tv = agressive behavior in children. Danny: What was the Donner Party?
Jack: They were a party of settlers in covered-wagon times. They got snowbound one winter in the mountains. They had to resort to cannibalism in order to stay alive.
Danny: You mean they ate each other up?
Jack: They had to, in order to survive.
Wendy: Jack...
Danny: Don't worry, Mom. I know all about cannibalism. I saw it on TV.
Jack: See, it's OK. He saw it on the television.
posted by tiaka
on Jan 15, 2001 -
5 comments
I was reading this article about the
new breed of modern airships when I stumbled over the line "Not your grandfather's airship". That started me off thinking about the "Not your father's X"
meme that's been part of the journalistic background noise for a while now. It seems to me to evoking something oedipal, a male child's revulsion of his father and his father's way of doing things. It's usually juxtaposed against technology or at least things that aren't all that old to begin with. Does anyone know who used it first? A
quick search of Google reveals it in everything from "
Cuba: not your father's stagnant nation" to "
XML: Not your father's HTML". Anyone got any favorites?
posted by lagado
on Jan 4, 2001 -
19 comments
CueCats Held Hostage! A motley mix of left-wingers and computer geeks plans to march on the offices of the
Dallas Morning News this weekend, armed with pet carriers filled with CueCats, in order to protest what they see as pro-GOP slants in the paper's reporting. If the paper doesn't agree to their demands for more left-favorable reporting, the CueCats will be executed! Why CueCats? Because the company that owns the
News has been plugging CueCats like crazy. (second item on the page)
posted by aaron
on Dec 14, 2000 -
3 comments
Time Digital 2026: Normally I wouldn't get too excited about Time Digital, but this issue was edited by SF writer Bruce Sterling and features such future niceties as sewerbots and organically grown homes. Now if we could only get him to guest-edit Family PC...
posted by mecran01
on Dec 6, 2000 -
0 comments
That dude that's been doing the Gore vs. Bush graphics for CNN has
outdone himself. It looks like Gore is actually trying to bite Bush's head... Egads!
posted by Niccola Six
on Nov 29, 2000 -
16 comments
Is this annoying to anyone else? I usually get most of my news from either ABCnews.com or CNN.com, then this morning I noticed that every time I load ABCnews, an annoying ad banner pops up for AT&T over the browser toolbar. I know that big sites have used popups before (usually as announcements or something else), but an ad popup on such a major site seems like an even further blurring of that line between media and advertising. I guess I'm switching news sources.
posted by almostcool
on Nov 28, 2000 -
18 comments
We the Public Press.. In order to form a more perfect newsmedia, establish reader distrust, avoid few legalities, provide for the common deafndumb, promote the grocery store impulse buy kiosks, and secure the Blessings of Boldfaced Lying to ourselves and our Readership, do completely avoid and ignore this annoying Code of Ethics...
posted by ZachsMind
on Nov 19, 2000 -
0 comments
Flutterby wonders what the difference is between those who have faith in media and those who see them as "an unending stream of barely edited press-releases."
posted by Mo Nickels
on Oct 6, 2000 -
5 comments
Superfluous and unnecessary. The :Cue Cat
reader has insinuated itself into the very fabric of the
Dallas Morning News, promising links to "expanded content" and "special promotions" by using this $50 future garage sale item. Is there a real need for bar code scanners in the average household? Or is :Cue Cat merely artificially creating a need for their services?
posted by ethmar
on Oct 3, 2000 -
13 comments
What if they had a school shooting and no one reported it? *sigh* I watched the typical US evening news broadcasts hoping to see some coverage of this event, but there was none. I don't want to believe that the reason it went underreported was because it happened at an "inner city" school and the media has the perception that "those people kill each other all the time, what's one more?" but the small, dark, pessimistic part of myself is starting to believe I'm right.
posted by likorish
on Sep 26, 2000 -
10 comments
Democratizing the Mass Media -- A way to finance
Metafilter without banner ads: -- "Under Baker's proposal, the government would grant every adult citizen an entitlement to direct the U.S. Treasury to allocate a specific sum of money (let's say $150 per person per year) to a non-profit communications organization, or portions thereof to organizations, of his or her choice. The allocation could work something like the current taxpayer check-off to political parties, except that non-taxpayers would be entitled to participate as well as taxpayers -- just pick-up a form at the post office or at the ballot box, fill it out, and hand it in."
posted by johnb
on Sep 21, 2000 -
23 comments
Where Are The Hollywood Conservative? Does a liberal cabal of Hollywood executives destroy the careers of conservative performers? Or, is the conservative philosophy (opposed to change, antiquated morals...) just too boring for artists and performers?
posted by Doug
on Sep 12, 2000 -
23 comments
Seattle's "Alternative Weekly,"
The Stranger has no actual articles in it this week. Instead, they replaced all of the words in the articles that would normaly be there with
a novella. All the normal formatting is there, right down to the letters to the editor and the little news bits. Really clever idea, and from what little I've read so far, a neat story too. Unfortunately the clever layout doesn't translate to the Web site, but the story does just fine.
posted by endquote
on Aug 17, 2000 -
5 comments
Public Broadcasting Gets Funky The CBC (sort of like NPR, but Canadian, federally-funded and with TV too) has a stealth project, 120seconds. They are planning to embrace new media in a big way and this is their start: stories, music, film, experiments. Not bad.
