Monday, June 12, 2006

Fake news going too far

I’ve been smitten with Robert Thompson’s formulation of the fifth estate, “When the fourth estate is doing such a horrible job of what it is supposed to be doing, the fifth estate - comedy - steps in.”

On the other hand, fun can go too far. Lost Remote:

The Comedy Central fake news show, Dog Bites Man, is getting a bite taken out of it by the Oregon attorney general’s office. The fake TV crew shot a documentary at Portland State U. while pretending to be a real TV news crew. The Oregon AG is protesting the tactic, saying the group is doing “damage.”

I have serious problems with false releases:

Comedy Central has excused the ruses by saying that each participant is required to sign a general film release in advance. The release signed by Smoller listed only the production company, Central Productions, and said nothing about the comedy show or the network.

Emphasis mine. Never sign a release in advance. I always ask interviewees to sign after I shoot. And you have every right to limit use.

Close down all groups to ban a gay group. Then cheat! II

Remember the Georgia school district that banned all “noncurricular clubs” in order, some of us believe, to keep a gay-straight alliance from meeting on school grounds? After the ban was in place the PRIDE group was not permitted to meet while:

[S]everal other clubs-including a shooting club and a school dance team-continue meeting at the school even though they don’t participate in activities relevant to the curriculum, academic credit is not provided for participation in them, and participation in them isn’t required for any course.

The ACLU filed suit and today the arguments were heard in court:

The court heard from high school graduate Kerry Pacer, president of P.R.I.D.E. - or Peers Rising In Diversity Education - who brought the Federal suit. She testified students booed her when she received a rose at a school gathering. She told the court she heard announcements about other non-curricular clubs on the school P.A. system during her senior year after PRIDE was banned from meeting on campus.

Principal Brian Dorsey testified he decided no non-curricular clubs would meet on campus. But ACLU attorneys presented morning bulletins as evidence that those clubs did meet and those morning announcements were made on the public address system.

They’re fired up, and not going to take it anymore:

PRIDE member Charlene Hammersen will be a senior at White County High when school starts again and said mistreatment led to forming the club.

“The bullying motivated us, I mean people making fun of us,” she said.

Students like that are our proud future.

Gay gaming survey &tc.

Alexander sent me a note about his InNewsweekly story on the first study ever of GLBT gamers approved by the institutional review board of the University of Illinois. The study is open to participation for 6 more weeks; the survey and consent form are here. If you’re a “gaymer” check it out.

While I was away Alexander published this 1996 interview of Danielle Bunten Berry, unearthed in his research for a forthcoming piece on trans game developers. He says it’s “eerily topical even a decade later.” I chose this passage to illustrate that point:

I think Lemmings was a neat, quirky thing. [Here’s a javascript remake] The Incredible Machine was, to me, one of those genres that got slipped off to the side in the early days… SimCity and all of those fall into that category of toy products; it’s not really a game, you don’t win it, but you play with it. It has a significant entertainment element, but it also frequently has an educational element. For instance, in SimCity, while managing and building your city, you do learn something about cities. In the case of the Incredible Machine, you learn a little bit about physics, though it’s not really a “sit down and learn physics” thing. I think those are wonderful games that do a little more “head” stuff.

She begins to anticipate Steven Berlin Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You argument, even using the Sims example that Johnson used just last week on The Colbert Report. [video] His appearance, by the way, was something of a game itself:

Those television interviews are always slightly surreal—the conversation feels like it lasts about thirty seconds as you’re in the middle of it, and of course you have to surrender any hope of actually getting to make a coherent presentation of your argument. But it’s even more surreal when the person you’re talking to is actually in character, pretending to be a “professional idiot” (as Colbert himself described his onscreen persona during our one minute chat before the show.)

I guess that’s something we’ll just have to get used to when dealing with the fifth estate.

How to master email overload

I’m not seeing a magic bullet here:

Vint Cerf, chief Internet evangelist, Google: “I tend towards pretty terse replies.”

Matthew Lynch, CIO, ShopKo Stores: “I limit distribution of my personal and company e-mail addresses...” (duh!)

Ray Karrenbauer, chief architect, ING Groep: uses Outlook filters then “just check[s] the ‘A list’ every hour or so.”

Carl Jones, director of collaboration services, The Boeing Co.: “We are into brevity.”

Robert Holstein, CIO, National Public Radio Inc.: ...never deletes a message that has gotten through his spam filter. “I leave everything in my in-box.”

Paul Saffo, director, Institute for the Future: “I do triage—I erase the ones I don’t need to look at; then I answer the ones I can answer in a sentence or two; then there’s the ‘residium,’ six or seven messages out of 300 that require some thought.”

To counter the ‘ex-gay’ movement: Truth Wins Out

There’s a new organization set up to counter the ‘ex-gay’ movement:

Wayne Besen (r.), author of Anything But Straight: Unmasking the Scandals and lies of the Ex-Gay movement, has founded a new organization to counter the misinformation espoused by the ‘ex-gay movement.’

Truth Wins Out, Besen’s new organization, launched this past week. The announcement was set to coincide with the Senate vote on the so-called Marriage Protection Amendment (formerly known as the Federal Marriage Amendment).

RELATED: Yesterday The Boston Globe looked at ‘ex-gay’ New Hope Ministries:

Kyle’s experience at New Hope was typical in many ways. He experienced moments of elation, severe depression, crushes on other men, homesickness, and boredom. He eventually returned home with the expectation that he would apply everything he had learned to his old life. Instead, during the next several years he experienced only more uncertainty regarding his sexuality. He began occasionally dating men at the same time he volunteered at a local ex-gay ministry. Later, he embarked upon a chaste relationship with a woman he hoped to marry, but he broke it off after realizing he would never feel sexual attraction for her.

The article’s author is Tanya Erzen, an assistant professor at Ohio State University. Her book, “Straight to Jesus: Sexual and Christian Conversions in the Ex-Gay Movement,” is to be published this month by University of California Press.

Outing gay marriage foes

I favor outing. And I absolutely favor this:

KnowThyNeighbor.org, a website that contains a searchable database of the names of Massachusetts residents who have signed a petition for a constitutional amendment to outlaw gay marriage, has helped a church in Jacksonville, Fla., build a similar database of Floridians who have signed a ``marriage protection” ballot initiative in their state. The Florida names will be available on KnowThyNeighbor.org or through a link on the church’s website, christchurchofpeace.org.

The website’s creators say its purpose is twofold—to root out signature fraud and to provide public information that gay marriage supporters can use to identify petition signers they know and engage them in “open and meaningful dialogue.”

I will see what I can do to get one set up in GA.