more-crowded world.

Still, it can be done.

Again, playing with money.

Art and Commerce.

Money-as-canvas is often as not a nerve-wracking business.

Difficult to document, but not impossible.

Money-as-canvas is ephemeral and elusive.

The more potential levels of understanding of a work of art, the better. I liken my particular flavor of art to 3-D chess.

Hubris? Arrogance?

Yeah.

But also extreme humility.

"Pay more."

Tags: Faux Press Advertising Art and Commerce

Media Mashup :: The Poetry of Political Speech

Click to Play

Playing with the smartest guy not in the room, Bill Moyers, and the unremarkable footage of the Dems' response to the State of the Union address.

Formats available: Quicktime (.mov), Flash Video (.flv)

Tags: faux_press, media criticism, politics, poetry, mashup, community, collaboration

JeffJarvis on Oldstream Media Fear :: Society 2.1

Earlier this week I talked about how folks in the movie business justifiably find personal media frightening. Jeff Jarvis writes in his Buzz Machine blog:

"...The realization that the internet is really the means for us to gang up on them hasn’t fully dawned on them yet. In that sense, I’ll bet that my new Davos pal Michael Dell is ahead of the rest, for he faced the gang, the coalescing critical mass of connections that the internet enabled.

"So let them think that interactivity and social networks are ways for us to amuse ourselves while they still wield the power. They will wake up one day and realize they no longer own the world and can no longer look down at it from the top of the mountain. See Alan Rusbridger on one of the Davos media sessions, where the head of what can still be called the most powerful journalistic voice in the world looked up to find himself facing a just-out-of-college kid who reportedly turned down $1.5 billion for his company and who understands this new world in his soul; it’s not the money that should make the moguls jealous but that understanding. Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook explained to the media moguls that the job of media — and, for that matter, government, business, and technology — is to bring people together to find distributed and elegant solutions to their problems. That is not web 3.0. That’s society 2.1. And we’ve only just begun."

If big media - oldstream media - begins this transition in fear, the means and ends won't be pretty. Read your history, media moguls, and embrace the future rather than fight it. The mp3 floated down the Faux Press RSS pipe today is the introduction to Lawrence Lessig's "Free Culture", a book read chapter-by-chapter in its entirety by a host of net geeks and made available free, HERE. Download a pdf of the book - also free - HERE.

The introduction to the tome herewith transmitted is read by Andrew Dubber.

How may I say this? Control. Power. Hierarchy. Competition. Bah.

Cooperation is an equally successful strategy for success, and it leaves neither dead bodies nor broken spirits in its wake.

Tags: Faux Press Media Criticism

Attack on the Blogosphere

Discredit where discredit is due, from the New York Times.

Feeding Frenzy for a Big Story, Even if It’s False

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK Published: January 29, 2007

WASHINGTON, Jan. 28 — Jeffrey T. Kuhner, whose Web site published the first anonymous smear of the 2008 presidential race, is hardly the only editor who will not reveal his reporters’ sources. What sets him apart is that he will not even disclose the names of his reporters.

Dangerous territory here. Disturbing news.

The blog- and vlogospheres must maintain higher standards of veracity and integrity than the MSM or we'll be dragged down with the MSM as it sinks, and there will be nothing left floating in the aftermath but the crap we've already got.

Tags: Faux Press Media Opinion

Afraid of Media? Yeah.

Click to Play

I get how some folks find the advent of cellphone video frightening; it's a brave new media world.

Allow me introduce you to Ged. He's remarkable. Moreover, he believes in me as a sound person. For that confidence I am deeply grateful.

The crew he put together got their asses kicked all over Manhattan's West Side Highway. But we were happy to do it for him. He's that kind of leader.

Furthermore, Ged keeps his head under pressure. I aspire to that.

Music "Cash, Money, Sex" by Phoebe Dunne.