Black Friday’s Black for a Different Reason Today as the world mourns what the latest count reveals to be 155 people dead in Mumbai. The past three days have been a nightmare for India and those dear to the wounded or killed in the wide-spread terrorist attacks made upon the country’s bustling, financial capital. Three hundred twenty people–many of them tourists (targeted for just that reason)–were seriously injured in addition to those slain, and the latest news is that the five Jewish hostages taken have been murdered. India is, for now, blaming Pakistan and potentially looking to Jihadist groups as the perpetrators of these violent crimes, but everyone’s holding his or her breath to see how many more will be reported missing or dead and how the siege will play out.

Putin’s Wily Ways have seen the light of day again. Why can’t we shake the feeling that Vladimir’s a total creep? Probably because he is. Seven years ago, in the first optimistic years of his presidency, Putin assured both Russia and the world that changing the constitution for the benefit of one man was wrong and would corrode the greater good. Saying he would not extend the presidential term past four years, Vlad seemed dignified, on the side of right, ready to turn away from power if it meant the country was one step further from its bloody, dictatorial past. Well, fast forward to the present, and he’s helping what some have called his puppet, Dmitry Medvedev, do just that: change the constitution to accommodate a greater-than-four-year term for Russia’s principle in command, leading many to wonder what sneaky things P is up to and whether they involve another go at the post.

The Lori Drew MySpace Case Verdict is raising questions folks should, truth be told, have been asking for years now. Can–should–lying about your identity be considered a crime? Should doing so for malicious intent–perhaps with devastating results–be call for a misdemeaner charge, one of a felony or nothing at all? I cannot begin to unpack the rage this case evinces in me, but suffice it to say, charging Drew on three misdemeanors falls very, very short of what I’d charge the monster with.

…and to mitigate some of this doom and gloom, I’ll move on to slightly more pleasant, holiday-related matters:

Turkey Food Coma has subsided enough to encourage even present-economy-stricken buyers from their wallet-hugging, to rush over to the mall and to the oasis of sales they’re sure to find there this Black Friday 2008.

JT lies about taking a break, but for a good cause… Although Justin Timberlake said that he won’t be working on his solo music for a while, Mr. SexyBack has posted a new song on his MySpace, titled “Follow My Lead,” which will benefit Shriners Hospitals for Children. The download includes interviews and a live performance of the song. It also features new artist Esmee Denters, who is signed to Timberlake’s label, Tennman Records. Pretty hot track!

Rihanna’s following the lead… For charity, that is. The glam singer is featured in a new commercial for Gucci’s upcoming Tattoo Heart Christmas Collection, where 25% of all sales will go to UNICEF. It is a very strange ad indeed, and the songstress looks a bit smug and lonely if you ask me. Chris Brown, where you at? You be the judge, check it here.

Is Coldplay “Lost?”… They are swimming around Internet rumors saying the longtime quartet has broken up. The news was posted by NME early Wednesday, but was taken down after a few hours. Though it might be a false alarm, lead singer Chris Martin might have been the one who set it off.

Blink 182, remember them?… Of course we do. According to former member Mark Hoppus, it seems like a couple of serious events have brought the trio back to talking terms, all after a bitter breakup in 2005. A refresher: Blink’s producer Jerry Finn died in August, while drummer Travis Barker survived a deadly plane crash in September. Suffice to say, another comical music video would be awesome to see.

First MySpace, now YouTube?… Music and the Internet is collaborating once again via YouTube Live for a streamed event that will feature artists like Will.i.am, Akon, Katy Perry, and Joe Satriani. The event will be held in front of your computer screen on Saturday November 22, at 5 p.m. PST and 8 p.m. EST. Really, who’s going to spend a Saturday night in front of their computer? (Ahem…)

“I believe there is something out there watching us. Unfortunately, it’s the government.”

-Woody Allen

Sixty one years ago this week, The House Un-American Activities Committee began its now well-known Hollywood investigation. The search resulted in nine day hearings and the historic “blacklist” of ten, and later more than 300, Communist sympathizers or perceived Communist sympathizers in the industry. Its “witch hunt”-like nature led Arthur Miller to write The Crucible, a play that uses the Salem witch trials as an allegory for Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s actions.

HUAAC folded in on itself in 1975 (the same year the Vietnam War ended, Franco died and Mitchell, Haldeman and Ehrlichman were found guilty of covering up Watergate…seems like a year for being fed up).

Has the government, however, made “butting out” progress since then?

I guess, being the government, “butting out” isn’t really in its job description. Apart from its “regular” obligations, it’s responsible for checking those things menacing to national, and thus presumably each individual’s personal, security.

