Friday, April 24, 2009

media filler: 'offensive' Baby Shaker

(see CNN article)
The 'Baby Shaker' app is about as stupid as the 'controversy' over such a meaningless little thing.

Typical media nonsense... 'outcry' from politically correct whingers, so what? There are always people who will get offended at something.
It's equivalent to a teenager's poorly-scrawled graffiti - offensive to anyone who WANTS to get offended, but otherwise completely trivial.

There are people being tortured and murdered, drink drivers doing hit'n'runs out there, and THIS is what makes the news? That's just silly.

Also silly is that Apple (and others in similar 'outcry' situations, like Youtube) respond so quickly and arbitrarily to take down applications like this. Not specifically in this case, because it is clearly a stupid and tasteless program, but in general when hosting providers like Youtube, Apple and some web hosts receive complaints about the 'offensive nature' of some content and they immediately (and perhaps without discussion with the author) take down the content - again, there are always going to be people out there who like to get offended at anything.
What it boils down to is that sometimes free expression suffers due to politically correct or simply malevolent, loud complainers.
Indeed, in probably all hosting provider contracts, they specifically assert the right to delete any content deemed offensive. How can this work, though, if offensiveness is in the eye of the beholder, which it most certainly is?