Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

critique

What if…

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If I was Britney Spears’ manager her big comeback would’ve went down a hell of a lot differently than the hot mess that graced the VMAs.

(First of all, that atrocious club single is not going to get her back to her bestselling days. They really should’ve got her a vocal coach and pitched a Britney unplugged with two new songs and followed up with a hybrid acousti-dance album, a la Madonna’s Music. But, too late for that…)

Spears VMAMy version of Britney’s performance would have started the same as Sunday’s – a mopey, slightly chubby, lip-sync-flubbing Brit Brit would emerge with her dancers and mime through a verse.

Then, when all looked dire (but not as dire as tonight’s performance), the song would start skipping, a la Milli Vanilli (or, for the younger crowd, Ashlee Simpson). Then the music would cut out, leaving a befuddled Britney staring into the crowd, helpless. Then, one of the male dancers would turn around and say the song’s opener, “It’s Britney, bitch.”

Suddently you would realize the dancer was her! But, instead of doing a strip-tease out of the suit (as she has in the past) she would just toss her hat to show off her crazy post-buzz hair at actual length and color, and proceed to just wail the song live without correction to the best of her ability while strutting around in a killer tailored suit.

The audacity of the emphasis on real hair and real vocals with less dancing and less skin would have left everyone’s jaws on the floor.

Honestly, I’d be good at this stuff. It’s a shame I’d prefer to get famous myself…

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As someone who has ostensibly spent the last three and a half years of my life studying journalism at times i have a lot to say about the current state of the American news media. Any major US news outlet is over-reporting, under-representing, over-the-top, unprofessional, and altogether useless as far as i’m concerned. However, this isn’t really the fault of the programmers — it’s the fault of the American public. You would think that consumers would reject local news that resembles an erstwhile clip of Entertainment Tonight, or that they would at least demand that Philadelphia have a single daily paper not owned and published by the Knightridder corporation. But, they don’t, and their low expectations and low-brow interests are the undeniable trend-setters of what gets covered, with sometimes shocking implications.

As such, i was initially taken by surprise to see CNN headline with an internet story. My surprise only lasted long enough, though, to realize that the lead-in to the story was rife with buzz-words, and that it primarily existed to address the intermittent but highly-annoying slow-down that began earlier this weekend. The article proclaims that “Experts called the worm the most damaging attack on the Internet in 18 months,” and it was assertion that i found most shocking of all. Plainly, it is incorrect, even without taking into account a conflicting statement made in the same artcile: “It’s not a major risk. It’s not [doing] either of the two things that are terribly damaging,” Paller said. “One is hurting people’s machines, and one is knocking things [off-line].” By contrast, the relative blip on the media radar caused by a distributed denial of service attack this fall that left nine of the thirteen major DNS root servers temporarily down for the count definitely ranks, in my opinion, as possibly the most damaging attack on the Internet. Even the CNN article admits the potential deadliness of this tactic, albiet without acknowledging the recent incident in question.

Before i go on, let me ask: do you know what that means? In case you don’t: Websites don’t really live at the addresses you are used to typing in for them; this one doesn’t really exist at a place named “crushingkrisis.com.” In reality, web-pages exist soley as a set of IP numbers … think of them as PO Box’s that have been set up to forward to your (more meaningful) full street address. DNS servers are what does the forwarding, linking those numbers to names like amazon.com, cnn.com, and whitehouse.gov. And, while there are many local servers around the world that maintain this address information, all of it originates from root servers — the ones that were attacked.

Based on that oversimplified explanation, it should be plain to see how the internet might slowly disintegrate into nothingness if a few more servers had been crippled, or if they had been damaged in a more permanent fashion. Even though sites would technically still work via their IP address, many sites (most blogs included) reference their links and images in such a fashion that they would be rendered useless without a domain name at their source. However, though “[t]his may have been the largest attack on the core of the Internet, it didn’t affect actual users” (Maguire, Newsfactor.com). This, as opposed to an extremely evident slowdown that left many pages totally unavailable this weekend, meant that its coverage was minimal at best

Can you imagine what would happen if the internet broke? Not just your own site, and not just every site you read, use to schedule classes, check email with, or do banking on. No. The whole thing. It would be a catastrophe! John U. S. Doe would find himself utterly helpless at work all day without being able to refer to stocks, research, or company intranets. Jane Americana Doe would be lost without her regular nightcap of Yahoo News. In short, the public should have been really, really, really freaked out by the 2002 attack, as well as this attack and what is implied by them both.

