Posts by Russell Brown
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This is interesting: an Atlantic story that suggests there's more to 'Gangnam Style' that it might at first appear:
Gangnam is a tony Seoul neighborhood, and Park's "Gangnam Style" video lampoons its self-importance and ostentatious wealth, with Psy playing a clownish caricature of a Gangnam man. That alone makes it practically operatic compared to most K-Pop. But I spoke with two regular observers of Korean culture to find out what I was missing, and it turns out that the video is rich with subtle references that, along with the song itself, suggest a subtext with a surprisingly subversive message about class and wealth in contemporary South Korean society. That message would be awfully mild by American standards -- this is no "Born in the U.S.A." -- but South Korea is a very different place, and it's a big deal that even this gentle social satire is breaking records on Korean pop charts long dominated by cotton candy.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Impermanence, in reply to Keir Leslie,
Something interesting about why Psy was the break out hit, but say, this not so much.
It takes itself a tad too seriously?
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Hard News: Friday Music: Impermanence, in reply to Kumara Republic,
Any brands in particular that are infamous for CD rot?
The cheap ones of any brand, I gather -- because they're the ones that used unstable vegetable dyes.
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Hard News: Media3: Where harm might fall, in reply to Stephen Judd,
Given what happened when Kerry Bolton complained to the BSA about Scott Hamilton’s comments on National Radio, I’m not entirely sanguine about that.
True. Otoh, we remember that one because it was such an outlier.
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Anyway folks, must go and make a TV show. Thanks for helping me sharpen up my Devil's Advocate thing!
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Hard News: Media3: Where harm might fall, in reply to Morgan Nichol,
Do we want laws to protect our prime minister from mockery? Because look at, for instance, Thailand’s law protecting their king from insult. It’s abusive and draconian (and very old fashioned).
No. But that’s what the Commission’s paper is very explicitly not proposing. It says that political speech requires the highest degree of protection.
Making it easier for some people to get protection from specific targeted ongoing harassment seems reasonable. And I’ve heard many times that our defamation laws are slow, unwieldy, and very expensive. But along with trying to solve those problems seems to have been bundled the ludicrous idea that people shouldn’t ever be upset.
Which I don't think is what the Commission means, but it has certainly left itself open to that interpretation.
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Hard News: Media3: Where harm might fall, in reply to Stephen Judd,
What if the crackpots that Scott Hamilton and Matthew Dentith deal with so well on their blogs start claiming the emotional distress of contradiction and mockery justify penalties?
If it got to the level of the Tribunal, my hope and expectation would be that it would swiftly be dispatched, the way that such complaints are by existing media regulators – although, yes, the “emotional distress” criterion is cause for uncertainty, and the lack of a requirement for input from the allegedly offending party is untenable. The chief peril would likely be a lot of people’s time being wasted.
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Hard News: Media3: Where harm might fall, in reply to Stephen Judd,
On another note, the first rule of PAS is all very well, but as has been pointed out on other occasions, sometimes it is necessary to be disagreeable – to be a dick relative to community norms.
Not very often, to be honest. I think it's more often the case that people convince themselves its necessary, or feel the need to give licence to their own actions. You need to have a very low level of respect for others in the room for it to be "necessary" to be a dick.
I think we can all imagine people whom we want to contradict vigorously and obnoxiously without fear of legal sanction.
I think the Commission has over-reached, but I do not honestly think that general web hurly-burly would make it all the way up through mediation to a Tribunal order, especially in the context of a political discussion.
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Hard News: Media3: Where harm might fall, in reply to Kyle Matthews,
I do wonder if there is a legitimate role for ‘nasty shit people posted about me on an overseas web site’. A tribunal might help smooth jurisdictional issues because it doesn’t go down a criminal path immediately?
Not sure. I do know that Google, for all it tries not to, frequently gets caught up in defamation disputes.
What Google's search ranking will effectively do is prioritise official information and widely-trusted sites. So even if you can't remove every scrap of false or damaging information, the correction or finding of fact will come up higher in search results. I think this is an underrated point.
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Brilliant, Jon. Thank you.