Its just a few hours after a bomb scare here in Boston, one that happens to have a particularly absurd bend to it. Initially, I saw the images of traffic stopped and the bomb crews under bridges on TV, and reports that it was not a genuine threat but a hoax. Then a friend told me that he had heard on NPR that the "suspicious packages" that were causing all the hubbub were lite-brite images of Err. This sounded too ridiculous to be true, so I didn't really believe it until I got home and looked it up on the web. Most of the articles in online newspapers are of the same sort: simply reporting what happened, which is what I'd want from them. But I wanted more than that. I wanted opinions. I wasn't so much interested in the event as the public reaction to the event. Would it just blow over really quickly? Will most people side with the Mayor and the Governor against the network and the advertisers, or will most people side with Comedy Central et al?
Obviously, the sites that people comment and blog on are not representative of the public reaction, but in just 30 minutes, I was able to find a wide range of reactions to the events that brought up a lot of good points that I would've never thought of and that TV news probably wouldn't have broadcast (generally, TV just parrots the same facts over and over, or presents one highly-opinionated viewpoint): that the placement of the signs (under bridges) combined with the fact that if they were not lit up and viewed from a distance they wouldn't look like Err giving the finger as much as a box with wires sticking out of the back make the alarmist claims somewhat understandable; that Shepard Smith said, "their god is an indian...that turns into a wolf"; that Bill O'Reilly suggested that a cartoon character be arrested; that the signs had been there for 3 weeks, etc.
You have to sift through a lot of erroneous, opinionated information while trolling blogs, but when something like this happens, they're more satisfying than traditional media simply because they moves faster. That's what I came to realize: the pace of information on blogs. This makes me all the more interested in blog or comment filtering (a la digg's system of making the most-recent, most-read, most-approved comments more visible than the others). Or perhaps the thing to do is find a community of bloggers or commenters that you've come to trust and go to those sites when big events happen. I'd guess that its this sped-up information that is largely responsible for the shortening of the news cycle. Cable news and legit press are just trying to keep up.
This event could also be proof of the point I made in a previous post about the unintended effects of advertising. There's no doubt that this particular situation had more to do with poor judgment on the part of the police and government than it does with advertising, but it does bring up an interesting point about the limits of advertising. Although, if this does, in fact, create buzz for the film (which it almost certainly will), and thereby generate more revenue for the parent company, then this would be considered effective advertising, and therefore should be mimicked in the future, no? It will be incredibly difficult to draw correlations between the profitability of the Aqua Teen franchise and this controversy. But as much as this might drive up their revenue, its an impossible thing to plan or duplicate. I'd argue that its precisely the perceived unintended nature of the publicity that makes it appealing to consumers. They're drawn to the product only b/c they believe the ad agency and the network when they say "we had no idea this would happen." And really, buying something related to Aqua Teen at this point (say, an Err shirt) isn't so much a vote for headline-grabbing controversy and police-bating as much as an assertion that the police, homeland security, and the FBI need to handle potential terrorist threats in a different manner.
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