hey gawker dudes. what the fuck is wrong with you?

but you know...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlRQjzltaMQ

agree with treeship that “white privilege” (hence “punching up”) angle re kid (from gawker, big media company) is disingenuous. speaking of critique drift. arguendo the article is humorous, not inappropriate, nbd, but imo that particular justification doesn’t work.

don’t have v strong feelings about this, but agree with certain distinctions treeship has been making:

it’s a random kid, not a public figure

who at the end of the day (imo) did nothing really wrong— arguably did not even commit a faux pas. singing along at a concert is distinct from tweeting. tweeting is an intentional act directed at a public audience, which one knows (or should) is open to criticism/ (mis)interpretation. anonymously & unselfconsciously singing along at a loud packed concert (one of hundreds in the audience, losing one’s individuality in the moment), completely unaware one would or could be the *object* of the spectacle, is not such an act.

the bit that made me most uncomfortable is the comparison to racist frat members: in current environment, with current news, doesn’t feel so much like innocuous joeks. arguendo there’s an interesting legitimate point to the jokey article (about white kid cluelessness, micro aggressions, whatever); but that comparison (aimed at a specific identifiable kid) should’ve been omitted or much more qualified

this is a thread i know i should not participate in and yet i feel compelled to note: gawker did not "accuse the wrong guy of a school massacre," it reported on the person the police had (as it turned out, wrongly) identified as the perpetrator, properly sourcing the claim to the police.

i know we all kind of got into it on ilx about this when it happened and many people felt like gawker should be held responsible nonetheless--i dont think this is a completely dismissable argument but regardless i think the distinction is pretty important.

to the extent this is a discussion that ilx wants to have it seems like itd make more sense to have it around justine sacco, who was 1) named and explicitly shamed in the gawker post about her, 2) the subject of a wide media outrage campaign, and 3) had actual material (career) harm come to her through the episode

all these things are obviously obvious (according to Treeship)

This thread seems to be operating on the premise that Gawker is not the clickbait shitpile for 12 year olds that I thought it was.

yeah it's obviously a sewer but getting outraged by it or, i dunno, daily mail online, seems unnecessary at this point.

there's a valid point here.

we need to discuss whatever ppl are hung up with regarding some article about a dude singing the n-word in the context of e.g.

* Naked Flakka Freak Who Calls Himself God Fights Cop, Fucks Tree: Police
* Horny Mom Threw Teen Daughter a Naked Twister Sex Party, AA Sponsor Says
* Lord Nelson, Former Football Star, Professor, Cop, Horse, Dead at 42
* The IRS’s Secretive Undercover Unit Lives In This Building
* Kim K, "Pornographic Symbol," Censored in Photo by Ultra-Orthodox Site
* Sad Man Sits in Field
* Peggy Noonan Talks Blobs
* Watch Robert Pattinson and FKA Twigs Bond Over a Mutual Love of Dance
* Since You Were Wondering, Judge Judy Is Having Amazing Sex
* Aaron Hernandez Found Guilty Of Murder
* The Doomed Visionary Who Made Feminist Games 19 Years Before Gamergate
* Cops: Kidnappee Escaped Kidnapper Because He Couldn't Drive Stick
* Blackwater Guards Sentenced to Decades in Prison for Shooting Civilians
* Twin Toddlers Drown After Mom, Attacked by Bee, Loses Grip on Stroller
* What Is the Best Clinton Conspiracy Theory?
* Chris Hansen Wants You to Pay for Him to Keep Hitting on Sex Offenders
* Now Is the Time to Invest in War-Torn Somalia

(amazing headlines lately btw, good work all!)

Gawker ad manager or whoever probably was yelling "I need three race-baiting Coachella bits with pictures in my inbox in the next 20 mins".

Chris Hansen Wants You

* Sad Man Sits in Field

uh hello gawker dudes I am suing you for slander now

i've never even been in a field

the bit that made me most uncomfortable is the comparison to racist frat members: in current environment, with current news, doesn’t feel so much like innocuous joeks. arguendo there’s an interesting legitimate point to the jokey article (about white kid cluelessness, micro aggressions, whatever); but that comparison (aimed at a specific identifiable kid) should’ve been omitted or much more qualified

