posted 2007/11/28 at 21:14
I'd like to post a bit of a follow-up to a post earlier this month about a television commercial about workplace safety on Canadian television that features incredibly graphic images of a woman with her skin peeling off as the result of accidentally throwing hot oil all over herself. First of all, if you didn't read the comments to the post, I found a copy of the commercial on YouTube later on, although before I link to it I just want to reiterate that this commercial is extremely graphic and nearly made me vomit. That being said, if you think you can stomach it and want to see what all the fuss is about, knock yourself out. The commercial has aired during the late-night games on Hockey Night in Canada each of the past two Saturdays, but I've gotten a lot better at switching the channel before the commercial becomes so horrible.
First of all, I should mention that there is a Website that goes along with this campaign, a Website which I tried to visit several days ago, but given that everywhere you go on the site there's a theme of this severed hand -- even if it's a cartoon severed hand -- I just got sick of it and stopped trying to see what all was in there. Again, let me preface this by saying that this isn't nice stuff, but if you want to see how this campaign has been translated to the Internet, the Website for the campaign is prevent-it.ca.
Naturally, I was curious to see what kind of news coverage this campaign was getting, and I found a good article about it at canada.ca. This link is safe, thank Goddess. However, given that I'd argued in my first post that late-night Saturday shouldn't be considered a "safe time" for this commercial given the high number of youths who watch Hockey Night in Canada, I was shocked to discover that the day I first saw this commerial, it also aired during a matinee hockey game that afternoon on CBC. In other words, CBC was showing a commercial that depicted a woman whose skin is, in the words of the article, "peel[ing] off in bloody ribbons," at four in the afternoon. How anyone could think that a commercial like this is suited for Saturday afternoon television just completely astounds me.
In my original post on this topic, I'd mentioned that I thought that the body that produced this commercial did so because they wanted to grab the attention of young adults who have been growing up on the Saw movies. (It was right after Halloween, so the movie franchise was kind of fresh in my mind.) After reading what that news article had to say about the kinds of comments that were posted about the commercial on YouTube, though, and after going back to YouTube to read more of the comments myself (you know, the ones with expletives that couldn't easily be reprinted in a news article), I couldn't help but think of Beavis and Butthead when reading through some of the replies. Having once again painfully reminded myself of how old I am, I tried to update the reference in my mind to Jackass, because shows like Jackass have likely led a whole generation of young people to think that televised depictions of these kinds of horrors are, well, cool.
As I said in my first post, though, I'm too much of a First Amendment believer to suggest that these commercials should be censored, although given the kinds of things that have been censored on Canadian television in the past, it doesn't make much sense to me that these commercials have been allowed to air. Still, though, even if I don't believe in government censorship, I think there's a lot to be said about self-censorship, self-restraint, and plain old common sense, and whoever thought that this commercial would be suitable for Saturday afternoon television is plainly lacking in one, or all, of those things. I'm all for calling attention to workplace hazards, particularly those hazards that are caused by corporate greed and indifference to workers (which, ironically, this campaign is all about), but if the sampling of comments I've seen on YouTube are any indication, this commercial may, ironically, be having quite the opposite effect. Regardless, I sincerely hope that I don't run across this commercial again, and that it gets shuffled off to viewing times when young children aren't so likely to be watching CBC.
Labels: canada, commercials, freespeech
posted 2007/11/18 at 18:19
Reforms urged after MySpace hoax's victim kills herself (AP via pantagraph.com)
I've been following this story as it's been developing for the past few days. This doesn't exactly follow the pattern of behaviour I've been so interested in tracking recently, since the person who created the fake "Josh" account on MySpace was an adult (and a parent at that) rather than a fellow teenager, but what happened to Megan is certainly similar to what I've been warning could happen if this kind of Internet misanthropy, more common among younger people than people the age of the parent mentioned in this story, continued unchecked. Although I have mentioned in the past that I am concerned over how some older people have latched onto the relative anonymity of the Internet to keep doing the kind of immature bullying most of us get tired of in our teenage years, this was clearly more a case of premeditated action than juvenile humour. I still think it's a huge cause for concern, though, and I can only hope that this news story opens up a greater dialogue about this kind of cyberbullying.