Cold War bound McCarthy wanted to eliminate the Communist threat. Bush and Congress passed the USA Patriot Act in 2001 to defend the country against terrorism. The perils both Communism and Terrorism presented to the country at each time were, in a way, legitimate. Turns out the Rosenbergs were spies after all. September 11th really did happen.

But where do we draw the line?

Benjamin Franklin’s quote “Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety” pretty much encapsulates the fact that the end doesn’t always justify the means, especially when it encroaches on civil right (one of the reasons The House of Reps called their counter Patriot Act the Benjamin Franklin True Patriot Act, a Kucinich/Paul sponsored document about which I can comment little for or against as I my knowledge extends not far).

Then again, I don’t know. Detectives obtain search warrants to look through private property and personal correspondences all the time. The law permits them the right to do so should they have “reason” to believe that search will yield proof that a felony, for example, has been committed.

So what’s the difference?

Every time I try to figure out where one differs from the other, justify both or neither, I stonewall myself with counterarguments (it’s very tiring).

But as long as dangerous name calling, rife with implication, isn’t dead (and it isn’t), don’t we have to try to figure that out? The House of Representatives has had its own kerfuffles lately. House Republicans have accused House Democrats and such institutions as Columbia University of being “anti-American” for not supporting certain energy obtaining measures.

I don’t want to make this a Republican v. Democrat issue. I hate hearing the “Republicans are evil. Democrats are Saints” litany. It’s tantamount to childishly painting the political arena black and white (where black is “bad,” “white” good) rather than red and blue. I have to say both sides do a disgusting amount of tomato throwing.

The point, though, is that I think our government still breathes down our necks too much for comfort. Frankly, what with the Pellicano, MySpace and Facebook voyeurism feverishly (and often dangerously) making its way to computer screens and phones around the globe, everyone does and perhaps far more than the government really does.

While the whole “McCarthyism” description used as a symbol for American Totalitarianism has gotten pretty stale, and we’re a lot better off than many countries have ever been, we shouldn’t abide by moral relativism. Just because we’re freer by comparison doesn’t mean we’re free enough.

Personally, I’m not a fan of big government. In an ideal world, there wouldn’t be a government at all. We wouldn’t need one. But I think that one thing most people can probably agree on is that we don’t live in an ideal world, and Sir Thomas More’s dreams, or at least what have been retroactively interpreted as those dreams, aren’t likely to come true.

That being the case, let’s not let this 61st anniversary be a deja vu moment.

After the Virginia Tech shootings in 2007, many members of social networking sites changed their profile pictures to a VT ribbon, in honor of the victims of the shooting. The ribbon often appeared in either black or maroon, symbolizing either mourning for the dead or support for the VT community. When the shootings at Northern Illinois University took place last week, NIU memorial ribbons similarly became widespread on Facebook and MySpace. Being a “Huskie,” the school’s mascot, was not only a meaningful label for NIU students, faculty and staff, but suddenly also for the extended community that radiated out from NIU memorial groups and the friends and families of the victims.

The shared visual language of these two tragedies, signals more generally how we are approaching mourning online. The images of the ribbon and the mascot are quickly and easily reproducible in a digital environment, creating what could be considered a “brand” of mourning. In an environment where copying and pasting is a regular act of creation, survivor guilt becomes easier to address. Being public about one’s guilt or mourning has always been an important part of moving forward after a loss. The cross-cultural ancient rituals surrounding death— dressing and viewing the deceased, the celebration of life, the placing of markers at gravesites— are ways for mourners to participate publicly in moving forward. The act of memorialization is the first step in a form of forgetting, each distinct practice of mourning being a stylization of a culture’s particular needs. In these cases, joining in the online visual culture of mourning appears to play an important role in dealing with survivor guilt, giving internet users a simple way to express their grief. Many of the Facebook and MySpace users changing their profile pictures this week, for example, are not members of the immediate NIU community.

Using corporate language and branding tactics nonetheless may be less than ideal, as it expresses noncommercial mourning and guilt in a readymade language of commodity advertisement. The juxtaposition is at once disconcerting and entirely natural. In the case of the school shootings, the corporate university brands are more than familiar; they are the iconic images of a carefully wrought visual culture of power, strength and courage. On a very basic level, they convey what needs conveying and so they rose to the top of the great mix of our ever-expanding digital raw material.

What is particularly interesting about the Facebook and MySpace community’s response to the NIU Shootings is the rapid production of these spaces and user-created media about the shootings. The Facebook group “Pray for Northern Illinois University Students and Families” was created a mere hour and a half after the shootings occurred and membership rose exponentially, to 103,358 members a mere two days after its inception. Similarly, countless digital memorials to 9/11 have been created even while the process of creating the physical memorial continues. Both groups feature media made by mourners, a digital equivalent of the items left at roadside memorials and spontaneous shrine sites. Media offerings include documentation of the spontaneous shrines at NIU, of the six crosses representing the shooter and his victims, and user-created images of solidarity and support. Most of these images are composed of the NIU memorial ribbon and another university’s logo and the words “Today, we are all Huskies.” Collective folk responses such as these have been common at sites of mass tragedy; for example, teddy bears were a popular theme at the Oklahoma City National Memorial, and dog tags were often left at the Vietnam Veterans memorial.

