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Wi-Fi Allergy a PR Stunt
ADiamond writes "There is no Wi-Fi allergy. The English DJ claiming a Wi-Fi sensitivity, chronicled earlier, was a PR stunt to promote his new album. It would appear that the stunt was highly successful, appearing in multiple high-profile media outlets like The Sun, The Telegraph, and Fox News. The article at Ars goes on to discuss the evidence, or lack-thereof, of electromagnetic spectrum sensitivity."
He's made the world a better place. Now anybody who claims to be suffering from this fake malady can be told to shut up with "Oh, that's a fake disease from an old PR stunt."
You have to remember, people were already claiming to suffer from it; it's already in the 'common knowledge' bin. He's brought nothing new to the table as far as claims go.
I mean, I would call this a stunt if the DJ did indeed acknowledge it, and said that he has no condition.
But as of now, this article is just another opinion from a journalist that the the condition is BS, and might indeed have been used as a way to promote an album.
There is nothing fundamentally wrong to promote an album based on what one believes. If the DJ really believes that he is electro-sensitive, then it makes perfect sense for him to promote an album called "electro-sensitive" by talking about his "disease" (even if everybody knows that the disease is only in his head).
What's more scary is not that its used as a PR tool, but the fact that the media was so gullible to just pass it along....
I've noticed boing boing has had increasingly bad and misleading posts/articles lately, down to "what caused these waves in the snow" and other random BS. Whatever draws an audience, and the clicking of advertising links, I suppose. You don't see crappy articles like these in the NYT.
moox. for a new generation.
He already has it. It's called Asshole disease. In rare cases, it cause a loss in popularity, being socially ostracized, and attempts to win back old friends as society turns their back on you for being a douchebag.
Om, nomnomnom...
meh. The media spends so much time propagating garbage and so little doing background research I enjoy seeing them get owned like this. If you're a little guy trying to get noticed, I see no real harm in using their stupidity to your advantage. Guerrilla marketing ftw!
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
So why do the anti-empirical morons insist on taking things like wifi allergy seriously, and not PR-stunt allergy?
Well, because if I don't take is wifi allergy seriously, then why should he take my fibromyalgia seriously? Or your chronic pain disorder? What I think is happening is that there are two main effects at work here. One is a result of a kind of "post-scientific" thinking, the same kind of thinking that drives the New Age movement, basically the idea that nobody is wrong, everyone has their own opinion about the world, and that opinion is valid. If you subscribe to this school of thought, one of the rigours of it is that you have to assume each person is capable of creating a truth. And one of the benefits of course is that you can believe whatever you want and others like you will eat all your bullshit up with a smile. A lot of the ills of our society can be tracked to this kind of reasoning.
The other problem is our society's consistent inability to treat mental illness as an illness and not as a moral failing. Most of the mysterious illnesses of our society, from wifi allergies to "travelling" pain, to fibromyalgia and chronic pain disorder, are all manifestations of dysthemia and depression. People simply refuse to acknowledge that they're depressed, because of the moral stigma attaching to mental illness, and so the illness manifests itself in other ways.
Calling all these people stupid, however, is just counter-productive and innaccurate. Many of these people aren't stupid in the intellectual sense, even if they lack self-knowledge. Many people here at slashdot, though not stupid, also fail at self-knowledge. Our society simply doesn't encourage self-knowledge, in part because of that moral stigma attaching to mental illness, psychotherapy, or really anything to do with the workings of our emotions. These people are reacting to an illness the only way they know how, because they've never been taught better.
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
I wonder if they'll publish the retraction of the story tomorrow, with similarly big headlines. They usually do ... right?
No sig today...
How many more over-the-top summaries do slashdot feel the need to concoct? Nowhere in the article does it say that the UK DJ has admitted his wi-fi allergy is a PR stunt. It doesn't mention this in any other news sources either.
It is a publicity stunt IN THE OPINION OF THE AUTHOR OF THE ARTICLE. Thanks for presenting somebody's opinion as fact in order to generate controversy, slashdot. Again.
Its a fairly interesting study, I'll admit. However, after a brief reading of it, I noticed:
1) The methodology doesn't say whether the generator is in view of the subject, and the phrasing suggests that it is. The generator could have had tells.
2) Doesn't mention how the administrator was isolated from the subjects in the double-blind experiments.
3) It states that a single-blind was first conducted, then goes on to say that the double-blind was conducted with "the same parameters."
It would be nice to see these clarified and the results reproduced. If there were issues with the "double-blind" (either the administrator or the generator being observable), then the first run of the single blind, and subsequent weeding out of the test subjects, would select for those who would be able to recognize the tells.
This particular paragraph gave me a bit of pause too:
"In our experience, the patients' clinical responses could not always be reproduced completely, but the objective Iriscorder, EKG, and respirometer could be. However, the responses were definitely different from controls or placebo challenges. In our experience over the years, we have found partial reproduction of symptoms on repeat challenge to be as significant as total reproduction. Therefore, significant differences from controls in objective ineasurementa were deemed valid."
There are some other questionable assumptions in the discussion section as well.
Still, it would nice to see the experiment reproduced, since they did manage to obtain some interesting results that would be worthwhile investigating.