Gasp.

The full story can be found here.

But the concept is simple enough; there were complaints about the overt sexuality of a couple of photographs in an Abercrombie & Fitch, and the local Virginia Beach police officials confiscated them.  The issue is not so much the idea of the confiscation, but the ads which are being targeted.  Recently, there have been several similar occurrences, all concerning ads that have relatively little sexual content.

No one has any business targeting ads like these, which can hardly be deemed sexual, or even too revealing of the human body, an almost unhealthy taboo in American culture.  This campaign, while not exactly conservative, is more focused on style than sexuality.  I think that the complaints which led to the confiscation of the posters stem from Abercrombie & Fitch's history (legislation has been passed in the Senate in reaction to a racy 2003 Quarterly photo shoot).

The other thing which might make being offended by an upper buttock or a little too much skin more understandable is that this campaign and the store that the photographs were removed from is aimed at teenagers.  

And since these ads are aimed at younger people, opposed to sex-themed Dolce and Gabanna ads, which target adults, any promiscuity is going to be objectionable.  As much as teens might protest that they don't care one way or another, parents will always do everything that they can to protect their children and Abercrombie & Fitch might want to keep that in mind next time they launch an advertising campaign.  The last thing any company wants is to be the subject of a brand boycott.

Justin. Pepsi. Super Bowl.

One ad that I thought was particularly effective, was the Justin Timberlake Pepsi ad.

I think that the ad was one of the 'big' commercials that Super Bowl watchers have come to expect. Though this year seems to mark the end of truly fantastic Super Bowl commercials, I think that this ad fulfills some of the expectations that people have to see real celebrities advertise a product.

The commercial achieved everything that it was supposed to; it glamorized Pepsi by tying it to attractive bikini-clad girls sunbathing in their backyards and to meeting the (as is emphasized by the ad) entirely fabulous Justin Timberlake. Entertainment is supplied in the way that many people enjoy seeing a celebrity get beat up, especially in a comic manner, and also in the way that ordinary people can have contact with a famous person in the meantime.  

The music (also from Justin) fit the ad perfectly, and increased the upbeat nature of the ad. It also reinforced the message of the advertisement: if you drink Pepsi, you'll get free music.

Trivial Flurries and Excessive Furies

The full back-story can be found here.  And the voicemail from the irate wife can be listened to here.  

But the basic idea is that a seventeen-year-old student, by the name of Dave Kori, got his hopes up one morning because there was a thin layer of the powdery, white stuff outside and was frustrated to find that he should have done his homework after all-- school wasn't cancelled.

However, Kori didn't internalize his frustration at having a top-notch education or even limit himself to complaining to his friends; he called the office and home of the school official who had made the Snow Day decision.  

When the man's wife receives the obnoxious message, she chooses to call Kori back and give him a piece of her mind.  

His infringement on privacy might have been forgivable if he had left it at that, but Kori seized his opportunity to make the lives of a hard-working couple even more difficult.  He posted the voicemail from the woman (which was understandably angry and comically derogatory) on Youtube, and created a Facebook page complete with phone numbers and a petition to fellow obnoxious students to harass the couple further. 

And that isn't even where it gets bad.  It gets bad when the Youtube video and the Facebook group gets thousands of hits and comments in the first few nights and the Post decides that this is newsworthy.

Youtube and Facebook are websites that can act as vehicles for personal expression and debates over what is and is not moral are not hard to find.  

However.  

These debates are almost exclusively shallow and almost always reduce themselves to personal attacks aimed at other Youtube and Facebook users.  There is a tendency among Youtubers to use the video comment box to have moral and ethical arguments completely unrelated to the video.  Thousands of hits on petty, ridiculous webpages which negatively impacts individuals in the real world are not unheard of.  

My major problem is with the Post covering this as news.  The seventeen-year-old that invades the privacy of a school official and upsets his wife can only benefit from more attention.  His self-involved sense of self-righteousness needs to be addressed by his school's faculty and his parents, but the controversy should not go any farther than that.

I think that the Post's decision to cover this story was a result of the print media's increasing desire to attract internet affluent readers and to connect to people who spend a considerable amount of time on video-sharing sites like Youtube and friend sites like Facebook. Unfortunately, I think that the deference paid to the situation and the 'number of hits' is as shallow and unpalatable as the young man's actions.