… and I’ll tell you why.

This is only one of a many commercials like this. You may have seen one from Sprint that’s very similar: three people are stuck on a ski lift, and the commercial talks about how these three people have awesome Sprint phones so they can visit an alternate reality (be at work, be at the beach, check Facebook, whatever.) Back in the day, when you were stuck with two other people on a ski lift, you might… you know… talk to them. Face to face.

Same thing goes for the Verizon commercial above:  you’re camping with your kids, and the little brats are too busy texting to pay attention to what’s going on out there. Developing decent social skills is awkward enough as it is — do kids really need a way out of every uncomfortable situation?

I don’t see how marketers can think this kind of escapism is a virtue. To me, it’s not a selling point at all.

// end rant

First, I want to share a video from the talent show at GSPP (my graduate program.) It’s a tongue-in-cheek commentary on efficiency and equity in economics, described by its creator, my colleague Jay, as

…  superficially an allocation problem.  But the subtext is really about contrasts in ideology.  This is expressed through the antediluvian hero and the modern heroine and then punctuated, somewhat heavy-handedly, through the Oreos.

Without further ado:

My problem: my motherboard only supports 2 SATA slots, so only two hard drives for me. Buying a new motherboard is really cheap these days, but the problem with that option is that my processor’s socket type (939) has been deprecated. Add to that that my RAM is DDR2 and most new motherboards now only take DDR3, and my only real option is to build a new computer altogether. I figured I could recycle some parts of my old computer and turn it into a dedicated media PC.

… and then I started doing the math.

$714. Gulp. Looks like I’ll hold off for a while!

The fact is that TMZ was indeed first, and that–this time–they happened to be right. TMZ’s strategy involves paying for tips and paparazzi journalism, and doesn’t necessarily make for the most reliable news. Some major European outlets, including Britain’s The Sun, use these kinds of tactics, but in the United States, the practice is generally frowned upon. The Sun, coincidentally, is headlining that a “painkiller injection” killed Jackson, while the New York Times article I linked to above merely states that he was on medication. That, to me, is emblematic of this journalistic divide: one set of outlets is quick to report the (any) news, while the other is more measured and thorough in its approach.

Besides, I think it is ridiculous to rebuke other media outlets for taking “longer” to report the story; in this age of instantaneous communication and desemination of information, taking an hour or longer to get your facts straight seems like the smart thing to do. The backlash a gossip site like TMZ might encounter when it gets a story wrong would probably be very small in comparison to the criticism heaped on CNN or the New York Times.