Slashdot Mirror
Disinformation.com
The site's left-of-center-pieces -- with generous links to other POVs -- vary wildly in quality and usefulness, but you can find some real gems on disinfo.com. Taken together, the stories on this important, possibly even landmark site are a sharp indictment of the humorless and tepid way the popular media screen out opinion and commentary that's different, provocative or original.
We know too well that most mainstream media -- TV networks, major newspapers and newsmagazines, commercial news web sites -- have been corporatized, homogenized and mass-marketed by profit-obsessed corporate execs from Disney and General Electric. They could as well be -- and simultaneously are -- selling them park tickets and light bulbs as ideas and opinions. Newspapers have grown stupefyingly boring, their commentary relegated to snoozy op-ed pages. Cable TV, once the great hope, is becoming a nightmare of fragmentation, eternal argument and dogmatic fanaticism. Except for slight variations -- Fox News' interesting right-wing tilt, for example -- most mainstream news organizations stock to a militantly moderate point of view, veering a wee bit to the right or a tad to the left but never much further.
The target audience of most major media, from your daily paper to Time and CNN, is the appliance-and-car acquiring middle class, who seem to like their politics tepid and lite, the way AOL users like their Net. With media so firmly in the grip of market research, it's tough to know what they might cover if they were left to their own imaginations.
"Disinformation" is, to say the least, different. It was launched in l996 by Richard Metzger, now edited by Alex Burns. It's arguably one of the best-designed and most interesting alternative news and underground culture sites online. Apart from its own content, the site provides a subculture search engine which directs a reader to sites and relevant links. The site's political bias is clearly leftish, but its links are refreshingly open-minded, incorporating ideas, opinions and responses far beyond traditional definitions of "progressive." In fact, Disinformation is really, in many ways, a dogma killer. Despite the editors' viewpoint, readers get drawn into all sorts of opinions and debates any time they pursue a story or essay.
Apart from the excitement generated by a website that circulates about alternative ideas -- ideas the Net helps to keep alive -- Disinformation is beautifully designed. There's a Disinformation store, of course, offering T-shirts and books. There's easy access to stories by popularity and topic -- from activism and aliens to media, mind control, spirituality and technology. For all the ballyhoo and media hype about sites like Slate, with its heavy Microsoft subsidy, Disinformation really seems to get the fusion between interactivity and ideas. It's an exciting place to browse.
From the beginning, the Net was meant to open up information and give voice to different kinds of people and points of view. The Web, with its hyperlinking, took that idea still further. But in the past few years, that notion seems to have grown tired, in between the copyright wars, the dot.com era and the so-called Net slump. It seemed that corporate America -- Yahoo, MSN and AOL -- was devouring the Web whole. That's why sites like Disinformation are so important. They are the real heart of the Web.
God, that "cheerleaders" piece was awful. As reporting, it was incompetent and uninformative. As ranting, it was slow and anticlimactic. If this is the sort of feeble attempt at interesting writing that Jon Katz is urging us not to miss, then I think I'm beginnig to understand why he's so hated around here.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Disinformation is nothing. If you are looking for the web that was "promised" -- and who promised it, anyway, technofuturists drawing a paycheque on empty predictions -- then you should go to www.google.com.
What do you want to know about? Type it into the search box. Check your results. Read the ones that are interesting. Alter your criteria. Try it again.
Use their links to read newspapers from all around the world. Use babelfish to translate a German page to English.
I have all of the information I could possibly need at my fingertips through a combination of Google, Lexis-Nexis and sites like Everything2 and the Guerilla News Network. I have opposing viewpoints, case studies, major media coverage, independent media coverage, essays and fiction based upon pretty much every major event in the last twenty years. Going back a bit, the completeness level goes down for all but the most major of events, but nonetheless.
The Internet allows anyone to put anything up. Google allows you to find it. Your brain allows you to parse, to judge, and to collate it.
The third part of that equation is the important one.
If you're still using major media to define your worldview, you haven't understood a thing about what the internet has done (nevermind what it was supposed to do or what it should do in the future). I check in with major media sites because they tend to be well laid out. When I actually want the information, all of it, that's when MSN and CNN can kiss my ass good-bye, because they do not and never have provided anything more than sound bites.
Which is pretty much what Disinfo does, except with a snotty, leftist bent that doesn't do much more than pre-emptively derail most of the discussion that occurs.