At the same time, though, I'm kind of conflicted about how to resolve this issue. Someone on a messageboard I visit pointed out that there is a free speech issue involved here, and of course whenever the words "free speech" get brought up I hesitate because I'm such a huge First Amendment advocate. That being said, there is that whole thing about not being allowed to yell "FIRE!" in a crowded theatre, and I think that in that same spirit it's hard not to argue that there should be some consequences for telling a vulnerable person to kill himself or herself. (Ignoring that Megan was diagnosed with depression and Attention Deficit Disorder, the fact that she was just thirteen years old kind of automatically made her a vulnerable person.) Perhaps for the parents involved here this was a more methodical thing, but it's shocking for how many young people this kind of "go kill yourself" rhetoric is a humourous pasttime.
I don't know if there is a legal solution to this problem that can make me, let alone anyone else, happy. The underlying problem here is a society that encourages people to act in their own self-interest and not care if their actions harm others, and gives young people lots of examples of how attacking other people, whether physically, verbally, or emotionally, can either work to their benefit or at least provide them with "great entertainment." This is a problem that would require an incredibly long time to correct, though, and given the changing sociopolitical climate in this country, we seem to be moving away from a more just society in this regard rather than towards it. In the meantime, though, 13-year-old Megan is dead, and every day since then there have been more immature people going online, harassing people just as vulnerable (if not more so) than Megan and inflicting tremendous emotional pain on these people for their own jollies. I can only hope that this story, as tragic as it is, draws more attention to this problem before it becomes a true epidemic.
Labels: cyberbullying, freespeech, internet
posted 2007/11/11 at 20:39
Happy seventh birthday, seanshannon.org. I will have a .journal entry to commemorate the anniversary, but as has been the case so often these past few years, I've got to put off writing it until I get to Thanksgiving break and have some time to write it well (and also finish dealing with some personal stuff that's kind of weighed me down here lately).
On a mostly unrelated note, last night I think I came the closest to throwing up that I've been in several years. I had the late game of Hockey Night in Canada on my television, and this commercial aired where this young woman with a chef's outfit was talking about how great her life was and how she had gotten engaged recently. A somber look overtook her face, though, and she said that she wasn't going to get married to him the following weekend like they'd planned because she was about to have a horrible accident. She started to talk about how she should have cleaned up the grease spill earlier and how she shouldn't have put the deep fryer in the position it was in, and in mid-sentence she turns and slips on the spill, throwing a huge amount of liquid out of the pot she was carrying, covering her face, splashing behind her and causing the stove behind her to catch fire.
Now, up to this point I'm thinking that this is a highly effective commercial. At this point, though, the woman lets out this blood-curdling screen as another chef bends down by her to help her, and then, for about a half-second, the shot snaps to the woman, the skin on her face and hands completely scalded, before snapping to black, finally showing the URL of the Website people are supposed to go to in order to learn about safety. I'd been noshing on Doritos just before the commercial aired, and for about a good twenty seconds I thought I was going to lose it. I ran to the upstairs bathroom and lifted the toilet lid, but nothing came out. Needless to say, I kept my eyes glued to my flat panel here whenever the commercial came back on, as it did several times throughout the rest of the night.
I know that we're living in a post-Saw world and that some people argue that you need these kinds of jarring images in order to attract people's attention these days. I can remember a debate several months ago when Volkswagon started showing car crashes from inside the cars in a line of their commercials, the ones that famously ended with the person driving the Volkswagon saying "Holy shit" at the end (with the -it cut off by a similar snap to a black screen). However, I think there is a world of difference between showing car crashes (which despite all of the twisted steel never had a drop of blood or even the slightest hint of injury) and flashing to a shot of a woman with third degree burns on her face and hands. Even though Poppy Z. Brite is one of my favourite authors and I've written a bit of horror myself, I really have no desire to see horror on television or in films, and it couldn't be more obvious that this commercial was trying to play on horror-film schlock here, particularly given that they cut away from the burnt woman so quickly.
More to the point, this is not a commercial that should be airing when children are so likely to be watching it. The commercial only started airing during the late-night game, but even assuming that it aired only in eastern Canada and they didn't show it in the west, there are still a lot of children watching CBC that late on a Saturday night during hockey season. Hockey brings Canadians of all ages together in a way that the NFL only wishes they could get football to do here in the US, and little kids don't need to be seeing stuff like that. I'm too much of a libertarian on these issues to say that the Canadian government should outlaw the commercial, but given some of the ridiculous things some Canadian bodies (in particular the CRTC) does to regulate Canadian television, I would have thought that they'd never allow this commercial to air, much less during Canada's signature sports broadcast.
Labels: canada, commercials, freespeech, hockey, television
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