I have one major problem with TFA: the assumption that Thompson - and Gonzo - is just journalism about drugs. Anyone who has read Thompson beyond the copy Fear and Loathing they bought at their bong shop knows that Thompson's work was never about the drugs (Burroughs had already exhausted that boring genre). Sure drugs were there - because they had to be there - but what made Thompson great was his clarity of language and use of creative exaggeration in what a supposedly 'neutral' media. He wrote about politics, journalism, sports, and the American Dream, but rarely drugs. Most of F&L was highly exaggerated to prove a point and it wasn't that drugs were cool. It was - mostly- about the fact that the Old Generation couldn't understand the New, that there was a generation 'forever thinking that just behind some narrow door in all his favorite bars, men in red Pendleton shirts are getting incredible kicks from things he'll never know.'
That is why we need another Thompson. We don't need someone to write about technology, we need someone to write about the things worth writing about and weave technology into the fabric of their work so that a new Generation can understand it. The media is still run by people who can remember a life without computers and video games. But for the new generation, that technology has always been around so don't care - they are appliances. It was the same with the drugs in the 70's. That's what made Thompson so powerful - he could write about Nixon, mad from gin, roving the halls of the White House in a way that made sense to a new generation of people. He never wrote about anything new or innovative, he just did it all in a way that made you believe he wasn't another cog in the media machine, even though at many levels, he was. All flows according to the whims of the Great Magnet.
I have been following the Jack Thompson effect for sometime now and I have tried wrap my head around why exactly he has chosen roam around the country like a snake-oil peddler. It's easy to assume he does it for the money, but in many of these cases he's not the being paid. He tries to files these friend-of-the-court motions and calls himself an expert in a field that doesn't exist (often citing his television appearances as somehow legitimate proof of his expertise).
Old Jackie is dumb and insane. He is a hateful little wretch of a man doing everything he can to reconcile his crumbling world view. This is not a matter of republican or democrat, liberal or conservative. Jackie is a whore and a junkie of the first order and he'll side with anyone who will get him a taste. He comes up with dubious data from studies conducted by his cronies that supposedly expose the dangerous and seedy underbelly of the vicious peddlers in the video game market. Yet his attacks are vapor all over and he knows it. There is an old saying amongst the legal crowd:
If the facts are on your side, pound the facts. If the facts are not on your side, pound the table
This is how Old Jackie rolls. It will bite him in the end, though, when people remember more about his woefully disillusioned ramblings then they do about his countless attempts to ban video games state by state. He has only been allowed to get this far because gamers are a notoriously lazy bunch, but that will only last so long. Eventually, as they say in the gamer crowd, Old Jackie will get omgwtfpwned and go crawling back to whatever rat-infested Florida swamp that he came out of.
Far more interesting than most of the stuff Kessler discusses here (stunted writing and four(!) Mel Brooks references), is what is going on beneath the surface. He is clearly having some serious medical issues of his own. He starts tripping balls when he's looking at the hotel carpet, has phantom psychosomatic pains, and starts coughing and jabbering for no apparent reason in the middle of the show. What is his purpose here anyway - to tell us that technology is making medicine better? Thanks. Pop-science or no, this is more a sad look at a confused and deranged former techie trying to find his way in a world that seems to be closing in around him than it is about how technology is 'rebooting' my doctor. Oprah will probably love it though, and I suppose that's all that matters.
That's just it. The beauty(?) of this system is that it happens prior to conciousness, so you won't want to take a closer look because you won't 'know' that you saw anything. In fact, it would almost make more sense for the "viewer" to be different than the person that looks at the flagged images. I wonder what would happen if you had a few of these hooked up so that the first viewer filtered a bunch of images and then someone else filters through the flagged images from that person and so forth...
Not only do you not have to press the button but you can look at the data ten-times as fast. Imagine this scenario:
You're a Homeland Security Goon at the airport and the boys in the NSA have provided you with the face of a terrorist that may be walking around the airport. You memorize the picture of the guy, put on your nifty EEG space helmet, and tap into the face recognition system camera database at the airport. You then sift through thousands of photos in mere minutes. Human recognition works FASTER than human consciousness and therefore can identify the images before you even 'know' it. The EEG can detect the signals of your brain recognizing images and when it gets a 'hit', it dumps that image them into a cache for closer review at a later time.
Think about it... banks of people in a windowless office with EEG helmets on pouring over pictures from every corner of the globe looking for whomever. Fascinating and scary at the same time...
What happens when your console explodes? You have to rebuy all of your games? Not only will this pissoff Gamefly and the like, but I can't imagine developers would be too happy about it. It's like parking your brand new car in the garage at home and then only being able to park it there for ever and ever. Even if your house falls over and your garage burns down.
Now all they need is consoles that only let their owners play on them... Thumbprint please. Thank you, Billy, you may play now.
How many feet does Sony have to shoot itself in?
This is pretty clearly a case of viral marketing. Sony's ad agency for this piece was TBWA, who market themselves as 'disruptive idea makers.' As has already been stated many times, why spend cash on a huge campaign when you have the collective dissemination might of the media giants to do it for you. Down to the brass tacks here folks - Do you really think little Billy and Jane give two craps about the socio-political aspects of this ad? All they want is the new Pokemon Digi-farm 2007 Gold Extra Special Photo Pack 12... Even if you make the argument that the PSP is marketed at older gamers, say 21-30, the ad is still effective. Most people here are gamers, and you all know as well as I do that gamers are a decidedly amoral lot - junkies. They might complain about the lack of black people in Warcraft on the forums but they're still logging in every day to loot that next epic. Same philosophy as the 'anti-smoking' ads that the Tobacco Co's put out - the CONTENT of the message means nothing because at the end of the day its still 30 seconds spent talking about smoking.
