I'm a DJ for a very large college radio station (broadcasting all over the Boston metropolitan area in the middle of FM dial) and the most disconcerting facet of the post-wardrobe malfunction FCC crackdowns is the fact that even a single incident would result in my station being shut down. We got one complaint a few years ago (in the more tolerant era), so now, if we were to become a repeat offender, the fine--several hundred thousand dollars--would completely bankrupt the station. SInce we're independently funded through ad revenue, there's no way we could pay, and we'd be off the air--just if somebody complained to the FCC because a late-night DJ slipped up and said "Fuck" on air, even when we're actually allowed to play music containing the same word.
To me, at least, it seems incredibly obvious that the punishments are beyond the limits of sanity. The FCC is trying to look out for the standards of our community? Yes, my station plays underground rock and hip-hop at night (I DJ for those programs), but during the day, it's exclusively jazz and classical. If, at 3am, a hip-hop DJ curses, leading to a complaint and the end of the station, who really loses? I suspect that the thousands of classical and jazz listeners would be more on the losing end than the asshole who called in the complaint or any of the other people who happened to hear the word "Fuck" in the middle of the night.
The FCC is just one manifestation of how colossally fucked up governmental regulation is becoming. I'm all for the government trying to help out the people, but not when there's clearly no understanding of how the real world actually operates.
Facebook requires the good graces of its users to make money by selling the attention span of those users to advertisers. So what does Facebook do? Simple, piss off those very users it needs to make money.
Facebook, unfortunately, appears to have been extremely calculated and crafty in its decisions to roll out new features, each time building upon the level of addiction that its existing users have already reached and the larger social "necessity" of being on Facebook, especially among college and high school kids.
By the time they allowed high school students (and later anyone) to join, Facebook was already fairly established with students, who already had enough "invested" in their accounts and knew that their real friends were in the same situation. The introduction of news feed may have angered those with concerns about privacy, but certainly not enough to make a significant number of users angry enough to leave. For those that did stay, News Feed reinforces the necessity of being on Facebook, because once you do have access to that kind of information about your friends, it's hard to turn it down.
This Beacon situation feels very much like News Feed, except that the impact on solidifying Facebook "addiction" will be less marked. Facebook and its features just become too important to most users (in college, not having an account can get you some very strange looks), and Zuckerberg et al. will continue to use that to their advantage in building their revenue stream.
Slashdot Mirror
Just throw a stone at it.
I'm a DJ for a very large college radio station (broadcasting all over the Boston metropolitan area in the middle of FM dial) and the most disconcerting facet of the post-wardrobe malfunction FCC crackdowns is the fact that even a single incident would result in my station being shut down. We got one complaint a few years ago (in the more tolerant era), so now, if we were to become a repeat offender, the fine--several hundred thousand dollars--would completely bankrupt the station. SInce we're independently funded through ad revenue, there's no way we could pay, and we'd be off the air--just if somebody complained to the FCC because a late-night DJ slipped up and said "Fuck" on air, even when we're actually allowed to play music containing the same word.
To me, at least, it seems incredibly obvious that the punishments are beyond the limits of sanity. The FCC is trying to look out for the standards of our community? Yes, my station plays underground rock and hip-hop at night (I DJ for those programs), but during the day, it's exclusively jazz and classical. If, at 3am, a hip-hop DJ curses, leading to a complaint and the end of the station, who really loses? I suspect that the thousands of classical and jazz listeners would be more on the losing end than the asshole who called in the complaint or any of the other people who happened to hear the word "Fuck" in the middle of the night.
The FCC is just one manifestation of how colossally fucked up governmental regulation is becoming. I'm all for the government trying to help out the people, but not when there's clearly no understanding of how the real world actually operates.
Facebook, unfortunately, appears to have been extremely calculated and crafty in its decisions to roll out new features, each time building upon the level of addiction that its existing users have already reached and the larger social "necessity" of being on Facebook, especially among college and high school kids.
By the time they allowed high school students (and later anyone) to join, Facebook was already fairly established with students, who already had enough "invested" in their accounts and knew that their real friends were in the same situation. The introduction of news feed may have angered those with concerns about privacy, but certainly not enough to make a significant number of users angry enough to leave. For those that did stay, News Feed reinforces the necessity of being on Facebook, because once you do have access to that kind of information about your friends, it's hard to turn it down.
This Beacon situation feels very much like News Feed, except that the impact on solidifying Facebook "addiction" will be less marked. Facebook and its features just become too important to most users (in college, not having an account can get you some very strange looks), and Zuckerberg et al. will continue to use that to their advantage in building their revenue stream.