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The website “PopMatters” seeks essays (1,200 to 3,000 words, usually) about any aspect of popular culture, present or past. (If you are interested in pitching a review of some specific current work or performance, please contact the appropriate reviews editor.) We prefer careful analysis of the chosen subject matter with the intention of supporting an original thesis; we aren’t particularly interested in articles that merely want to promote their subject. An assessment of what ideological work a given pop culture phenomenon performs (i.e. what has allowed something to become popular, what’s at stake in its popularity besides money, how it is situated in a historical or geographical context, etc.) is especially welcome. Ideally essays will draw on sophisticated interpretive strategies derived from a theoretically informed point of view but will be presented for a general reader in lively, accessible language.
For details, click here.
An article on Ars Technica raises perplexing issues about privacy, government intrusion and warrantless searches in the era of the iPhone and the Blackberry.
From “Editor and Publisher” magazine:
NEW YORK Already the media have found at least two dozen angles to approach the sudden death of actor Heath Ledger in New York City today. The Los Angeles Times entertainment blog, Web Scout, used the occasion to look at the way the news emerged, almost in “real time.”
The Times now reports on its site, pointing to the danger, “that preliminary reports that pills were found scattered around Ledger’s body” were “inaccurate.”
Here is part of the posting at www.latimes. com :
If you watched the story of Heath Ledger’s death explode chaotically across the Internet, with facts, errors, inconsistencies and confusions flying every which way, you may have concluded that in the new digital media’s race to break stories in minutes, accuracy has been left in the dust.
Chief among the media’s switchbacks was the early non-fact that Ledger’s death had taken place at the New York apartment of Mary-Kate Olsen. Celebrity news site TMZ.com and even the New York Times’ City Room blog reported this piece of misinformation before they unreported it.
Importantly, however, neither the New York Times nor TMZ got it wrong. It was the NYPD spokesman who had the story mixed up — the media were simply parroting incorrect information.
When the spokesman later corrected himself, the sites rushed to update the story, but readers were critical of the changes.
“TMZ is in such a rush to break the news,” one commenter wrote, echoing dozens of others, “that they are usually wrong first.”
But here’s the problem: Stories have never arrived to the world fully formed or vetted. Journalists have generally had hours — not minutes or seconds — to craft a story from the blast wave of facts and factoids that comes in the wake of a bombshell.
What people are seeing now is an old-fashioned process — reporting — as it unfolds in real time. If the public wants its information as raw and immediate as possible, it’ll have to get used to a few missteps along the way, and maybe even approach breaking stories with a bit of skepticism, like a good reporter would.
Here’s a slightly different perspective from Columbia Journalism Review.
From Ars Technica:
After commissioning a 2005 study from LEK Consulting that showed collegiate file-swappers were responsible for 44 percent of movie studio “losses” to piracy, the MPAA then used the report it bought to bludgeon Congress into considering legislation to address this massive problem. Now the MPAA admits that the report’s conclusions weren’t even close to being right; collegiate piracy accounts for only 15 percent of “losses.” Oops. And that’s assuming you believe the rest of the data.
Read more here.
“Inside Higher Ed” has another take on the revelation.
Write a new word in the blank pages of your dictionary: “Britney.” Noun. Definition: A woman’s sexual organ, as in “Her skirt was so short that when she sat down you could see her ‘Britney.’” Etymology: Paparazzi photographs of singer Britney Spears’ nether regions revealed as unclothed as she exited, ungracefully, from automobiles. When I read that, I laughed. Admit it – you did too. But I was immediately embarrassed. Laughter is a wholly inappropriate response to the tragedy that is Britney Spears. Nothing that happens to the talented singer seems too gruesome, too disgusting, too disgraceful, for the media to keep it out of the printed page or off the air.
If you accept the argument that the media creates celebrities, then the Spears case has to be seen as that of a parent eating its own child. Is our fascination with celebrity really an addiction that can be sated only by devouring the last drop of blood from the cherished star? What amount of restraint should the media exercise in reporting on the failings and peccadilloes of the “beautiful people?” Writing on the Spears situation, Roy Peter Clark of the Poynter Institute says journalists must look beyond the titillations of the moment to find the teaching moment:
And here, for journalists, is the crux of the problem: While we linger beyond imagination on the dissolution of one young celebrity, mental illness is an almost invisible story in the American news media. I came to this conclusion after reading the book, “Crazy: A Father’s Search Through America’s Mental Health Madness,” a Pulitzer finalist. In it, Pete Earley, an experienced journalist, reveals the terrible truths that should be on the pages of America’s newspapers every day: that we have not progressed as far as we think from Shakespeare’s day when the mentally ill prisoners of Bedlam Hospital were put on display as public entertainment.
