Alan Gutierrez

Spoke 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.

Hugh MacLeod on Business Porn

Business Porn is just like Ordinary Porn or Real Estate Porn, except instead of it being about the women we wished we could sleep with, or the houses we wish we owned, it’s about all those cool, lucrative, exciting jobs and businesses that we wish we had, instead of the normal, tedious, schleppy crap most of us end up doing to pay the bills.

How many times have you seen a reporter say, “Shirley Tibedeaux, you’ve lost your home and you now have no health insurance. How do you feel?”

[response]

“There you have it, Jim. Now back to you.”

The term disaster porn coined by my friend Christian Roselund to describe Katrina journalism.

Like Hugh’s concept, except that it appeals to us in a way that is perfectly purient.

Rather than helping victims or understanding the complexity, we’re invited to share their emotions, from the comfort of our homes, feel their pain, and having done our part stay tuned for the sports roundup.