My local news outlets largely did not cover the attack last year. By rights, it should have been the most important story… certainly more significant than impending precipitation or a sports game. Instead i found out about it in class where, unsuprisingly, no one even understood its significance. This attack obviously got picked up by CNN because it affected business and, in an unusually potent turn, disabled some thirteen thousand ATMs. Meanwhile any garden variety email-communicable virus, which i have never once even approached catching in seven years of blithe internet usage, is cause for alarm and coverage. Why? Because it primarily affects the lowest common denominator. That’s what it all comes down.

You may not be able to tell if the chicken or the egg came first — the point is that they both need each other to exist. The same goes for the relative irrelevance of the news and the increasing idiocy of the American public — especially on issues of politics and technology. Individual news organizations should make a change by covering what’s important, and not what’s expected. You should make a change by giving a shit about what they’re telling you. And not telling you.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2003/01/90238287/

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And, now, for another episode of Writer’s Block Theatre.

When we last left our hero, he was awaiting a response to his record reviews with bated breath. Would he finally get to write for an honest to goodness newspaper? We pick up shortly after Peter receives the paper’s reply as we fade up from black. Though he was initially joyous at their friendly invitation of “Welcome Aboard,” over the course of the day he realizes that the congratulatory email has delivered him the worst possible news – his new editor is more interested in what he feels about records than what he thinks, and is hopeful that he will revise his reviews to this effect.

Peter stammers as he recoils in fright from this newly transformed message. “But… but… feelings are the root of all bad record reviews!,” he exclaims as he slowly backs away from the screen. “I’ve spent years detaching myself from new records so i can offer tidy unbiased opinions of them. Saying that any record i own by someone other than Ani or Tori makes me feel anything is an utter lie! I’ve reduced reviewing music to science!”

“Is that so?”

A voice rises from behind him; Peter whirls as though he’s being confronted by another of his worst fears only to find Amy sitting on his guitar amp nonchalantly leafing through a Rolling Stone. He opens his mouth to speak, but she silences him with a wilting glance.

“How you feel will influence anything you write, Peter, so you can just come down from the damned pedestal and write with some feeling for the benefit of all of us people who don’t consider each cd purchase a new child.”

Temporarily ignoring the implication that he would feel the need to be scientifically detached from all of his children so that none would feel more liked than the next, Peter madly gestures back towards the screen. “But, Aim, feelings? Why should someone buy a record based on how i feel? They don’t even know me!.”

Amy fixes Peter with a cool glare from over a two-page spread of Ewan McGregor. “Peter, are they really compromising your journalistic morals here, or is it a possibility that you’re so excited about this job that you just have cold feet.”

Peter’s only reply is silence.

“Well?”

“Erm… possibly mildly chilled feet.”

Amy nods to herself. “Just as i thought,” her face is buried in the magazine before the next sentence escapes her lips, “now get to writing.”

His moral quandary solved by the quick wit of his friend, Peter is again faced with the computer screen — now sinisterly blank white as it awaits his feelings about the Wilco record. Slowly, he approaches the keyboard.

(Cut to black, commercial airs while Peter frantically tries to decide if he honestly feels anything about Yankee Foxtrot Hotel)

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2002/06/85175275/

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Via Ernie, Via 37signals: Celine Dion’s new disc will not play in computer CD drives. I’ve been harping about this a lot recently, and there has been a similar amount of speculation in independent internet press on which overblown major-label artist would first allow themselves to play guinea pig to this particular corporate experiment. Ironically, Dion is one of the least relevant: music piracy is obviously most common on college campuses, but Celine is much more of an Adult Contemporary artist. It remains to be seen if labels are brave enough to similarly cripple a disc by Ms. Spears or even Metallica, as the ramifications on record sales alone are potentially horrifying — not to mention the nearly assured backlash by college-aged record buyers (and their potential to find an easy way around the protection).


Not to prematurely give birth to my aforementioned massive media essay, but record labels just don’t get the damned point. Students burns and rip discs because they aren’t realistically affordably. Record companies continue to raise prices to help maintain their profit margins, while they slash artist rosters at the same time. Maybe if brand new pop discs didn’t have an unbelievable list price of nineteen dollars they wouldn’t be so readily copied for under fifty cents. But, rather than assess their own corruption of the artistic process and of the artists’ own rights, the recording industry would rather point the finger at technology and punish buyers who listen to music at their computers. It isn’t the right way to solve things.

