Lately, I have noticed a disturbing trend in movies and TV. It seems to me that scriptwriters and authors *borrow* extensively from websites when detailing locales, incidents and current events. It almost seems as if screenwriters "Google" the topic, then populate vast sections of their scripts, almost verbatim with rich details gleaned from various internet websites. Oftentimes, even the mistakes of fact survive intact. I was watching a prime time TV show the other night when part of the story line dealt with oppression of their people by a certain regime. It all seemed like Deja Vu to me, so I googled the topic, and voila, the script read almost word for word from a webpage I found.

It won't be long before authors glean a good percentage of information from the comfort of their easy chairs. (It is probably already happening.)

Anyone else notice this trend?

Nox

"The poison ivy of the eyes"
Wim Wenders
TV screenwriters almost NEVER get anything right.
Watch any of those 80s Lifetime chanell illness of the week movies or 50s "Highway Patrol" reruns and you'll see it is has always been like that. Don't blame the internet.

Well, access to information has its pros and cons. I recall many years ago (b.t.n. = before the net) when somebody proudly showed me the new logo some graphic designer had made for his video company. It was an absolute copy of a logo from a video production company based in Spain. I showed him a magazine where I had seen it (a trade mag that didn't circulate outside of Europe) and he really got mad. Nowadays it's both easier to do something like that as well as harder to get away with it. Just wait for some lawsuits to settle some rules... the one time I felt the script writers were really into net stuff, was that episode of Drew Carey dealing with cosplay... mmhh...

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Originally posted by Nox:
Lately, I have noticed a disturbing trend in movies and TV. It seems to me that scriptwriters and authors *borrow* extensively from websites when detailing locales, incidents and current events. It almost seems as if screenwriters "Google" the topic, then populate vast sections of their scripts, almost verbatim with rich details gleaned from various internet websites. Oftentimes, even the mistakes of fact survive intact. I was watching a prime time TV show the other night when part of the story line dealt with oppression of their people by a certain regime. It all seemed like Deja Vu to me, so I googled the topic, and voila, the script read almost word for word from a webpage I found.

It won't be long before authors glean a good percentage of information from the comfort of their easy chairs. (It is probably already happening.)

Anyone else notice this trend?

Nox

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Inaccuracy and bias of the information found through a search engine, plus wide and polished distribution of the TV. Just charming -- cultural monoculture being created in front of our eyes.

Right. There was no plagiarism before google ;-)

I'd rather this sort of monoculture be created before our eyes than in back rooms. At least then we can google too, and call BS when we see it.

I think the net is more of a force against monoculture than for - there's an interesting bit in Grant Morrison's Invisibles where a character declares that he's working to create a world where everyone gets what they want, even the 'bad guys.'

For the net to be useful to people, it need also be useful to people with goals we don't like. Better that than useful only to people we do like, because then we have to fight over who 'we' are, and who it is 'we' like...

I guess some research is better than none. But the people who half ass it, there work will be kind of half assed. It goes with the saying garbage in garbage out.

perhaps the easier it is to produce half-assed work and drop it into a mass media channel, the more half-assed work there will be, and the faster the crap 'monoculture' will discredit itself. this only works when there are alternative means of distributing other cultural products, but the net seems to be that. so maybe this is a good thing?

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Originally posted by toadgod:
perhaps the easier it is to produce half-assed work and drop it into a mass media channel, the more half-assed work there will be, and the faster the crap 'monoculture' will discredit itself. this only works when there are alternative means of distributing other cultural products, but the net seems to be that. so maybe this is a good thing?

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But the whole problem with monoculture is that something that would barely make sense as a part of large system becomes the core and dominating force.

People who are aware of the context and alternatives will be disgusted, but if most of people were looking for things on the Internet, TV wouldn't even go there fishing for "research" -- writers would know that by repeating widely-available stupidity they will discredit themselves.

For a "normal" person the problem with the information on the Internet is that there is a lot of information, and it is NOT SAFE to believe all of it, one has to do some thinking, and take everything with a grain of salt. With mass media the assumption is that it is SAFE to just believe everything that you see, maybe with the exception of some commercials. Those things, appearance of safety and need to actively filter the garbage and form your own opinion make things fundamentally different.

