Program scripts from week of November 12, 2012
My name is Jay Phillippi and I've spent my life in and around the media. TV, radio, the movies and more. I love them, and I hate them and I always have an opinion. Call this the View from the Phlipside.
Just Lie
I’ve talked before about the whole question of safety online for our essential information. The entire digital business model is really based on getting as much of that information and either using it directly or selling it. The problem is trying to control access to that information while still enjoying the joys of the World Wide Web. Folks over in England may have come up with the simplest way to achieve that.
Lie.
No seriously, an Internet security officer for the British government advised people at a major conference over there to only give your actual information to highly trusted sites like those from the government. To everyone else? Lie like a rug.
Andy Smith, listed as an Internet security chief for the Cabinet office, advised everyone to tell social networking sites lies about themselves. The rationale is that while a limited number of sites absolutely need your correct information everybody else is a potential danger and should be treated as such.
The push back was almost immediate. It came from all of the business folk who make their living on the web. If all our social networking info is fake their ability to use that information for advertising purposes. While I understand their concern let’s say it’s not first on my list of thoughts.
In a world where online predators can be a very serious problem this really seems like a simple solution. As with any simple solution it turns out there are a few bumps along the road. I’m a little leery of actually advocating that people start creating fake identities on the web because that comes with its own set of problems. It also means that those “trusted” sites to whom we do entrust our real details will need to be hyper secure. Right now a thief has lots of places to try and grab your info. If they know that all your info is confined to just a handful of sites you can assume that the assault on those sites will go up exponentially. Which means I need to trust the government to do a really good job with their Internet security. Let’s just say that I’m a little doubtful on that subject.
For the moment I think I’ll keep my security to myself and my lying to a necessary minimum.
Please Don't
It used to be that you never saw the names of products or even businesses in the movies. The movie makers would create fake names for pretty much everything. There were always exceptions, like when Macy’s appeared in the movie “The Miracle on 34th Street” but more often than not it was some version of Wile E. Coyote’s ACME Corporation. Then came the days of the paid product placement. Companies would pay the movie makers to actually have their logo or company name to appear clearly and openly on the screen. And in those early days there was not even an attempt to disguise it. You would get a long slow pan over the Pacific Bell logo on a phone booth or have a Pepsi can placed prominently in the scene. Over the years the product placements have gotten a little subtler.
So I was interested in the product placement issue that has arisen around the Denzel Washington movie “Flight”. Washington’s character is a high functioning alcoholic airline pilot. His plane gets into a mid-air catastrophe from which he miraculously saves it and all the folks on board. The problem is that in the post crash physical the level of alcohol in his blood becomes an issue. And that’s the real issue in the dispute.
The character is seen regularly drinking Budweiser and Stolichnaya vodka among other drinks. The manufacturers of the two alcoholic beverages have asked Paramount Pictures to remove or obscure the logos of their products in all future versions of the movie. The reason is simple. Both companies have spent a lot of time and money supporting responsible drinking campaigns. What’s shown in the movie is exactly what they DON’T want connected with the images of their products. From their point of view this is negative product placement.
The real problem is that Paramount doesn’t really have to do it. The Trademark laws don’t give this kind of protection. The products are available world wide and are being used in the manner intended even if over used in this case. It’ll be interesting to see what Paramount’s final decision will be.
And of course on the other hand Heineken paid millions of dollars to have their beer featured prominently in the new James Bond movie. To each their own I guess.
Snark
Last week someone on Facebook accused me of being snarky. Moi? OK I’ll be honest and say it’s not the first time. In fact I’m not the only one out there. I’ve heard people refer to this as the “Age of Snark”. It’s a word that I toss around with fair abandon. But it dawned on me this time that I’d never really looked into the word itself. Since our snark is expressed primarily over digital media I thought I’d take the time right now to do just that.
First we look it up in some online dictionaries. And it’s right there. Most of them seem to agree that the word comes from the combination of the words “snide” and “remark” which gives us snark. The definition of the word itself talks about remarks involving sarcasm or malice. I’m going to come back to that. Now the history of the word (its etymology) is a little unclear it appears that the word has been used in the contemporary understanding going back to at least 1906. But of course that’s not the earliest usage. That probably goes to The Rev. Charles Dodgeson, better known to most of us as Lewis Carroll, the author of “Alice in Wonderland”. Among his other works was “The Hunting of the Snark” a nonsense poem about a fictional beast with a made up name. Curiously the name snark has been used a lot since then. There have been missiles, planes, ships, alien races all named snark. There’s even a Corporal Snark in Joseph Heller’s novel “Catch-22”.
But the kind of snark we’re interested in today is the kind involving sarcasm or malice. And I think that provides the dividing line on snark itself. There’s good snark and bad snark. The bad snark is the kind grounded in malice. It’s meant just to be mean and hurtful. That kind of snark is all too common out on the web. And it’s what gives snark a bad reputation.
The other kind of snark, based in sarcasm, has some value I think. If you went back to the days of the Algonquin Round Table, a gathering of wise cracking intellectuals in New York City in the early 20th Century, I think you’d find snark in its finest form. Dorothy Parker would feel right at home cranking out beautifully turned snark all day long. While sarcasm can cut and be quite painful let’s say that it’s a surgical cut where malice based snark is just a blunt instrument.
None of which is going to make me less snarky. But it may push me to raise the quality of my snark.
Call that the View From the Phlipside
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