PopCult: April 2003 Archive Page

"For all the glitz surrounding the unveiling Monday of Apple Computer's new music service, a quick look suggests that it's a solid, but hardly revolutionary, addition to the market....The integration between the one-click purchase service, Apple's iTunes music jukebox software and the iPod player goes well beyond what any other music service has done. It will genuinely make paying for music online easy, even an impulse buy, and artists and music labels see that as a big step forward." John Borland

--Apple's music: Evolution, not RevolutionNews.com)

Apple was and is in the hardware business; its job is to sell machines. The music is just a vehicle to sell the product, just like MTV and radio -- where the attention of the audience is the product being sold to advertisers.

fisk (v): debunk via critical annotation, typically with heaping doses of contempt.
Recently Jill Walker lamented that it was hard to teach her students to blog critically. Perhaps we should first teach them to fisk.

Over the past month, I've seen the verb "fisk" pop up in weblogs discussing media coverage of Iraq. The eponymous verb is named for Robert Fisk, an award-winning reporter for the UK Independent. His writing talent is without question:

Did I sit on President Saddam's throne? Of course I did. There is something dark in all our souls that demands an understanding of evil rather than good, because, I suppose, we are more fascinated by the machinery of cruelty and power than we are by angels.|So I sat on the blue throne and put my hands over the golden armrests and surveyed the darkened chamber in which men of great power sat in terror of the man who used to sit where I was now. -- Independent 12 Apr 2003

While not flinching from calling Saddam evil, Fisk has been highly critical of the U.S.-led coalition's invasion of Iraq. He is extremely popular with [some] anti-war forces, in part becaue of his opinionated writing; but his consistent pro-Palestine slant does not escape the watchful eyes of pro-Israel media watchdogs, some of whom find his statements anti-Semitic.

But just as "boycott" derives not from something that the evil English landlord Captain Boycott did, but rather what the Irish villagers did to him, so too "fisk" does not refer to what Fisk does, but rather what is done unto him. In the blogosphere, some feel motivated to respond to Fisk's writing by refuting him in minute detail -- often repeating long chunks or the entirety of his articles, and interlineating their challenges. See: "Fisking Fisk."

The best definition I have found so far is by Eugene Volokh, who recalls an article in which Fisk "(1) recounted how he was beaten by some anti-American Afghan refugees, and (2) thought they were morally right for doing so." This, then, would seem to be the very first "fisking". Volokh credits an August 8, 2002 Instapundit post, and asked whether anyone had found an earlier usage. I wonder whether the term owes something to "MiSTing" -- a form of cultural criticism that formed the premise for "Mystery Science Theatre 3000," in which silhouetted wise-crackers in the lower right corner of your TV screen comment on and ridicule bad movies.

In general, then, the term "fisking" can be applied to any point-by-point critical annotation of another text. It is a mode of criticism well-suited to the WWW, since it begins by copying the full text of the target text, and proceeds to point out logical flaws and raise doubts. Since the fiskee's fixed text cannot respond to the challenges, the fisker can without too much trouble make the fiskee look ridiculous. While the term seems to have originated in conservative attacks against liberal positions, I recently came across a postmodern blogger who fisks an anti-postmodernist.

--Fisking as a Rhetorical ConstructLiteracy Weblog)

My idle curiosity about the term has turned into something of an epic quest... I think I'll post this now and take a break. You can post comments on the KairosNews version of the fisking entry.

"By the time this child graduates from high school, her brain will have absorbed 350,000 television commercials, 100,000 alcohol ads and a daily barrage of sex and violence. If that doesn't turn you off then nothing will."

--TV Turnoff Week -- April 22-28Adbusters)

Umm... why does it start on Tuesday? That's probably an old ad. That's what you get when you mix text and graphics -- it's harder to keep your information current.