Slashdot Mirror
I have one major problem with TFA: the assumption that Thompson - and Gonzo - is just journalism about drugs. Anyone who has read Thompson beyond the copy Fear and Loathing they bought at their bong shop knows that Thompson's work was never about the drugs (Burroughs had already exhausted that boring genre). Sure drugs were there - because they had to be there - but what made Thompson great was his clarity of language and use of creative exaggeration in what a supposedly 'neutral' media. He wrote about politics, journalism, sports, and the American Dream, but rarely drugs. Most of F&L was highly exaggerated to prove a point and it wasn't that drugs were cool. It was - mostly- about the fact that the Old Generation couldn't understand the New, that there was a generation 'forever thinking that just behind some narrow door in all his favorite bars, men in red Pendleton shirts are getting incredible kicks from things he'll never know.' That is why we need another Thompson. We don't need someone to write about technology, we need someone to write about the things worth writing about and weave technology into the fabric of their work so that a new Generation can understand it. The media is still run by people who can remember a life without computers and video games. But for the new generation, that technology has always been around so don't care - they are appliances. It was the same with the drugs in the 70's. That's what made Thompson so powerful - he could write about Nixon, mad from gin, roving the halls of the White House in a way that made sense to a new generation of people. He never wrote about anything new or innovative, he just did it all in a way that made you believe he wasn't another cog in the media machine, even though at many levels, he was. All flows according to the whims of the Great Magnet.
Old Jackie is dumb and insane. He is a hateful little wretch of a man doing everything he can to reconcile his crumbling world view. This is not a matter of republican or democrat, liberal or conservative. Jackie is a whore and a junkie of the first order and he'll side with anyone who will get him a taste. He comes up with dubious data from studies conducted by his cronies that supposedly expose the dangerous and seedy underbelly of the vicious peddlers in the video game market. Yet his attacks are vapor all over and he knows it. There is an old saying amongst the legal crowd:
If the facts are on your side, pound the facts. If the facts are not on your side, pound the table
This is how Old Jackie rolls. It will bite him in the end, though, when people remember more about his woefully disillusioned ramblings then they do about his countless attempts to ban video games state by state. He has only been allowed to get this far because gamers are a notoriously lazy bunch, but that will only last so long. Eventually, as they say in the gamer crowd, Old Jackie will get omgwtfpwned and go crawling back to whatever rat-infested Florida swamp that he came out of.
Far more interesting than most of the stuff Kessler discusses here (stunted writing and four(!) Mel Brooks references), is what is going on beneath the surface. He is clearly having some serious medical issues of his own. He starts tripping balls when he's looking at the hotel carpet, has phantom psychosomatic pains, and starts coughing and jabbering for no apparent reason in the middle of the show. What is his purpose here anyway - to tell us that technology is making medicine better? Thanks. Pop-science or no, this is more a sad look at a confused and deranged former techie trying to find his way in a world that seems to be closing in around him than it is about how technology is 'rebooting' my doctor. Oprah will probably love it though, and I suppose that's all that matters.
That's just it. The beauty(?) of this system is that it happens prior to conciousness, so you won't want to take a closer look because you won't 'know' that you saw anything. In fact, it would almost make more sense for the "viewer" to be different than the person that looks at the flagged images. I wonder what would happen if you had a few of these hooked up so that the first viewer filtered a bunch of images and then someone else filters through the flagged images from that person and so forth...
Not only do you not have to press the button but you can look at the data ten-times as fast. Imagine this scenario: You're a Homeland Security Goon at the airport and the boys in the NSA have provided you with the face of a terrorist that may be walking around the airport. You memorize the picture of the guy, put on your nifty EEG space helmet, and tap into the face recognition system camera database at the airport. You then sift through thousands of photos in mere minutes. Human recognition works FASTER than human consciousness and therefore can identify the images before you even 'know' it. The EEG can detect the signals of your brain recognizing images and when it gets a 'hit', it dumps that image them into a cache for closer review at a later time. Think about it... banks of people in a windowless office with EEG helmets on pouring over pictures from every corner of the globe looking for whomever. Fascinating and scary at the same time...
What happens when your console explodes? You have to rebuy all of your games? Not only will this pissoff Gamefly and the like, but I can't imagine developers would be too happy about it. It's like parking your brand new car in the garage at home and then only being able to park it there for ever and ever. Even if your house falls over and your garage burns down. Now all they need is consoles that only let their owners play on them... Thumbprint please. Thank you, Billy, you may play now. How many feet does Sony have to shoot itself in?
This is pretty clearly a case of viral marketing. Sony's ad agency for this piece was TBWA, who market themselves as 'disruptive idea makers.' As has already been stated many times, why spend cash on a huge campaign when you have the collective dissemination might of the media giants to do it for you. Down to the brass tacks here folks - Do you really think little Billy and Jane give two craps about the socio-political aspects of this ad? All they want is the new Pokemon Digi-farm 2007 Gold Extra Special Photo Pack 12... Even if you make the argument that the PSP is marketed at older gamers, say 21-30, the ad is still effective. Most people here are gamers, and you all know as well as I do that gamers are a decidedly amoral lot - junkies. They might complain about the lack of black people in Warcraft on the forums but they're still logging in every day to loot that next epic. Same philosophy as the 'anti-smoking' ads that the Tobacco Co's put out - the CONTENT of the message means nothing because at the end of the day its still 30 seconds spent talking about smoking.
you had neophilia and amnesia at the same time. Imagine the pleasure of discovering your new right hand every 20 seconds.