On Botany, Pt. 4

Lauren King, a first-year law student from the University of Virginia, believes that major news outlets can “shill” the public by ignoring or downplaying crucial information.

“Fox News' coverage of the war tends to be ‘willfully blind’ of negative factors such as lack of rationale for entering the war, or associated scandals,” King said. “Its numbers in terms of deaths or any negativity tend to be downplayed (toward the) favor of the Bush administration. So it seems that there's a planted bias; some articles dismissing corruption and such could be an outright plant.”

King hypothesizes that the more tangible the existing evidence, such as the Katrina White House videotape or the Downing St. Memo, the more effort (or lack thereof) must be exerted to keep the collective mind of the public off of it.

“At a time when Bush's approval ratings are extremely low, it seems the White House is doing whatever it can to cover further negative press,” King said. “If there were more intelligent Americans, we wouldn’t have to worry so much about the media.”

King also commented on how she believes journalists are not necessarily drawn to this sort of behavior, but “can be swayed by job pressures such as deadline.”

As an example, King cited KOVR-TV v. Superior Court. The case involved a TV reporter who, because of deadline pressures, had told a pair of minors the mother of a neighboring family had murdered her children, who were the minors' playmates, and then committed suicide, in order to film their reactions.

The District Court judge found summary judgment for the TV station but stated in the ruling: "the video tape reveals that after defendant ascertained the minors knew the Weber children and ‘played with them all the time,’ but did not know what had happened to them, he volunteered to them information with emotionally devastating potential, especially to children of such tender years."

“His disclosure to them of the murders in the hopes of eliciting a ‘newsworthy’ reaction was triable as outrageous conduct,” King said. “His actions constituted outrageous and extreme conduct and intended to cause emotional distress.”

On Botany, Pt. 3

Devin Braden frequents multiple forums on the Internet, most of which are devoted to his favorite bands.

Braden says the concept of shilling is nothing new to him.

“There was a (recent) review on Lambgoat(.com) for a band called ‘The Sword’,” Braden said. “The (original) reviewer was ultimately unimpressed with the effort. In the comments section of the review, a mostly-anonymous person came to their defense, and even called them ‘groundbreaking’ or ‘revolutionary’ or something like that. Because of their label's major distribution, and the large amount of press they've been receiving lately, it is likely that this anonymous, long-winded critic of the review was likely not a regular reader of the site.”

Braden noted that smaller, independent music sites such as Lambgoat.com, ThePRP.com and Blabbermouth.net are not as subject to plants as are larger music sites or band’s personal websites.

“I've also seen it happen on bands' forums,” Braden said. “I used to frequent the ‘Glassjaw’ forum, and every few months, there would be a poster who had only posted once or twice creating a thread about a new band or new ‘zine. Sometimes, you would even see other fairly new posters posting replies that seemed to hype the band or the ‘zine.”

Unlike Spiller, who said people on the Internet are generally gullible, Braden feels that the communities he belongs to are not vulnerable to the tactic.

“Every so often, I'm sure some younger or more-easily influenced kids might fall for their marketing ploys, but a true indie readership can spot that sort of thing a mile away,” Braden said. And that the shillers are more likely to be “flamed,” meaning verbally assaulted by other posters, off the forum.

Smith maintains that the focus is to avoid that sort of detection.

“The most critical point was this: develop and integrate the identity,” Smith said. “No random ‘HEY! EB GAMES IS AWESOME, BUY THIS!’ stuff.” (Note: all caps are used sarcastically in online circles to represent senseless online yelling.)

“But,” Braden would argue, “they never do a very good job with that.”

On Botany, Pt. 2

John Smith, whose name has obviously been changed due to his shame of having even admitted this, claims to have applied for a job as one of these shills. Smith said the job was not being offered directly by a company, but rather by a marketing firm that would offer its services specifically to video game developers and in particular targeted web forums.

Smith would not name the firm but did say it was located in San Francisco, which is well-known in the gaming community as home to multiple gaming magazines.

“I was told that if I took the job, I was supposed to have at least 50 identities on as many forums as I could handle, with a goal of 5 posts an hour – they wanted 100 (identities) eventually,” Smith said. “My posts would have to be well thought out, and the idea was that I needed to establish numerous identities with a history on the forums, so that when the timing was right, a well-written but subtly-placed marketing post could be finessed in.”

Smith said that when he interviewed, the company had 12 shills working full-time and were looking to hire 10 more. Considering a nine-hour workday, the company, were all its employees meeting their minimum requirements, would make 540 posts per day and 880 with another 10 shills.

Smith didn’t take the job. He called it “kinda spooky,” and “a fucking mill.”

But the tactics are not limited to video games. They expand into other forms of entertainment as well.

On Botany, Pt. 1

Most people are unaware of the concept of guerilla marketing, which is exactly why marketing companies love the tactic so much.

In fact, you probably have no idea what I’m talking about and that fact makes you all the more susceptible to their ploys.

In the early 1980s, the concept of guerilla marketing applied to effective ways for small businesses with low advertising budgets to efficiently release information about their products or services to the masses.

But with the omnipresence of access to the Internet in the 21st century, guerilla marketing has taken on a more sinister tone.

Instead of being a healthy, affordable marketing strategy through which small businesses could flourish, the concept has been warped into the creating of shills all across the Internet, from various online forums to Amazon.com product reviews.

While he has no proof as to the origin of these shills, Ross ******, a student at CU-Boulder, says he has seen them all over sites that he visits daily, ranging from Cnet.com to Amazon.com.

“I think there is very little you can do about it. It is a logical step for companies and capitalism because it really works,” Ross said.

But Ross is indifferent to people who don’t see the shills for what they are.

“It sucks and most people will be tricked by it, but on the whole people are pretty dumb and mindless,” Ross said. “If they don’t do their own research into all the angles and make their own decisions, then they probably deserve it.”

To depublish or not to depublish?

Depublishing is the practice of posting something to the web and then making substantive changes to the article. This act is usually performed on a weblog or other internet site. It is an aspect new to the digital media, as the only ethical issue involved with print that could be compared to depublishing would be the banning of, or destruction of certain kinds of print media.

Now, the ability to depublish can be viewed as one of the greatest aspects of writing on the web. When a mistake is made in print, the mistake remains in print, unchangeable and permanent; while mistakes made on the Internet can be corrected, as the Internet is a living, mutable entity.
Correcting typos and misinformation ensures your reader base a consistent and accurate flow of information. Though the primary argument against the statement I just made would be to simply ask, “Why are you publishing inaccurate information in the first place?”

It seems the nature of the Internet – if not media in general – that mistakes will be made. The Internet did not, by any means, invent the mistake, but one thing it did do is revolutionize the immediacy with which you could correct it. While daily newspapers must print corrections the following day in tiny little boxes that no one ever reads, weblogs and online news sites can correct any gaffes as soon as they are detected.

Now, the ability to depublish also allowed me to publish fairly humourous -- though potentially libelous -- things about former Rockies pitcher Danny Neagle during our last exercise in class, and delete them after they had already been published.

Now, if what I had published had been libelous and Neagle, or his kin, had read it during the three to five minutes that I had it up, could they sue for libel? What if the page was never Google cached and no evidence of it exists? I guess it makes for interesting thought but, nevertheless, remains highly pointless.