posted by sylloge
on Aug 11, 2000 -
3 comments
John Stossel Reprimanded but not Fired by ABC - It is not exactly
new information that Stossel has a habit of distorting facts and misleading the public. However, in this case he apparently thought he could get away with fabricating two complete sets of lab results related to food safety. Willingly disseminating false health information strikes me as a serious breach of journalistic ethics. In any case, ABC thinks a slap on the wrist will suffice, and tonight Stossel is expected to make an on-air apology. Will he admit he lied or blame an intern?
posted by johnb
on Aug 11, 2000 -
11 comments
I approached
this review expecting it to be of the "major media providers are the problem, not the solution" sort, but discovered something somewhat different:
"It’s not that the medium of the modern political campaign–television advertising–failed to do justice to men of substance, but that men of substance failed to adapt to television advertising..."
posted by dcehr
on Aug 7, 2000 -
3 comments
This story of a whiz kid who vanished raises all kinds of questions. Sufiah, a 15-year-old student at Oxford University, disappears; then, her father receives an e-mail, supposedly from her.
The e-mail claims that she ran away from her father's abusive high-pressure learning techniques;
the father claims that she must have been kidnapped and brainwashed. The police aren't sure how to handle this situation, as there's no way to
prove that the mail is really from the daughter. Finally, the father has called in the media to present
his side of the story, since Sufiah has threatened to go to the media with hers.
posted by harmful
on Jul 6, 2000 -
11 comments
Sony to introduce new CD format. No, it's not DVD-Music. It's a new double-capacity CD format that Sony says "will be able to prevent illegal copying." I'm assuming the new format will require all-new hardware to read and to write. So my question is, what's the point? Won't another music format just increase consumer confusion and make them more reluctant to buy? Why come out with a 1.3GB format just as recordable DVDs, with much larger capacities, are becoming practical? Do they really expect people to buy all new hardware to support what is obviously a dead-end format?
posted by daveadams
on Jul 5, 2000 -
12 comments
Snap to Grid: A User's Guide to Digital Arts, Media, and Cultures is one of the best readings on the interactions between artists, technology, and culture I've found so far.
I found a quote here by Sir Isaiah Berlin which is very appropriate to my experience and perhaps those who search for sites like Metafilter:
Loneliness is not just the absence of others but far more living among people who do not understand what you are saying.
posted by Taken Outtacontext
on Jul 3, 2000 -
1 comment
Designer-programmer-actor-model-waiter? Finally, someone giving one or more fingers to Toronto's tightarsed, outdated
nouveaux-médias hiring practices. How would
you like to be on call
24 hours a day as an interactive-TV manager for the Weather Network way the fork out in Mississauga?
Lila Feng worship isn't enough of a payoff, kids.
posted by joeclark
on Jun 12, 2000 -
7 comments
Advertising on Your GPS Reciever It looks like advertisers are already dreaming up new uses for the higher quality GPS signals.
"You're walking down the block, your phone goes off as you pass every store and tells you that there's a 50-percent-off sale."
Someone remind me why it was a good idea to deregulate the GPS?
posted by darainwa
on May 27, 2000 -
4 comments
the age weblog [via wetlog, of course]
it's pretty obvious she's reading MeFi [and memepool] -- but not linking to them.
posted by palegirl
on May 25, 2000 -
22 comments
inside.com goes live. Inside.com is the latest attempt to have people pay for non-porn, non-financial information on the web. The site is currently in "Sneak Preview" mode and is the brainchild of Kurt Anderson (of Spy Magazine fame).
posted by icathing
on May 23, 2000 -
3 comments
Crackpots brought to you by 'balance" is a piece over at the Boston Globe on the state of the media today. It focuses on the media's handling of the whole Elian G. business, but it also takes a different angle on the more general matter of being journalistically 'fair' . . . which I thought interesting too in the light of growth of online fora and web logs (and perhaps also ask-an-expert sites?) which are coming to be considered as legitimate news resources.
posted by mrpalomar
on Apr 27, 2000 -
7 comments
HighWired.com helps high schools put their newspapers (and classrooms and other information) online -- but i wonder if putting articles like
this one, which tell personal information about students, online is a good idea. following that logic, i guess it's good that it's difficult to search high wired or find
a list of all the high school newspapers that it hosts. if you poke around a bit, you
can find many papers and it's
good for a laugh.
posted by palegirl
on Feb 2, 2000 -
0 comments
The San Francisco Examiner is up for sale? I didn't even know this. I'm surprised no dotcoms have swooped in to buy the dead trees media. Apparently, they need a buyer very soon, or the paper will merge with the SF Chronicle. Will SF become yet another one-newspaper city? Sad...
posted by mathowie
on Jan 29, 2000 -
1 comment
Pursuitwatch.com is a typical American piece of fecal matter. It's a news service dealing totally in high speed chases. And now, one can get chase news sent directly to one's alphanumeric pager. It's a symbol of the general rise of 'dumbth'. If you don't know what dumbth is, I cover it a little in my
column for the thirtieth of October. The article is really about some crazy stuff going on in Britain, but it's a good read.
MattDabrowski.com is better than Pursuitwatch.com any day.
posted by tdecius
on Oct 29, 1999 -
1 comment
