Fatally Killed

I’m going to talk about the internet, because that’s where I live. I’m going to talk about Facebook, because that used to be my street. On that street was my profile page, and on Friday I attempted arson and deleted myself. 

Or, at least, I hope I did. Did the paper and petrol take hold? Because the ‘book owns everything that was on there anyway, so can decide if they want to keep my stuff or not. For now, I am ‘deactivated’ pending caving and logging in in the next two weeks. Clearly the powers that be cannot imagine anyone being able to resist their ‘Home’ button for longer than a few days. But Facebook, seriously, you and I have been on the path to ‘over’ for some time now. Everybody has been talking about cutting you off; I thought the decent thing to do would be to do it first, show everybody that there is life outside the social networking beast, and hope that others would email me when they cut you out of their lives. Or call me. Or, horror of horrors, tell me in person! 

Hello? Hello? Oh, OK. I really did commit social suicide. 

And OH NO! I can’t update my status to tell everyone that I did it. What changed in the past few years? I didn’t need a vehicle to endlessly tap witty one-liners into. I just didn’t think that way. Facebook was the internet condensed into one click of a button: people’s drunken parties, articles they thought everyone should read, horrible flatmate updates (mostly me), conversations between mutual friends that appeared in your newsfeed… no wonder I would just click on the ‘Home’ button, waiting for new things to appear. And of course, adding to that feed myself. When I floated the idea of a mass exodus from Facebook, on principle of ethics (shitborgs), people would gasp and say ‘but where will I get my dose of Lotte? Rata? flatmate issues?’ To which I’d reply, ‘Well, we could meet up once a week and have things to say to each other instead of… “oh this happened” “yes I saw that on FB” “oh” *end of topic*’. 

Where do I turn to? My real blog? My other blog? Do we really need the internets to prop us up socially? Those things only work until you leave work, right? All those parties you said you’d go to, you’ve long forgotten them by the time they roll around. ‘Like’-ing ‘Save Radio New Zealand’ does not make a socially conscientious citizen of you. It’s just a button. You probably hid them from your feed anyway. You just liked it because your friends were liking it and you wanted them to see you like it too. It’s all about being seen. But do I want those people I went to school with twenty years ago to see me? How about I just disappear?

OK, you got me, I’ve cheated. I looked my my boyfriend’s news feed. But he’s quitting too! This house will soon be Facebook free. My flatmate, who has never been on the beast, complained that it was hard to make friends at social gatherings in her newly adopted home town - people were more interested in whether she was on FB, presumably so they could go home and ‘friends’ her. 

(Mark Zuckerwhatsyername, that is your greatest contribution to the world: the phrase ‘she friendsed me’. Talk about more often and get it in print and then in the OED. Seriously. But first, delete my information.)

So if  you’re reading this, I recommend you go and delete your account too. Make an effort to be friends with people in real life, and have conversations that extend beyond ‘I saw that on FB’. How many of your ‘friendsed’ friends do you actually talk to? Would talk to in the street? 

And stay the fuck off Twitter too, while you’re at it. 

Simon Dallow: So, has Bill English done enough in this budget to combat [the fact that this could be seen as a budget for the rich]?

Guyon Espiner: I think he has. I mean, there will be some envious eyes…

At which point palms should be well connected with faces. Sure, you pulled a Duncan Garner and prefixed your simpering toadyism with a cursory statement that it’s only your opinion, but then you used John Key’s language (note here that Key’s language isn’t great, he doesn’t seem to know the difference between “less” and “fewer.” But then, the man can’t pronounce “Australia”) to tell us all that we’re only jealous. It was hard to hear the rest of the arse-lick over the sound of my involuntary groaning. I won’t harp on about the content of the budget, better lefty bloggers than I have summed things up nicely elsewhere, but it is worrying to me that nobody on One News seems to be covering the cost of the tax cuts. This analyst calls the fact that they are not revenue neutral for another three years “a slight concern” but still gives the budget “full marks” and thinks we’re going to put that $5 a week we’re netting in the bank. As opposed to, say, spending it on trying to educate our children now that they’ve chomped another billion from that pie - in the same week that Key was going on about how our kids are at risk. Hey guess what, John?