The heart of the web? No. Just another meta. The heart of the web is that anybody with access to a PC and 20 minutes to learn can put a basic webpage up that will be indexed by Google so that somebody like me can stumble across it.
Google and the WayBack machine are the killer apps of the net. The provider of the content (Disinfo or whomever) don't matter. That's just branding.
And, hey, wasn't the 'Net going to take us away from all that? Or is it acceptable in the case of clearly lefty-biased sites?
That cheerleader piece is really annoying. I agree with only the tiniest fraction of what the Christian Cheerleader Leaders say and stand for, but the guy who's doing the interview is the biggest dork I've read in a while. He sounds like a newish convert to his lack of religion, and like most new converts, he's all guns blazin' and basically a smug asshole. (I don't have religion either, but at least I try to have some dignity about it, even if I think concepts of faith help lead to stuff like WTC.)
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Did anyone actually follow the link, read, and then take Marty's work serious at all?
Initially, I read the header:
Marty Beckerman is an 18-year-old humor and opinion columnist living in tropical Anchorage, Alaska. His award-winning writing has appeared most frequently in The Anchorage Daily News, though occasionally manages to pop up in finer national publications.
and thought, wow this is interesting, a young adult doing some actual work as a columist and apparently being successful... But then I actually read part of the body of his work labeled You Just Can't Lose when Jesus is on Your Cheerleading Squad.
After reading the first page of his column, I stopped and returned to the top of the page to make sure I read this correctly:
Beckerman's first book, Death to All Cheerleaders: One Adolescent Journalist's Cheerful Diatribe Against Teenage Plasticity was published September 2000 on Infected Press.
What sort of crack addict book company would publish the crap this kid is writing... well Infected Press I guess, but the question was rather hypothetical, heh.
This kid is not a columnist, nor does this work represent that he is able to relay any sort of humor. Although, it appeared that he was attempting to do some sort of column with some investigative reporting included in order to back up... the... uh... opinions? or something I guess... that he had. The column started off ok, not of very high quality but decent enough to continue reading. But there are various points in the column when you can realize that this guy is actually just a jackass trying to rant a few loose viewpoints. Here, he starts off asking about the modesty in the cheerleader's dress, and then before the topic has even been finished he throws in an inflammable remark-type question that the guest responds to anyhow (Marty = MB, Guest = Rose):
MB: You dress more modestly?
Rose: Yes.
MB:
Rose: Right.
MB: They're like, knee-level instead of mid-thigh, or what?
Rose: No.
MB: By the way, how does Jesus tie into cheerleading again?
Where did this guy get his interviewing skills? Seems like he pulled them out of his ass. Note to self: Never pull interviewing skills out of Marty's ass, you can get better ones out of your own ass.
He then goes on to ask completely ridiculous questions in what apparently is supposed to be a semi-serious interview:
MB: Would you ever, like, consider taking one of the girls' pompoms and painting it green, and then setting it on fire so it would be like the Burning Bush or something?
Rose: No. We're not extremists.
MB: But that would be hilarious, wouldn't it?
Apparently, Rose thinks she is too good for my question.
This could maybe be classified under humor (section: lame) but what is it doing in an interview within an investigative opinion column? This is ridiculous.
The first page then ends with this portion of a second interview with the president of another Christian Cheerleading Organization:
"So obviously both cheerleading and religion have come under scrutiny and criticism over the years," I say. "How would you respond to people who might themselves say 'Death To All Cheerleaders And There Is No God?'"
"They would say what?" Coleman inquires.
"You heard me," I inform. "They would say cheerleading is worthless, and then go preach glorious Atheism."
"Anytime you get students involved in anything extracurricular, that's meaningful. You get them off the streets. Cheerleading is a character-builder, and there's a lot of positive things you can learn from athletics. As for faith, I think you have to walk the walk."
It's at this point in the conversation I realize I'm completely bored, and proceed to hang up the phone. Fuck walking.
You can finally sort of see where this kid is coming from: a place of no direction, morality, or ethics. He starts out with an inflammable question, hoping to get a repsonse he can poke at. But, when he is faced with some actual facts and serious views about life in the response, he cowers away and avoids all contact.
I gave this guy a tad of my attention, believing that he might have some serious views on things... boy was I wrong. Don't let this guy pull a fast one on you - don't read his column (and possibly any other columns). He is, simply put, a jackass not worth paying attention to.