Activism also plays into online memorials, perhaps more intensely than it does for physical memorials. Nearly all of the Facebook and MySpace memorials address the Westboro Baptist Church’s announcement that “God sent the Shooter…WBC will picket their hypocritical funerals & memorials & “vigils.”” WBC pickets many vigils, memorials, funerals and public gatherings in response to mass tragedy and loss such as the funerals of soldiers, hate crime victim Matthew Shepard and other school shootings because the church sees these events as God’s “Wrath & Vengeance Against an Ungrateful Nation that has Forsaken Him & Embraced Filthy Fags.” In response, there was a call from members connected to the Facebook and MySpace memorials to set up a counter-protest and later promote when and where the counter-protests would take place:

One user, Marion Dzwonnik, composed a YouTube Video threat in response to WBC’s plans:

Another, Rich Peters III, “J.R.”, made a vlog questioning the WBC congregation on how it would act if a shooter opened fire on one of its services:

In general, the amount of user-created media and responses to the NIU shootings is already astounding, and we probably won’t see this response fade very quickly. Other tragedies, such as the Virginia Tech Shootings, Hurricane Katrina and 9/11, are still generating new-media creation. And while I’ve only taken a look at responses on two social networking sites, the landscape of online mourning extends to video- and image-sharing sites, virtual worlds and practically any other online community space.

——
Sara Hebert is a graduate student in the Digital Media Studies program at the University of Denver.

Miitt Romney, the Republicans’ top family values and big love candidate, is fearful of the internet because… he doesn’t know anything about it. Over the last few weeks, he has been turning his campaign into an anti-internet-porn crusade, taking a strong stand against sexual predators on “these networking sites.” He wants to lock up the predators “for long periods” and then “monitor them for life with GPS,” so there will be “no more walking around on the streets” for them “no more in places where there is access to children.” Mitt Romney, he’s the candidate who’s out to protect our children!

How serious is he? Very. He’s now proposing that every computer sold in America come with some kind of filtering device that would block pornography. How will that work? It won’t. Why? Because it’s assinine. How assinine? Very. Does he know that? No. In speaking about it, our new internet guru confused MySpace and YouTube.

“YouTube is a website that allows kids to network with one another and make friends and contact each other. YouTube looked to see if they had any convicted sex offenders on their website. They had 29,000.”

The sex offender statistic was released by MySpace this week. Romney has clearly never used either YouTube or MySpace, nor has anyone on his staff— at least not openly, not when Mitt’s in the office, that is, and could see what they’re seeing on their screens! Why in the world would we let Mitt protect us? Why would we hand our communications media over to Mitt Romney and his people to futz with for four or eight years? Why? Because that’s just what we need, more people writing internet legislation who don’t know the first thing about the internet!

There’s an adage that advises against mixing friends and money… but it must have been formulated before a presidential candidate could gain hundreds of thousands of virtual friends on the web, each with their own credit card.

The New York Times reported this week that Democratic presidential candidates have had more success than their Republican counterparts in channeling the infinite resources of the internet into their coffers, largely thanks to aggressive campaigning on social-networking sites.

Nearly all the candidates boast profile pages on Facebook or MySpace, the two most-popular networking sites and two of the most popular sites on the web. Facebook this month reported 30 million members worldwide and the number of MySpace users is at least double that amount.

Obama, who according to the Times is one of the leaders in online fundraising, has made more than 100,000 Facebook friends. His page boosts his image as the hipster candidatepartly by listing interests such as his favorite TV show: ESPN’s “Sportscenter.” Giuliani, who is lagging in online fundraising, has gone for a less friend-friendly approach, opting out of Facebook altogether and using a “private” MySpace page that welcomes only pre-approved friends. Why be choosy? When it comes to raising money, being an online-friend whore pays!

John Edwards, who the Times reports logs on to twenty-three social networking sites, has supplemented his profiles with casual punch e-mails, encouraging cyber-supporters by the hundreds of thousands to join the campaign.

The social-networking-site campaigns could quickly turn into a popularity contest better suited to a high school cafeteria. They’ve also already become another measure by which the mainstream press can frame the campaign as horse race long before people should be taking bets. Meantime, it’s an encouraging sign that politicians (or their advisers) are realizing that young people’s lack of interest in CSPAN and the nightly news doesn’t equal a lack of interest in politics. On the contrary, a lot of our phones and our laptops are synched to the newswires.