This Valentine's Day, I'm Breaking Up with MSNBC

Super Bowl Ads 2008 - Overt Racism Awards

Unilever Gets Caught

Shameless Self-Promotion

The Zit-Free Life Is the Good Life!

The Voice of the Next Generation

USTroopsTube

Resonation

Watch This!

Update ... It IS Democracy!

If you haven't noted already, the person who created the Hillary mashup ad has owned up.  HuffingtonPost.com has it all, including a blog by the creator himself, which is a must read!  Here are my favorite parts mostly because they warm my heart and affirm my hopes from yesterday's post:

"I made the 'Vote Different' ad because I wanted to express my feelings about the Democratic primary, and because I wanted to show that an individual citizen can affect the process. There are thousands of other people who could have made this ad, and I guarantee that more ads like it--by people of all political persuasions--will follow."

"This shows that the future of American politics rests in the hands of ordinary citizens."

"This ad was not the first citizen ad, and it will not be the last. The game has changed."
 

Now This Is Democracy!

Sorry about the blogging hiatus.  Life, well work actually, gets in the way too often these days.  Anyway, I'm behind in all things blog-worthy, so I'll cut to the chase.

You've all seen it by now.  The spoof of the famous 1984 Apple ad that supports Obama and "mashes up" Hillary Clinton.  If not, see it where it all began a couple of weeks ago, on YouTube.  While you're there, you can now see the response, another 1984 spoof, this time with Obama getting smashed.

There are a few big lessons I'm learning about the state of American politics and culture from this incident. 

First, people spend too much time on computers, both making video spoofs and watching them, myself included. 

But more importantly, I think we might be able to learn that this really is democracy in action.  This is what YouTube could and should be used for.  When someone, and that someone who posted the original spoof remains a mystery, can make media messages with a quality just as good as any ad on television and can broadcast it on a platform that receives more audience eyes per day than the nightly news, then a shift might be possible.  It might not take millions or hundreds of millions to launch a campaign if you can make a website, start an effective blog, and do press conferences and TV ads via YouTube.  Of course, you'd have to eventually get noticed by mainstream media in order to drive traffic, but if this 1984 ad can do it, a cleverly launched campaign could too. 

This is citizen media.  The democratization of technology has made mass communication possible for anyone with a laptop and some editing software.  Heck, even a dorky college prof at a small Midwestern university can speak to the world about her opinions these days!

 Anyway, I think the mainstream media is missing the real story here.  Maybe because it wants to.  Heavens knows it can afford anymore competition.  But Clinton and Obama seem to be getting it, at least for now.  Clinton, who claims not to have seen the ad yet (yeah, right), told NY1 in an interview that "anything that drives interest in these campaigns and get people who otherwise are not at all interested in politics, I think that's pretty good."  Obama was a bit more sophisicated and direct in his comments, although he denys that his campaign generated the ad, "It's democratization of the process," he said on Larry King Live.

Instead, the media are focused on the "who dunnit" story.  The lastest is that the GOP did it.  Blah!  I hope not.  Besides, the GOP doesn't use Macs, let alone understand the brand history.  Anyway, I prefer to believe some Obama supporter somewhere with a sense of humor and a little technological talent decided to speak up.  I like that version much better, for the reasons noted above.  Either that or my other best guess is the Mac guy from the current Apple ads did it.  He's got the spunk and the moxy, although his PC counterpart is always much funnier - maybe that's why the ad is so serious.

In the meantime, I'm trying to decide which of my friends or colleagues ought to launch their political campaign via the web soon.  I smell a campaign manager job in this for me!



 

"VAGINA!"

I have hardly any time this morning, but you have to know about this if you don't already:  Three high school women in upstate New York were suspended earlier this week for saying the word "vagina" during an open mic night at their school.  They were reading the famous "my short skirt" excerpt from Eve Ensler's "Vagina Monologues." 