― drash, Wednesday, April 15, 2015 2:33 PM (41 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

jfc are you serious

yes

problem with comparison goes two ways: not just unfair to kid, but also rhetorically minimizes virulence of those frat members' behavior

http://i.imgur.com/n6cZ1At.jpg

can we please get this thread on gawker already, snake's tail isn't gonna eat itself here

unintentionally minimizes (i'm sure of course author does NOT intend to minimize or draw moral equivalence). but to my mind the comparison (unintentionally) does

but like i said, don't feel v strongly about this

(puts gun back in holster)

http://4closurefraud.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Not-to-play.jpg

regarding smarm huh

problem with comparison goes two ways: not just unfair to kid, but also rhetorically minimizes virulence of those frat members' behavior

― drash, Wednesday, April 15, 2015 3:28 PM (21 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

what if it was: a joke

spiralli otm

what if it was: a joke

granted, it was. still have all those problems with it (shrug).

it was a joke but also i think it was accurate!!

tbh if joke was aimed at public figure (acting that way at a concert) instead of random kid, prob would have no problem at all with it

i get the joke. dunno, maybe my own issues re privacy/ shyness make me identify with the kid

but i should stop because i'm boring myself

big gawker is watching u

lol don't give me nightmares

maybe you look like a famous actor, too, drash

you can't know for sure until you are publicly shamed, and then you measure the amount of shaming received vs our charts

from username translator compendium

drash?

― Mordy, Tuesday, March 3, 2015 3:50 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Sarah silverman, Michael Cera, and Reggie Watts?

― how's life, Friday, March 6, 2015 11:55 AM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

oh shit

i get the joke. dunno, maybe my own issues re privacy/ shyness make me identify with the kid

but i should stop because i'm boring myself

― drash, Wednesday, April 15, 2015 4:04 PM (18 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

breaking: internet user drash likes to say the n word in private

plz post to gawker stat

that's jash i think

― Maybe in 100 years someone will say damn Dawn was dope. (forksclovetofu), Friday, March 6, 2015 12:33 PM (1 month ago)

they can't shame you if you don't give a shit

breaking: internet user drash likes to say the n word in private

plz post to gawker stat

that's jash

Remove Bookmark from this Thread

Jon Ronson talks to Adam Curtis - this has nothing to do with Gawker but frankly I'm not sure a discussion of Gawker is going to be more interesting.

I think the thing that proves my point dramatically are the waves of shaming that wash through social media – the thing you have spotted and describe so well in your book. It's what happens when someone says something, or does something, that disturbs the agreed protocols of the system. The other parts react furiously and try to eject that destabilising fragment and regain stability.

two intellectual luminaries in conversation

omg is he blaming the collapse of the arab spring on twitter this is amazing

its impressive the level of anxiety twitter provokes in ppl

lol that quote is hilarious

sometimes, when someone does something everyone else dislikes, they get mad

when people seem to disapprove so much of sites that are basically just people talking to each other, i wonder what kind of peaceful, uneventful, unfailingly polite human interaction they expect millions of people to maintain every single day of their lives

I think Curtis is mostly talking about the feedback loop thing that happens when people are clamoring with millions of others to have their voice heard and embraced by some group. In a truncated medium, you do this by saying familiar things -- staking out a hardline stance.

He kind of jams this into a facile alarmist narrative about how twitter is ruining everything but i think he is right insofar as it and other areas of the internet seem less than ideal for substantive conversation. People talk past each other on twitter. This is fine but people want to use it as a vehicle for important conversations. How many thinkpieces are just exigeses of tweets?

People talk past each other on twitter.

was gonna say

the feedback loop thing that happens when people are clamoring with millions of others to have their voice heard and embraced by some group

come on, ascribing reductive psychological impulses to "millions" of people makes you look like a dumbass

so Gawker is hardly the only site not to let a woman being raped get in the way of "Horny Mom" lols:

http://gawker.com/horny-mom-threw-teen-daughter-a-naked-twister-sex-party-1697948520?utm_campaign=socialflow_gawker_facebook&utm_source=gawker_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow

But:

The night ended for Lehnardt around 3:30 a.m., when she woke up in her bed to find her daughter's 16-year-old boyfriend having sex with her. According to an Evans County sheriff's report quoted by the Huffington Post,

"Mrs. Lehnardt told [the sponsor] she and her daughter had spoken and that her daughter 'felt guilty because the 16-year-old was 10 inches long and huge, and if she had just been able to take it, he wouldn't have needed to rape her mother.'"

The horny mom, arrested based on the sponsor's story, won't face any sex-related charges because 16 is Georgia's age of consent.