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Participatory Disaster Porn
September 12th, 2006Spoke with Dave Coustan yesterday, over dinner at Coop’s. Dave asked if ther there have been any notorious instances of astroturfing in the New Orleans blogs. I mentioned the carpet bloggers.
There is a group of people who have visited New Orleans and are writing breathless stories in a blog about secrets they’ve uncovered. I a recent video post, a they fear for their lives to write about them. It’s sounds like a radio drama of the days of old, where you couldn’t show horror, only describe it. It’s like Suspense).
They’ve adorned their post using the wealth of heartrending images available on the Internet, as if these were their own photographs.
There is little you can do about this. People are reading them. If someone contradicts them in the comment section, someone else writes a defense. Some locals have been helping them.
They have made content of tragedy. There is a market for everything, it seems. Another bucket into which to wring your sponge of daily anguish.
A local blogger even met with them, not understanding that they are producing a low-budget serial, that will say what it takes to increase page rank.
The long tail will find an audience that will listen to fictional accounts of Katrina, made up as they go along, and not respond with questions, but with emotions. It is participatory disaster porn.
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Comments 
[...] Big thanks to Alan for helping us hook up. [...]
Hey there stranger!
This is only somewhat related (and perhaps I’ll say more r.e. the blogs you mention here) but Tuesday night I went to a presentation at the Mpls gallery where my March 05 NOLA images are showing (www.mncp.org) for a presentation by a guy from Hewlett Packard about a project they did to salvage photographs in St. Bernard Parish. I think they encountered too much red tape to do it in Orleans…?
Basically, they had an SUV rigged up to be a portable scanning and printing center and invited the public (what little of it there was in Da Parish in February) to bring in photos that were damaged during Katrina to try to capture and restore the image. Work was done by HP volunteers all over the work via their intranet to make the best of some really ruined photos.
OK–the weird part is that it was in conjunction with ABC’s show Extreme Makeover Home Edition (which I have never seen; the segment the guy showed was pretty cloying).
Here’s a link to the story:
http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/feature_stories/2006/06restore.html
At any rate, I guess HP left scanners, printers and paper with a group in St. Bernard that is continuing the photo restoration effort–the HP guy promised to email me more info and I’ll pass it along to you when/if I get it. I thought it might be a good thing to post on your blogs and I’m going to investigate it as a possible project for my winter New Orleans visit, too.
Now, back outside to paint a window frame and door so handyman Dan can make my house winterproof next week. Don’t worry, it’s gorgeous and about 75 here right now. I went raspberry picking in the afternoon after a lovely bike ride on the rails-to-trails path near my house in the morning.