Read about the incident here.  Watch the three women, a member of the school board, and Ensler herself on the Today Show this morning here.  You'll also be able to watch Meredith Veira continue to drive me insane.  If this is her attempt at unbiased morning journalism, I wish she'd just stop it.  First, we don't do "objective" news in this country anymore.  Second, her devil's advocate conversativism that has led her to ask, "Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?" during a segment about college women and casual sex earlier and then to say, "Some people are sensitive to the word, Eve" on the show today, is quite disturbing.  I'll take the Meredith from The View (sorta like "Jenny from the block," I think) anyday over this NBC puppet.  Ugh!

Anyway, say "VAGINA" today in support of these women.  I can't believe we're still having this argument.  

Please note, a male student said the word "fuck" during the same open mic.  He wasn't suspended.  Discuss.
 

The Return of the Chastity Belt?

Of late, there has been a plethora of media attetion given to what have been termed "bad girls."  Between the Britney/Paris/Lindsay criticisms sits the unending coverage of the new book by Laura Sessions Stepp, titled Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love, and Lose at Both.  

Sessions Stepp joins the chorus of alarmist reactions to a generation of women who are experiencing casual sex in the ways men have enjoyed for years, without commitment, without regret.  Sessions Stepp herself has strong roots in feminism as does Ariel Levy, author of Female Chauvanist Pigs and one of my media heroes, Bill Maher who is generally as liberal and left as it gets.  Unfortunately, Maher in a recent LA Times column wrote about how these "crazy" women might damage the chances of getting a female president in the White House (something he supports).  And while it was said in sarcasm and rather in support of women gaining political control, his idea that we need to "sweep up the usual suspects" and hide them away until November 2008, too closely echoes the cries of other alarmists writing about this phenomenon, even if he is sort of joking.

The Today Show ran a segement with Sessions Stepp this week in which Meredith Viera, another self-proclaimed feminist, feared for women who are having casual sex, and CNN.com ran a piece today about the "sex crisis" on college campuses.  The alarmists all seem to want one thing ... to get women back under control.  They either advocate for women to exercise self-control or for us to all help them realize modesty is a good thing.

This, my friends, is frightening.  How far have we come?  Not very if this is the reaction to women finally having sexual choice and freedom.  

I'm much more inclined to agree with Salon writer Tracy Clark-Flory who writes of Session Stepp's book, "the book sounds like a '50s-style handbook on appropriate femininity, juiced up with some hip-wit-it slang"; Kathy Dobie who wrote the review for the Washington Post and said, "The author resurrects the ugly, old notion of sex as something a female gives in return for a male's good behavior, and she imagines the female body as a thing that can be tarnished by too much use"; and finally, the witty Meghan O'Rourke for Slate who noted, "For the first time in ages, young women are actually concentrating, in some fashion, more on their work and on their female friendships than on love and sex, and many do feel empowered by this."

Please let these voices and ideas rein and not those of alarism and control that the press is currently courting! 

My copy of Sessions Stepp book arrived in the mail today.  It's research.  I'm presenting on this topic later this month, but I do feel bad adding to her sales. 

This Is American Justice

If you haven't seen the footage from the cameras-in-the-courtroom proceedings in the Anna Nicole Smith hearing about the custody of her body and paternity of her daughter, you're really missing out.  Judge Larry Seidlin gave quite the performance.  He laughed; he cried; he did stand-up.  If you can't tell, his grand audition provided those watching with his true "range."  He can be witty and biting.  He can be sympathetic and emotional.  Perfectly done.  But only perfect if your aim is to land a television career.  Certainly not your aim if your focus is on the law. 

Last week's episode of Real Time with Bill Maher joked about the animated judge during a debate about cameras in courtrooms.  Some argued the judge had been "playing to the cameras" hoping this national attention would give him his big break, that break of course being that he'd become a bonafide TV judge.  As I watched Real Time, I thought, "No, surely not.  Why make a mockery of a case that is so huge and so public?"  Clearly, I was wrong.

News broke yesterday that Seidlen has been offered a TV spot on CBS.  I heard it on Countdown with Keith Olbermann but it's also on CBS's blogs today.  My heart sank.

Couple this with the news of a new study saying that the current college generation is so narcissistic that it could actually harm the world and you gotta wonder how much lower we can possibly go. 

This Is Why the Snickers Ad Isn't Funny, People!