Category: Digital Culture

Double Standards at Facebook?

It took public outrage to get Facebook to back off its decision to allow video of a beheading to appear on its pages; and users still fight to get images of animal torture and pages promoting similar depravities off the site. But according to this article from Queerty.com, over 100 users were barred from access for posting a photo of two men kissing. Not two naked men having sex.  Just two men kissing. The author of the article, Matthew Tharrett suggests that it’s all too easy for  Facebook users who find homosexuality offensive to label such depictions of garden-variety romance between GLTB partners as “violating community standards.”

While Facebook may not be directly condoning the mistreatment of homosexuals, it certainly seems the company is going to need a better system if it is to remain relevant in, y’know, this century.  One minute, these companies want the Internet to be a free-for-all of vitriol, misogyny, and plagiarism on the grounds that it’s all free speech.  The next minute, this kind of thing happens, and one has to wonder.  And to what lengths are these users going to suss out these images they find so offensive?  I know there’s plenty on Facebook that would offend me, but I don’t see it because I’m not friends with people who would post it.  Duh.

Of course, if the story isn’t true, I apologize in advance.  After all, I got it from the Internet.

Casey Neistat & Fox Redefine the Movie Promo

Okay this is pretty cool, and a really interesting example of what can happen when old media meets new media to produce something extraordinary.  Filmmaker Casey Neistat was offered $25,000 by 20th Century Fox to make a video to promote the release of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.  In considering the themes the studio proposed for the project, Neistat responded that he would like to take the money and do something for the people of the Philippines whose lives were overturned by a typhoon on November 7th.  The studio said yes, and the video  below is the result.  Assuming we can take the whole story at face value — and I certainly hope we can — it’s a wonderful example of digital age meets legacy industry to produce something that wouldn’t exist without combining the best of both worlds.  Less than a decade ago, even if a filmmaker like Neistat had the same instincts, the technology simply wasn’t there to support this kind of project.  Kudos to Neistat for his approach, and kudos to whoever it was at Fox who recognized that this video actually fulfills their creative brief.  Take a moment to view.

Are designers of social engagement anti-social?

I remember very clearly a day in April 1992 when I was walking in my adoptive city of New York and thinking about my native city of Los Angeles, which was at that moment roiling with the violence known as the Rodney King Riots.  I couldn’t help but wonder whether or not copycat or sympathetic riots might flare up in New York, but the prevailing calm made me think about the contrasts in the design of these two cities  and how those differences might have played a role in race relations.  Los Angelenos, of course, live in their cars, and one of the flaws with traveling autonomously around suburban sprawl is that segregation becomes absolute. To be blunt, L.A. has rich and middle-class white parts of town, and poor and working-class, black and latino parts of town; and there is no central transportation flow that forces people of different races to coexist at least for the duration of a commute.  This is an important contrast with a place like New York City, where the six-figure executive will ride elbow-elbow on the subway with the janitor; and this kind of systemically imposed interaction is of course the type of benefit urban planners aim for in their proposed designs.

A New York Times OpEd by Allison Arieff, points to a contradiction between the use of urbanist lingo by tech giants to describe the virtual world and that industry’s general effect on the real city of San Francisco thus far.  As others have reported, companies like Facebook and Google are famously insular with elaborate, luxury campuses that obviate any need, let alone desire, to leave the office and patronize a local food shop, or more importantly, just be around people who don’t work for Facebook and Google.  San Franciscans have scoffed at the Facebook shuttles that ferry employees to work complete with wi-fi and comfy seating, while “regular residents” take public transportation.  And there’s nothing wrong with these company perks per se, but to echo what Areiff is saying with regard to tech companies now moving into the cities, there is certainly something odd about engineers of “social engagement and connectivity,” who choose not to engage with actual people.

“Tech tenants now fill 22 percent of all occupied office space in San Francisco — and represented a whopping 61 percent of all office leasing in the city last year. But they might as well have stayed in their suburban corporate settings for all the interacting they do with the outside world. The oft-referred-to “serendipitous encounters” that supposedly drive the engine of innovation tend to happen only with others who work for the same company. Which is weird.”

Read the full article at The New York Times.