Tag Archive for 'mass media'

Film as a guide to life: the thread we had to have

Published
by
Kim
2 months, 3 weeks ago
in Blogging, Culture, Film, TV, Video etc, History, Lesbian and Gay, Life, Relationships, Sexuality and Sociology
. 6 Comments

Never let it be said that this blog lets a good idea from its commenters go to waste. Even when that good idea emerges in response to a monotonous manifestation of the enormous ego of one of the blogosphere’s most ubiquitous hydra headed trolls. While Pavlov’s Cat is no doubt right that basing one’s entire orientation to life on a film is somewhat superficial, on the other hand, as a number of commenters indicated, it might be a neat thought experiment. For there is a serious point here - the mass medium of the film does actually provide something of a socialising phenomenon in modernity. (Whether that’s still true in late or post modernity is perhaps another debate.) For instance, I was recently alerted - through reading Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz’ Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism - to a really huge project conducted in America in the 1930s - the Payne Fund Studies. Chicago School sociologist Henry Blumer asked adolescents about the impact of movies on them (and in many ways the 30s was the height of Hollywood dreaming). He found that a lot of teens modeled their dating behaviour consciously on film scripts, as it were:

When I saw “The Pagan” I fell harder than ever for Ramon Navarro. All my girl friends talk about is these wonderful love stories. When I see a picture like that it makes me like my steady boy friend all the more… it happens that through the movies I have learned to close my eyes, and I use that “Deep Bend” pose.

From watching love scenes in the movies I have noticed that when a girl is kissed she closes her eyes; this I found that I also unconsciously do. When [boys] go to make love, to kiss or hug, I put them off at first, but it always ends in them having their way. I guess I imitated this from the movies because I see it in almost every show I go to.

Continue reading ‘Film as a guide to life: the thread we had to have’

Privacy rights in Child Protection investigations: the need for the mass media to disguise identifying features on the minors in the Henson images

Published
by
tigtog
6 months ago
in Art, Consumerism, Ethics, Law, Media, Parenting, Photography and Politics
. 59 Comments

crossposted

Author Note: The original title of this post was “Do the right thing, Mainstream Media: disguise the faces of the minors in your reproductions of the Henson images NOW”, deliberately imperative because I wanted it to grab attention in people’s feed readers and hopefully provoke an immediate reaction. That has happened, the faces are now being pixellated in the mass media (not that I’m claiming that this is a direct result of this post), so I’m changing the title to something that sounds a bit more like “me” speaking.

* * *
The Age has an article quoting the mother of the girl whose image is the most widely disseminated with respect to the investigation of complaints against artist Bill Henson’s nude studies of adolescents. The mother defends Henson against claims that he did anything unethical, and mentions in a statement given to The Age via an intermediary that he has been a friend of the family for over 10 years, that her daughter has “a keen interest in the arts” and that the whole family were well acquainted with Henson’s work before the photo-shoot.

The Age claims to have discovered that the pictures were taken last year, and that the girl is still 13 years of age. That contradicts earlier reports that the images were several years old, which would have made the girl perhaps now 16 or 18, i.e. possibly made her no longer a minor. If The Age is correct, then she is still very much under-age, and I’m pretty sure that that creates a problem for the media who have disseminated Henson’s images of her online and in the press, or at least it certainly should.

I only yesterday realised that the censored images of Henson’s work readily available online mostly lack one key ingredient that we usually see when images of minors are at the heart of a news cycle about alleged sexual exploitation/abuse - there has been no black bar or pixellation over the face to disguise the minor’s identity.

Why the hell not? Continue reading ‘Privacy rights in Child Protection investigations: the need for the mass media to disguise identifying features on the minors in the Henson images’