Commentary Ticker
- Irony In Stone: Ancient Greek Statues Dressed as Modern Hipsters
June 19, 2013 | 9:40 amAfter a day spent wandering around the Louvre in Paris, France, studying the idyllic nude bodies of ancient Greek statues, photographer Léo Caillard got to wondering about the nature of clothing. Each of the statues represented the maximization of human perfection—the human body taken to the extreme. But most people don’t have the ideal Greek [...]
- When in Rome… Make Better Concrete: How An Ancient Mix Beats Today’s Best
June 18, 2013 | 10:40 pmFrom the Hoover Dam and the Burj Khalifa to the Panama Canal, concrete underlies the greatest of modern architectural achievements. But modern concrete, it seems, doesn’t hold a candle to Ancient Rome’s. A little history for you: the Romans were the first to engineer concrete in mass, and it was upon this concrete that they [...]
- Google Wants Balloon Internet for Everybody
June 15, 2013 | 11:06 am“Balloons. That’s right. Balloons,” says the voice of a young girl in a video for Google’s latest endeavor: bringing the world online with massive balloons. The initiative, called Project Loon, comes from Google X, the experimental lab within the company whose sole purpose is to dream up big, borderline insane, ideas. Google X created self-driving [...]
- Watch Researchers Discover a Sunken Egyptian City
June 13, 2013 | 9:36 pmThonis, the legendary port city that served as an entryway to the Egyptian empire, was long considered to be a myth. The tales of its immense power and vast riches conflicted with the evidence of its existence—mainly that there was none. Cities of such grandeur do not typically disappear off the face of the earth. [...]
- “I Am The Nucleus” and Other Bizarre Quotes By Kanye West
June 12, 2013 | 10:06 amKanye West says the darndest things. On his unrelenting quest to become his own species of hip-hop artist, he has established a reputation as irreverent, controversial, and unapologetic. Though he makes time for public grandstanding by claiming a US President “doesn’t care about black people” or interrupting the VMAs, he remains mostly quiet when it [...]
-
Archive for Commentary Ticker »
Three Little Pigs Commit Insurance Fraud. Big Bad Wolf Still Dead.
British journal the Guardian created an advert for their open journalism platform around the retelling of the Three Little Pigs in modern day. Screened for the first time on 29 February 2012, the ad opens up the premise of media as a two-way dialogue between outfits like The Guardian, and citizen journalists online.
In the style of a docudrama, the short begins with a devilishly boiling pot flashing into a digital newsroom where the editor is typing the headline “Big bad wolf boiled alive.” Next, a specialized police storms the third pig’s house to arrest him. The news of the incident (both the boiling and arrest) spreads and the fevered 24/7 news cycle takes clicks into action. Journalists, citizens, and everybody in between dig into the sea of facts, to offer their own opinion and conjecture about the case. The world is broken into either wolf or pig sympathizers as more information keeps coming.
The interactivity between the digital and physical world is expertly (and attractively) displayed making a particularly well told story told by tweet, headline, comment, and YouTube video.
Even philosophical questions like “Is killing an intruder ever justified?” pop into the video. These questions are then actively discussed by the people both in and outside of the newsroom.
Is this the right path for journalism? I’m not entirely sure. At points in the video, I almost felt like laughing. All characters were taking the case too seriously. There’s a difference between the big bad wolf receiving proper defense in trial and starting a riot over mortgage rates. Sometimes people get too caught up in the 24/7 battering of instant news from every angle that the entire thing becomes trivial. In a scene where a digital “huff and puff” simulation is shown to prove if the wolf could “scientifically” blow the houses down, I couldn’t help but see their “thoroughness” as absurd.
The Guardian had to pick the story of the Three Little Pigs for a reason, and they had to do so full aware of the “magic” needed to make the children’s tale function. Reopening it as a modern case is a sensitive subject. It makes for a good ad; I’m just not sure the ad favors open journalism.