just learned a new word today: astroturfing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing ... yeah i don't live in America the beautiful, thats why i'd missed this worthwhile contribution to social harmony in the US... am sooo looking forward to seeing the same phenomenon reach the Rest of the World - not! i mean, of course astrosurfing is just another form of propaganda so whats new? well, perhaps the fact that propaganda at least has a morally and ethically objectionable image attached to it (personally i think its simply criminal but thats just one view...), whereas recasting it under a friendly and swish-sounding buzz word such as astrosurfing does a great job of legitimizing the practice, even of 'democratizing' it if you will! feels like, hey, me too, i can astrosurf this stuff with a bunch of me mates across the country! i'm empowered! cool, freedom of expression, constitutional rights etc... yeah yeah yeah!!! except of course, as usual thats the big boys who will use the tool best (hint: they created it), and against you the individual dope, but hey, that at least, fair or not, is just in the nature of things my my my, am almost getting politico-philosophical here! ok, back to the topic: the great thing about this orchestrated mercantilisation of values in the US, the expansion of the grey areas - here the borders between 'freedom of expression', 'right of response' etc and plain old criminal deception - is that it opens up a whole range of potentially exponential revenue streams, not just the PR ones! (until we reach saturation stage of course) am very new & naive at this game i must confess, but seems to me that this could be a good place to start to track the interesting plays http://www.thenewpr.com/wiki/pmwiki.php?pagename=AntiAstroturfing.HomePage ? anybody confirms / cld suggest other ways? thks! now if anything, am def. going to watch this Gore movie now, since DCI has so kindly advertised it http://online.wsj.com/public/articl...bU6EGvfSqtP8_hHjJJ77I_20060810.html?mod=blogs what would be fun too, i guess, would be a lawsuit launched by YouTube.com against DCI for 'deceptive use' or sthg like that but that won't happen since YouTube.com wants / needs the biz anyway... perhaps a mammoth class-action lawsuit from a committee of YouTube.com registered users? mmmhhh... yeah but to award punitive damages one needs to define damages, what are they? thats the great thing you see, they're IMMATERIAL its just deception just get on with it people!!! gotta luv' america!
of course a grass-roots boycott of all Exxon-Mobil products until they clear their good name would be a serious risk to business... thankfully americans are just too busy taking care of themselves - thats the great thing about 'me me me individualism' innit? - it ain't gonna happen