If any of this sounds totally ridiculous to you, then you need to boycott Celine Dion’s new disc as well as More Music from The Fast and the Furious , Universal’s first foray into infringing on our rights as record buyers. I’m sure songs from both of the cds already abound on internet retrieval services thanx to savvy buyers with a line-in function on their computers, so feel free to go and download them without any guilt; record companies have shown us that all they care about is the almighty dollar, so all we can (and should) do is withhold it from them.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2002/04/75059416/

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So, now it is the morning after and more tiny details are creeping out about cell phone calls and arrests in Florida and etc. However, i won’t be linking the majority of this day two news, and i want to talk about the reasons why.

I am a student of Journalism and, while i lack a vast majority of the knowledge i will (hopefully) eventually be in possession of, i am both very aware and very critical of the dissemination of information in America. In fact, that is probably part of the reason that i am so continually interested and involved with personal publishing.

I am of the very concrete opinion that in a crisis of national importance the networks over-report the most basic and inconsequential of details and too often ignore the most basic facts of an investigation. What is excellent about obtaining breaking news online is that while news can be continually updated it doesn’t have to be continuously live. This means that the facts of a situation can continue to be present while the latest news can be appended to the top of the file.

Despite this fact, the major news outlets with normally reliable websites remained wholly ignorant of how to report such an important situation online. Simple facts like the time of impact were wholly absent from early versions of the story, and i had to view four different news services before piecing together my initial post with the NBC news photo.

I won’t touch upon the inadequacy of internet servers to handle crucial amounts of traffic because the situation became all-too-evident yesterday as CNN and MSNBC pitched all of their various bells and whistles overboard to save on bandwidth. I am primarily concerned with the way we report news, and what we report. Today coverage is focusing on individual families and acts of heroism, and this is totally appropriate and puts a human face on such a mind-boggling situation. However, in the early hours of a tragedy it is not what the general public most needs to initially see and hear.

Essentially, when an entire nation brings their focus to bear on a single state, city, or square block, the news media should be concerned with providing and maintaining an accurate narrative, correct and up-to-date statistics, and reliable eye witness reports. This does not include bringing in blood-thirsty “military experts” who are practically volunteering to deliver bombs themselves to “whoever” is responsible. It does not include repeatedly asking for the obviously unavailable casualty numbers throughout the early afternoon and into the evening. It does not include asking any and all New Yorkers to contribute yet another description of one of the airplanes’ impacts with the World Trade Center.

Human interest is definitely a point of any breaking news story, but my primary concern yesterday was to distill all of the news that had emerged so that anyone could see a single picture or read a single paragraph and glean important facts. The network coverage on ABC and MSNBC broke reports of the flight numbers and the names of the aircraft carriers shortly after noon yesterday, yet the flight numbers didn’t reach a rapid rotation in the coverage for well over an hour and this morning news outlets are reporting the presence of the aircraft carrier as though it slunk it under cover of night. There is a certain something to be said for continuously involving the viewer in the events so that they feel as though they are part of the journalistic process, but i find it disturbing that we have so few high-end news outlets in America when there is obviously a whole nation who are not hungry for death tolls or perpetrators, but who just want to know what is happening to their friends & family in other parts of the country.

Networks are afraid to cut away from coverage for any reason, and rightly so; there is always the chance of more breaking news and always a fresh viewer tuning in. However, not everyone wants a continuous feed of repetitive news, and that is why i turned on my computer at work before i turned on a radio or a television. As was pointed out by various sources yesterday, the internet is truly amazing because it is an entirely decentralized means of obtaining information, and it was this decentralization that provided the most important details as yesterday progressed. However, it is not unreasonable to expect a few reliable sources to be intermingled with this rush of facts from all sides, and i suppose i’m just surprised that the most consistently reliable source that i have found so far is not necessarily a formal news site, but the personally owned public forum at MetaFilter. Perhaps i simply need to change my ideas about a reliable source is, but i think that we all equally need to change our ideas about what we should be expecting from these sources.

I have no personal response to yesterday’s events yet because at the very root of me i am still numb about it all. However, just as yesterday morning my first instinct was to physically confirm news and then distribute it to my co-workers, my primary continuing concern is the inadequacy of some of the reporters and news services who we were relying on to inform us of the most basic details about this national emergency. I suppose in the face of such a disaster the only way i can feel like i have an impact on anything is to do this.

Blagh.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2001/09/5640337/