The Trib’s internet critic, Steve Johnson, doesn’t always have a firm grasp of the issues he’s writing about, but this non-tech-y post really takes the cake:
Jennifer Love Hewitt is protesting unhealthy women’s body expectations after allegedly unflattering bikini photos of her were published on the Web. We’re with you in principle, Jennifer, but isn’t insisting on your blog that you are still a “size 2” part of the same problem?
Sorry, fella, but the reason why a woman like Jennifer Love Hewitt needs to point out that she’s a “size 2” is because someone ought to recognize the stupidity of criticizing a woman for being “fat” even when she is, in fact, a size 2. In doing so, she draws attention to the hypocrisy of expecting a woman – any woman – to keep her body looking the same at 28 as it did at 18.*
I know it’s supposed to be OK to mock someone because they’re pretty and famous, but that doesn’t always make it right.
Speaking of not understanding the Internet, there’s this story from Michael Booth at the Denver Post:
The dirty little secret about the wildly popular Craigslist is that one click away from its home page are some raunchy and often deeply offensive forums inviting blatant racism, rants and sexual kinks.
That’s a secret?
While Craigslist guidelines threaten to cut off users who post offensive or abusive material, in daily practice the site’s handful of full-time employees can’t keep pace flagging and removing rogue entries.
True enough. In fact, that was the exact reason why Craiglist objected to a lawsuit filed against it last year.
This lawsuit ignores the essential nature of craigslist, demanding that we cease treating our users with trust and respect, and instead impose inappropriate, mistake-prone, and generally counter-productive centralized controls…controls which would actually be less effective in catching discriminatory ads than what we have in place currently, and which would vastly reduce the number of legitimate non-discriminatory ads that the site could process.
In fact, it’s up to USERS of Craiglist to flag those posts, not the employees. As Booth acknowledges at the end of the piece:
Buckmaster said user flags result in millions of postings wiped out each month, from about 30 million monthly entries.
Not that it stops him from engaging in a little fear-mongering, including raising the possibility that “your kids” are probably exposed to every manner of filth.
‘Course maybe they’re the ones flagging it all as inappropriate, which ought to make you pat yourself on the back for some good parenting skills.
* This graf originally appeared on the TOC blog, but I was still irked at the end of the day and needed to further vent.
