FRONTLINE: the pbs documentary series not the flea medicine

"slave labor" is inappropriate terminology there. "Unpaid labor" I should have said.

i don't know what it says about me, but i like HGG because she makes me cringe in sympathy, and i hate TO because he makes me cringe because of his transparent lusting for fame and power

haha tbf my being an underpaid yet enthusiastic lackey for a giant media megacorp probably has something to do with my feelings here

Karl Malone otm

http://i.imgur.com/DRwAdx0.jpg

"i hate TO because he makes me cringe because of his transparent lusting for fame and power"

where did you get that hi-res picture of me?!

Spent my pre-internet teenage years on BBSes, and I was into Doom WADs and level packs. Making a new level in Doom may have been free promotion, but at least there is some level of personal creativity there.

Free labor promoting corporate IPs these days does seem like a scary new thing to me, but then again maybe it's just Old Media cherry picking extra shit to go along with their regular advertising shit and it's nothing really all that new. People have had fansites since the beginning of the internet, the only difference is now if someone photoshops The Hunger Games into a still from Seinfeld, instead of being seen by the 10 other people that have sites in the same webring, it's splashed all over AV Club, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.

my particular life circumstances have led me to fear attention more than crave it tbh, so basically i was horrified by everything. mostly i'm sad because it works. what they're doing WORKS. ugh humanity.

The scary thing will be once Comcast has beat the internet into submission and people aren't just doing IP juxtaposition for free but PAYING FOR THE PRIVILEGE. No doubt Old Media have this business model in their sites.

HI GUYS! It's just ME, LA LECHERA, yr VIRTUAL BFF here to tell you all about COOL STUFF I LIKE

can you even imagine!?

― we slowly invented brains (La Lechera), Thursday, March 6, 2014 2:34 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

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jeez, that secrets of the vatican ep was just unbearably sad. for some reason i was not expecting 2/3 of the episode to be horrendous child abuse stuff, of course this seems obvious now in hindsight

yeah it was absolutely horrifying.

back to teens: this was an interesting side note to the doc, from an interview with alissa quart

It’s I think a side effect of living in such a data-rich and socially networked universe, where narcissism is not a condition; it’s a strategy, … strategy toward betterment, toward improvement, creating community, which sounds ironic, like how can narcissism help us create community? But it’s sort of like the person with the most aggressive data stream wins, who posts the most, who likes the most, who’s most present and ubiquitous.

I think cool used to be identified with scarcity, the jazz singer who turns his back to the audience. Now cool has become omnipresent. So there’s been a real shift in what cool is. That’s one thing that we’re talking about underneath our conversation about teenagers.

Let’s talk more about that, because that’s a fascinating shift. …

… I think cool originates with the jazz culture in the ’40s. There was probably cool before that, but that’s when people started talking about cool — Miles Davis and Charlie Parker and a bunch of other early, cool jazz folk.

Then it sort of got absorbed as the height of adolescent style, so an example of that would be James Dean. James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause is cool.

But one of the things with all these people that we’re describing from an earlier period of cool is that they resisted; they withheld. They were emotive without being emotional. They gave off like a cold light, right? And they were not giving that much.

Now I think coolness is about giving everything. It’s like you have to be constantly selling yourself, showing yourself and marketing yourself and using technology and using multiple platforms, because you might even seem sort of half mad. Instead of turning your back to the audience or wearing sunglasses at night, you’re taking off those sunglasses and you’re smiling into the camera, and it’s like there’s a real shift. …

The currency now is one of constant approval and a constant hum of self-assertion rather than standing back and hoping people come to you. It’s a real change.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/media/generation-like/alissa-quart-from-gen-x-to-z-teens-and-the-new-cool/

this doesn't seem like a new development-- Type A people connecting broadly have usually been more popular. Debbie Gibson was more popular at my middle school than any "cool" late 80s artist. The word "cool" is probably being stretched beyond meaning here.

THAT is so interesting, that excerpt. I was either attending or watching a discussion recently in which someone noted that a crucial element of cool is that it rejects what is widely available, that it requires being a have-not of whatever the going currency is...that "cool" comes from resistance. In that framing, you almost need a different word for the approval seeking kind of popularity, it's like the anti-cool?

I'm glad you posted that, I'd almost forgotten that chance comment and now it's becoming a new net to catch other thoughts.

agree, we need a new word for what these super in-your-face people are, a word like "trending"
because i guess cool isn't in anymore, but cool should remain cool

i think part of the problem is that we are trying to apply old concept words to new concepts, like spaceship or whatever -- there's a word for it but i can't remember, retroformation or something? i dunno.
not that this whole thing is particularly important, of course. it's worth noting that this stupid frontline about likes has generated more conversation than any other one
on one hand, this disappoints me
but whatever, people will talk about what they want to talk about unless someone gets super in their face about it, and clearly i am not the man for that job
so here we are :-/

yeah i think president keyes is right that this isn't really a new development, just new technologies enabling old phenomena. "cool" has had multiple meanings for a long time—it can def used to refer to both the "popular" kids and to the "outsider" subcultural kids. i think the difference between those two uses is more philosophical than generational. there's always been teenagers who desire fame and attention even in the limited high school sense, kids who want to show off and be gossiped about.