One may expect that large amount of bullshit thrown into what is supposed to be "safe" and "trusted" media will discredit it, however media discredits itself not through bullshit but through inconsistency -- say, during the Cold War both sides were spouting ridiculous amounts of bullshit at each other in everything from political speeches to news to art, yet without the ability to verify it, or understanding the cultures and complex nature of the societies, people had no way to discover the inconsistencies, media remained trusted, and bullshit stereotypes were taken for being the truth (and some remain now).

With traditional media vs. the access to raw opinions posted on the Internet (+ability to read them, of course) we can see the same thing as domestic propaganda vs. traveling to a foreign and not exactly friendly country -- only people who for some reason had to go, look and study, will know where the media picked something valid, and where it is widely spouting something from the realm of kooks and ignorance.

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I guess some research is better than none. But the people who half ass it, there work will be kind of half assed. It goes with the saying garbage in garbage out.

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If people base their work on someone's half -assed work which was based on someone else's half-assed work which was based on another someone else's half-assed work ......................
I wonder what the end result would be.

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Originally posted by toadgod:
Right. There was no plagiarism before google ;-)

I'd rather this sort of monoculture be created before our eyes than in back rooms. At least then we can google too, and call BS when we see it.

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The problem is, the distinction between truth, half-truth, and outright bullshit becomes blurred. The internet is like a virus. "Urban legends" are created overnight, and they spread like wildfire. Who hasn't received a frantic e-mail from a friend about something they heard, from a friend of a brother of someone's uncle who was actually there? The internet makes it easy for almost any Tom, Dick, or Harry (or Jane) produce something that looks half way professional. In the past, printed matter (even if a bald faced lie), meant one actually had to have the means to have it printed and distributed. Shoddy work and research manifested itself in the likes of 50 cent supermarket tabloids. Today, one could presumably, in the comfort of their own trailors, produce a page that rivals any Fortune 500 company as far as appearance goes. My belief is that people tend to "believe" what presents itself professionally to the eye.

In the end, sifting real information from bullshit becomes harder and harder. Ultimately, no one will know what the real truth is/was, and history will forever be muddled by mass media "misinformation." I wish Marshall McLuhan was here to see this.

Nox

The internet doesn't stop Lazy researchers from being lazy, they'll still do just the minimum to get by, but it does enable good resarchers to be even better. The next net-research bottleneck is how seldom some people check their bloody email....

Let me take a stab at these posts... I'm going to get all abstract here, rather than debate too many particular examples.

First, Nox, while a particular email may be, the internet is not like a virus at all. Both posts seem to confuse the medium with a chosen message that supports the particular argument's conclusion and ignores all else. The internet is a transport medium (wires + radio) with a set of open communication protocols thrown on top (apologies to people smarter than me if I'm mangling the engineering terms here). Innovation occurs at the edge of the network, rather than needing to be centrally engineered INTO the network like the plain old telephone network, tv, etc. The internet isn't email (and certainly isn't particular emails whose content we don't approve of), isn't Gopher or FTP, isn't even the WWW or p2p - these are applications developed and deployed at the edge of the network. How long will each of them last? Who knows? What applications will replace them? Who knows? But they won't be centrally designed and built into the network so they won't be in service of the monoculture (hopefully).

The issue of *trust* is not something that is tied to a medium, unless you're talking about authenticating packets (in which case the internet is probably more worthy of trust that TV, Print or Radio - or at least has the ability to provide more trust, even if this ability isn't in widespread use). Trust, at least, in the sense we seem to be talking about it, is tied to brand identity. We don't accept information as true because we saw it on TV - after all, we watch things on TV we know are fiction, and things on TV we know are BS - we accept it because we trust the source: say, for both the sake of argument and humor, CNN. Is the Paula Zahn embarrassingly mangling sentences on your TV more trustworthy than the articles on CNN.com? Nope. So you're trusting the brand. Is there anything about the internet that would prevent a brand that existed only there - like Salon.com (I think), and not in 'mass media' channels like print or TV, from being trustworthy? Nope.

