Friday, February 20, 2009 - Posts
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The current meta conversation burning up the net is the controversy over some media outlets' decision to publish a photo of a bruised Rihanna, post alleged battery by her boyfriend Chris Brown. The anti-publishing faction argues that it's an invasion of Rihanna's privacy, obviously an even more dire invasion than merely printing Rihanna's name in conjunction with the crime.
Gawker's Ryan Tate, in an entry discussing his site's decision to post the photo of Rihanna, says:
Critics say running the picture humiliates Rihanna at a time when she's already in emotional agony, that it pierces a zone of emotional and physical privacy already grossly violated in the apparent attack on her. Victims of domestic abuse and rape have long been accorded special rights in the criminal justice system; it is argued they should retain a similar degree of control if and when information escapes that system. Finally, it is lost on no one that sensational pictures like the Rihanna shot can bring profit-making publishers large amounts of traffic, opening publishers to charges of exploitation.
Those who support the publishing of the jarring photo of Rihanna make a similar argument to the one that I made when discussing the L.A. Times' decision to print Rihanna's name in the first place: By not printing the photo, which is clearly newsworthy, it's reinforcing the idea that she has something to be ashamed of.
It is also of note that photos of nonfamous women in domestic violence situations have been published without remark on sites like the Smoking Gun (example here). Is the outrage over Rihanna because that particular photo is so graphic? Is it because Rihanna had a pristine image, and it shatters the vaunted fantasy? If a less heralded celebrity, say, an Amy Winehouse, were in a similar domestic battery situation, would the publishing of her photos provoke such an outcry?
Finally, Newsweek has an interview with Leslie Morgan Steiner, the author of a forthcoming memoir about domestic abuse called Crazy Love. Steiner points out that Rihanna's well-publicized trauma may break down stereotypes of abused women. "I didn't understand that cycles of violence are passed from generation to generation, and I'd never known anyone who was abused," Steiner says. "I thought it only happened to poor women with children and without options."
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A post from guest blogger Abigail Pilgrim:
Maybe from now on when you sit down to confessional you'll hear a recording saying, "The following conversation may be recorded for Vatican polling purposes." But seriously, the rankings are just in from the Pope of which of the seven deadly sins men and women struggle with most often. These top five data confirm that women struggle more with internal sins: Pride, Envy, Anger, Lust, and Sloth. Men, on the other hand, take to the more active vices: Lust, Gluttony, Sloth, Anger, and Pride. So now we can add sin preference to list of ways men and women don't quite see eye to eye.
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I don't blame you, Margaret, for feeling misled and misused by Facebook, but the whole thing reminds me a bit of the coachmen of Pleasure Island offering toys and candy while quietly turning Pinocchio and the other wayward boys into donkeys. I think your outrage that its CEO "could make big bucks selling information we volunteer for our own purposes," is a healthy wake-up call. Five years into the social networking phenomenon, its naive beneficiaries are suddenly troubled that young Mr. Zuckerberg is running a business. Along with offering strangely satisfying cupcake images, movie quizzes, free karma, and opportunities to throw sheep or hatch rottweillers, Zuckerberg, without asking for compensation, has created a very valuable forum. Users all over the world put their current Faces forward and entertainingly connect with one another over years and across generations. It seems likely that providing tempting and easily acquired treats must run up expenses and follows inevitably that the clever wunderkind will seek to monetize his principal asset: many millions of members about whom so many useful, voluntarily supplied, tidbits are readily known.
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A guest post from Slate intern Margaret Johnson.
Emily, I agree that privacy is not terribly precious to many members of our generation, proven narcissists that we are, and I don't think it's impossible to reconcile our lack of concern for privacy with a desire to control our information, as Bonnie suggested. But it seems useful to clarify what kind of control we value online and why. Our desire for the last say in what happens to the information we store on Facebook is not about wanting to restrict access to our information; the reason we post anything on a social networking site in first place is that we want it to be seen. What we value is having sole power to decide how we present ourselves online, to create a stage—I mean page—and persona that we can alter when and as we choose. And since that is way more important to us than issues of privacy, I suspect that most of us are satisfied with being able to strike photographs and messages from other users' view, whether or not Facebook retains a copy. Facebook's much maligned and eventually reneged changes to their terms of use didn't threaten this control, so I disagree with you, Emily, that our desire to maintain it is the root cause of our indignation over the new terms. What actually offended us is that Big Brother Zuckerberg could make big bucks selling information we volunteer for our own purposes without his asking or in any way compensating us. It's not being seen that bothers us, it's being used.
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