Cool can be used to describe the popular "popular" kids and the popular "outsider" kids.

I think cool used to be identified with scarcity, the jazz singer who turns his back to the audience.

this sentence pisses me off! Miles Davis faced the band so he could conduct them, not to be "cool" or "scarce"

and he wasn't a singer

this is perhaps off-topic but i also feel like pointing out that ppl who post selfies on tumblr or vlog or w/e aren't necessarily narcissistic or fame-seeking, plenty of ppl do these things as a way to seek out community or like-minded others and i think this is especially important for young ppl who are marginalized in some way. i did this w/ personal blogging and later livejournal when i was a kid

if you read the rest of the interview with alissa quart, she addresses that (the empowerment "piece" as it is so called) in abundant detail
that thing about miles is total bs though, you're right crut

also i think i'm sick of talking about this tbh! i don't even care anymore
i just want to go on with livin my life and stop talking about talking about talking about everything

i just remembered that i once got approached by a marketing person from a major hollywood studio with an offer of exclusive clips of a highly anticipated film by an acclaimed director in exchange for doing some posts on my tumblr in the week before its broad release

when i wrote the guy back and asked how much money he was offering he was like "oh no this would just be for fun/exclusive clips"

i decided not to do it because it would have broken one of my rules (watching the entire film before posting something from it, not to mention: fuck you pay me) but the whole thing was just such a weird experience

Has anyone watched Rape In the Fields? I watched this last night in tears. I've never heard the term 'Mass Rape' before but it was chilly to hear those two words used together.
No criminal charges have yet been brought against anyone.
No criminal charges have yet been brought against anyone.
No criminal charges have yet been brought against anyone.
No criminal charges have yet been brought against anyone.

I started it, but couldn't handle it tbh. The women reminded me too much of my students, and their stories were too sad. I'm glad it was made though, and I'm glad people are watching it. Disappointing, but not terribly surprising that no charges have been brought against anyone.

did we talk about the lee harvey oswald one

i don't think so -- i listened to the podcast one night while i was falling asleep, so i remember exactly nothing about it

hey, just in time for WORLD TUBERCULOSIS DAY tomorrow!

In 2012, an estimated 8.6 million people developed TB and 1.3 million died from the disease, according to the most recent figures from the World Health Organization. The WHO estimates that about 530,000 children develop TB every year, but the study’s authors used a different methodology to arrive at their total.

The current epicenter of the pandemic is Swaziland, home to highest rate of TB infection in the world. In tomorrow night’s FRONTLINE investigation, TB Silent Killer, filmmaker Jezza Neumann travels there for an unforgettable portrait of lives forever changed by the disease.

Coming in April -- (4/22 and 4/29) -- two docs about the US obsession with incarceration. One about solitary, the other about the PIC, I'm guessing. I hope CCA is fully eviscerated.

I finally started watching the one about TB and I don't even know what to say about it -- the brother and sister they show in the first 5 min segment instantly ripped my heart out and stomped on it. The brother's English was interesting too.
Why are so many people still dying of TB in 2014? I guess I'll have to watch the rest, ha.

I didn't finish it but was wondering the same thing. I thought it was a different strain?

There's a drug-resistant strain, but it seems like it could be contained/treated earlier or something?!

new one on solitary confinement. hell on earth:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/criminal-justice/locked-up-in-america/the-disturbing-sounds-of-solitary-confinement/

Now only that, but there are two docs (this week and next week) focusing on the corrections obsession in this country -- i'm assuming at least one of them will talk about CCA?

wow, that preview is harrowing enough.

oh god, I don't think I can watch that. Horrifying.

That's why I feel like I have to watch it. If people can survive solitary, I can survive watching this documentary.

i'm somewhat ashamed to admit i'm at least as interested in the NOVA special about dog cognition that my local PBS affiliate has programmed right after the one about solitary confinement.

i don't even want to watch the frontline tonight but i guess i will

jk it's on at 10. past my bedtime.

oof.

man this is genuinely hard to watch

specifically but not exclusively the blood mop segment

yeah, that was horrifying.

my wife sat down and watched it with me. about 10 times during the broadcast she said, "oh my god, why am i watching this?"

adam's deterioration was really sad
i just want him to get his GED

after some time to think about it, it seems to me that this was pretty front-loaded with shocking footage (the kicking/shouting/howling/blood). there was some of that later, but not quite as much and by that time it was clear why the prisoners were going to such great lengths to get into the psych ward. there's a phone there! i was also not fond of the dramatic music -- the footage is dramatic enough and adding music was gratuitous imo.
and there was also nothing about the community they were from -- i guess i would have liked another hour at least of this movie.

my favorite details were the signs the prisoners put on their tiny windows.

the one next week seems to focus on corrections in a much broader context

oh! and the elaborate way they would send stuff from one cell to another was memorable.
i also enjoyed the many scenes of them grooming their facial hair -- how interesting that they're allowed that one dignity of having facial hair groomed to their liking.