Maybe the sticking point here is intermediation. Who tells us which brands to trust? We're used to editors and publishers, who stake their businesses on their judgements of the value of what they publish, to tell us what is worth reading or looking at. But this seems like part of the problem Alex mentions, because this is either a cause or symptom of monoculture (either way, the implication is that it's bad, because we're not all the same and don't necessarily want to consume the same cultural products). But the low cost of entry to 'internet publishing' (by which we specifically mean certain applications like the WWW, whether on blogs, forums or content management systems, or email mailing lists) means no one need risk any significant capital on what they make available to the public. So - who tells us whether something is valuable or not (and the flip side is how does valuable stuff find its audience)? Well, there are different ways this happens now, and I'm sure they're changing fast. New intermediation applications will fill the current almost-vacuum. Right now we have word of mouth, we have referrals in the form of links from trusted sources, which is a form of brand-trust (for instance, I may decide to trust Prof. Glenn Reynolds' Instapundit brand, and by extension give *some* credence to articles he links to). Google already provides some intermediation by weighing the popularity of sites by the number of links leading to a given site when deciding where it should appear in its ranking. New languages like XML may lead to new ways of intermediation. Who knows? The point is that this is a dynamic situation, which isn't the case in the monoculture of Murdoch, Turner, etc., and the FCC-regulated spectrum into which big corporations dump their crap. I have full confidence in communities abilities to find ways to ultimately weigh the truth of any bit of information - we're just seeing the evolution of systems to do this with online material.

Alex, I agree with some of what you say, but where I differ is in that your POV suggests to me that, should I adopt it, I wouldn't expect anything to change. And while I think that most people are idiots (what I assume you mean when you say 'normal' ;-), I don't like to think that they're idiots by nature, and I assume that they will change with a changing environment, hopefully for the better. I think the monoculture's taken a heavy hit already. It's not down, and it's fighting back with money and lawyers and propaganda, but I think ultimately it's doomed. Take this with a grain of salt, though, because I'm not sure we mean the same thing when we use a word we haven't agreed to a definition of, and on top of that I'm not even sure what I mean when I use it ;-) But I think the monoculture is more than just the military industrial complex propaganda you mention, it's Friends and Jay Leno, too. I'm far more concerned about the RIAA than the CIA, personally.

Neko-san, that sounds a little like Zeno's paradox (Xeno's paradox?), if that's the one with the arrow that has to cover half the distance it's been shot before it can cover all of the distance, etc. which suggests, if I'm remembering your post right as I'm writing this, no matter how many times hollywood sleaziods step on the crap they produce, they'll never get all the ass out of it ;-)

There are places where the interested can read cool and accessible stuff about these issues, like <http://shirky.com/> and <http://satn.org>, among others.

Looking back over this, I think I need to learn to rely less on parenthetical elaboration. Ugh. Sorry, it's late. Hope the above is readable.

lay of the internet you no good commie dissident.

Let me lay out it our for you.. unless otherwise stated all TV shows and movies are Entertainment NOT reality. Hey an oxymoron, reality TV...

--
Tim

Who, me? I'm a libertarian capitalist. Monoculture is commie!

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Originally posted by Neko-san:
quote:[QUOTE] If people base their work on someone's half -assed work which was based on someone else's half-assed work which was based on another someone else's half-assed work ......................
I wonder what the end result would be.

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I believe that would be an eighth-assed work!


If your not outraged, you're not paying attention!

since we are on the topic...what really depresses me is that almost everyone I know dosen't recognise that most of tv is a product of that half-assed research, that most of our news is biased in some way to either promote a political point of view or sensationalize in order to obtain ratings. independant thought is almost nonexistant and quite a few people go from cradle to grave without a single original idea. what's more is that the average person is content to live an unexamined life and as a matter of fact would have it no other way. sometimes i think im an alien.

No alien, love. Just one of us.

Quote: "Just charming -- cultural monoculture being created in front of our eyes".
Funny, I misread it as "Just churning--Cultural monoculture". Thats what TV does. Churn.

Churning information half-assed or not is entertaining. The power of the media is in the minds and hands of the audience as long as there are still buttons to push. Its not a direct feed...yet

I would contribute something very creative to this thread but I am too lazy.