"In 1999, Fanning, a 19-year-old Boston-area hacker from a broken home, stumbled on the idea for making digital MP3 files easy to find on the Net. Teaming up with fellow geeks he knew only through online chat rooms, he crafted a simple technology that allowed millions to swap music collections free of charge. The operation moved to Silicon Valley that same year, where MTV and other media outlets converted the hackers into heroes, until the music industry squashed the company in court." Brad Stone reviews Joseph Menn'sAll the Rave: The Rise and Fall of Shawn Fanning'sNapster. Menn argues that it was actually the greed and thuggery of young Shawn's shady uncle and buisiness partner John Fanning who doomed millions of teenagers to (sometimes) have to fork over money for their music. --Napster's Autopsy: Tracing a Music Rebel's Rise and FallM$NBC)

"My how times have changed! These days you hear nerd talk spewing out of everyone's mouth! ... Is it computer technology that's made nerds of us all? Or perhaps it's because we really do work for those former "losers" now." Peter Bagge

--The Nerd-ification of AmericaReason)

I feel the same way about Star Trek, which is not nearly as good as it was when it was still the domain of the uber-geeks. Thanks, "Traveling Ghost."

"The arctic rodents called Lemmings are well known for their periodic mass suicides by collectively swimming into the sea and drowning, or at least the Norway lemmings do. This is probably caused by environmental pressures usually from over population..."

--Mass SuicideHolology)

Actually, the cause of this behavior is more likely to be Disney employees hurling animals from cliffs in order to provide striking visuals for the 1958 movie White Wilderness. Another good Snopes find, which, among many other things, ruins an important metaphor in the classic IF game Trinity.

"American troops in Saudi Arabia have been listening with amusement to Baghdad Betty, Iraq's version of Tokyo Rose, who tries to demoralize them with her radio broadcasts. In one monologue, she warned them that their wives back home were sleeping with 'famous movie stars,' including Tom Cruise, Arnold Schwarzenegger and even Bart Simpson...." David Ellis

--Flashback: Have A Cow, G.I.!Time, 1991)

I have used this anecdote in my tech writing class, so I was surprised to read on Snopes that this particular joke comes from a Johnny Carson skit (though Carson's list of names was different). The joke was spread in late 1990, via the Usenet group rec.humor.funny, in a post that claimed "This was reported by an American serviceman in the Middle East and picked up by the Clarinet news service." There really was a Baghdad Betty, who was famous for not quite getting American culture right.

The above article is from the Time.com archive, which shows you the above 53-word blurb and then offers to sell you the full article, which, the page informs me, is 53 words long. So, what will I get for my $2.50? Not much, I guess.

Far more annoying is the fact that, when you hit the "go back" button, you get a pop-up window that reads, "Don't pass up on this opportunity to sign up for the TIME archive and read the article you selected." How many people, after already signaling their lack of interest in purchasing the article by clicking "go back", are going to change their minds because the "go back" button spawns a pop-up?

"I've collected hundreds of rejection slips from agents, producers, and studios. Recently, all this changed. I wrote an article last year called "Hacking Las Vegas" (Wired 10.09), and the next thing I know I'm being approached to turn it into a movie starring Spacey.... But I've heard rumors that have made me question my confidence - whispers of a dirty little industry practice that has brought me here to Utah on a mission both personal and journalistic.|I've been tipped to the network of semisecret cyberhallways, called tracking boards, that are open only to the most elite power players in the industry....They may seem innocuous at first glance, but the boards are where a writer meets his fate." Ben Mezrich --To Live and Die in LAWired)

"Detective Smith -- who calls himself a 'Starbucks, Barnes & Noble kind of guy' -- has become something of an expert in early teenagedom, and he has done so without the benefit of having offspring of the appropriate age. He ventures into cyberspace under some 30 different screen names, mostly as girls, each with her own personality, looks and even bra size..." Shaila K. Dewan

--Who's 14, 'Kewl' and Flirty Online? A 39-Year-Old DetectiveNY Times)

Interesting... the NY Times is starting to include advertisements in its printer-friendly versions of articles, which I always link to in order to spare readers from the usual online advertisements. In this case, the ad is sponsored by Starbucks. I wonder if the ads are assigned automatically, based on the content of the article? What if this were a report of a crime committed at Starbucks?