Clark continues:
Is there a way to cover the Britney Spears story responsibly? I’m no Puritan when it comes to gossip, and I’ve grown up reading the tabloids, but there is clearly a danger zone, when life and health are at stake, when the best thing the press can do is back off. That time for Spears is probably now. Avoiding the daily soap opera does not require journalists to abstain from critical and analytical pieces on celebrity, addiction, gender and mental illness. And perhaps the troubles of a particular celebrity might be an occasion to turn the camera away to the less intriguing but more important cases of mental illness in our own communities.
To read Clark’s complete commentary, go here.
If you’re an average Internet user, you get 40 spam e-mails a day offering some device or pill that will produce a longer penis, or bigger breasts. Aren’t you tired to having to deal with such crap EVERY DAY?! EVERY HOUR? It’s easy to lose your perspective with such an onslaught of garbage. Was the Internet really invented for this? One blogger reminds us to keep our sense of humor about it all.
Here’s a sign there’s not near enough entertainment venues in your community. A story in the St. Petersburg Times today relates:
“The town of Hollis, N.H., has found it necessary to limit its citizens to a 30-minute stop at the town dump. The New York Times reports that the dump has become a sort of social club, where friends catch up while unloading their garbage. ‘There’s no joy greater than coming to the dump on Saturday morning,’ said resident Ted Crane. Peter Band, a former town selectman, says there should be no limit, but if one is necessary, it should be no less than 90 minutes. ‘It takes me at least an hour and a half to empty my truck,’ he said. ‘It’s tyranny.’ A big part of the problem seems to be the ’still good’ table, which is basically a sophisticated dumpster dive where people put functioning stuff they no longer want on a table, and people wait and wait for something worth swooping in to claim. ‘They’re here all day long,’ said Peter Carroll, ‘like seagulls waiting for someone to drop a piece of food.’”
Evidently, the residents of Hollis have never heard of yard sales.
A story on our local Channel 8 News a few days ago still has me riled. The station’s investigative reporter, Steve Andrews, talked to Hillsborough County Commission Chairman James Norman about whether requirements for buying art for publicly-funded buildings should be eliminated. County regs there require the county to allocate 1 percent of a building’s construction costs to the purchase and installation of art for the site. Public art in Pinellas County is paid for by the Penny for Pinellas tax. The background of the story was the financial struggles county governments could have because of Tallahassee-mandated reductions in property taxes.
Picking on public art projects as a means of cutting county budget expenses is like complaining about the janitor’s salary when the CEO gets $40 million a year. Eliminating the 1 percent of public funds for art will do absolutely nothing to deal with the real budget problems local governments have and anticipate having, depending on what happens in Tallahassee. While the impact of eliminating such funding would be minimal to the average county budget, the lives of Floridians and anyone who visits here would be all the more impoverished.
Art in public places dresses up the often bland architecture which contains the workings of our civic life. Public art provides a spot of beauty, and gives us something to talk about, to think about, and perhaps just laugh about.
Public art also is a signal to visitors of our community’s values. It says we value beauty over mediocrity. It says we are intelligent and contemplative. It says we tolerate, if not embrace, diversity. It says we are a community of individuals, not automatons. It says “creative people live here,” something to be sought after, ala Richard Florida’s book.
Commissioner Norman said he would fund public art when it brings art to Hillsborough County. I have to ask Commissioner Norman — how long has it been since you left your house? The Tampa Bay area each year hosts two of the finest art shows in the state, if not the Southeast: Gasparilla in Tampa, and Mainsail in St. Petersburg. Seemingly every community in Pinellas County has some sort of art festival at least once a year. Galleries here house works from world-class artists — the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg and the Leepa-Ratner in Palm Harbor. Notable painters such as James Rosenquist and James Michaels, to name only two, live and work here. The presence of these brick and blood notables attracts lesser known artists to this area. In turn, this convocation of national, regional, and local artists attracts tourists and art afficionados to the area, where they spend money then go back home and tell their friends about the nice things they saw.
And we’ve only talked about the visual arts. The area also is home to writers, authors and actors too numerous to count. Fine performances go on virtually 365 days a year at the many performance venues in the area. I’ll put the facilities of the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center or Ruth Eckerd Hall up against any Broadway theater any day.
There is a long tradition in Western culture of publicly funded arts. Much of the art that fills the public squares of Europe or the halls of the world’s museums was commissioned by the state. Commissioner Norman might think he could save a few bucks by eliminating public art, but in the long term, we would all be much poorer for it.