Bias in news is difficult to avoid, and probably isn’t the end of the world. Every “Fox and Friends” has its “The Daily Show” to counter it. But in my view when it’s ostensibly still the national public broadcaster I think it’s a major problem. Now, by no means am I suggesting that there is any organised foul play going on in terms of the network being fed a line by the government. I’m not paranoid like that. However I am suggesting that the political analysts on staff aren’t doing their jobs properly and even if it’s not the case, it certainly seems like Guyon can’t see the forest for the intestinal walls, if you’ll pardon my crudeness.

And yes, I know I’m always hating on TVNZ. I really wouldn’t, but it’s just that they keep plonking such God-awful, enraging, insulting, disingenuous codswallop on my television. If they would only stop that, just for one day!

Just because I know my enraged jealousy of rich people (hooray for nationwide in-jokes) will be rampant tonight, is that reason enough? I’m sure Duncan Garner will give me something to hate on…

This whole media beat-up of Phil Goff over the GST issue is really getting to me. Let’s put aside the feeling that Guyon Espiner seems to want nothing more than to join Key and English in a chocolate-filled jacuzzi, break out the champers and spend the evening discussing neckties… Or is that Duncan Garner? Uh, I’m getting off track here.

Let’s put that aside, let’s forget that, despite the fact that most of us - left and right - seem to be unhappy that we’re about to see a rise in GST, the television political editors would rather attack the opposition because they’re not sure that they would be able to reverse the hike after campaigning against it. 

No, what really gets me is that they’re so basely slack-witted that they can’t work out what “fresh fruit and vegetables” means when Goff says he would cut GST on those items. Asks Espiner (on this morning’s Q+A, condensed into a blatantly anti-Goff One News story tonight): “Fruit yoghurt?” “No, fresh fruit and vegetables,” replies Goff.

Espiner, was following up a disingenuous argument from Bernard Hickey in the Herald (asking the same question - that’s some hard work right there). You can sort of see Goff rolling his eyes here, and you wouldn’t blame him if he went all Helen Clark and just dismissed the questioners as dunces because frankly if you can’t work out the difference between a fresh apple and an apple pie, you probably belong on a Jamie Oliver show. You’re in need of dietary intervention.

Anyway, at least nobody in this story is Tau Henare. Except Tau Henare.

….aaaaand this. A make-work piece that assumes that everybody is an angry dunce. Actually, I had to search quite hard to find this article (buried in “Motoring” in the Herald, it seems to have vanished from Stuff, which says something).

The whole premise of the story is that there has been a change recently, which is of course untrue. Yes, there are still some stations where somebody will fill you up and offer to check your fluids (shout out to the folk at the Mornington BP), but they’re few and far between. In the 15 years I’ve driven, I’ve only had two instances of an attendant filling up my car.

As to the issue of a company policy that forbids checking a hot radiator, well, that seems pretty reasonable to me. After all, your car’s manual tells you not to do it. I wouldn’t blame an attendant for not wanting to help, either. Especially not if they’re the only attendant on duty and there are, say, eight pumps to cover and a line of people waiting, and they have an aversion to being scalded.

At the end of the day though, this is a non-issue. It’s a chance for a few likely candidates (who in this case happen to be from the wealthier parts of Auckland) to bemoan the PC madness taking over their country, and maybe accuse the oil companies of being greedy (no arguments there, although when a money-saving policy also happens to help prevent staff injuries, I don’t think it’s fair to condemn them for it). Even so, who picked it up, and ran it on their flagship “current affairs” programme? Who ran outraged promos for it through the news hour? That’s right, TVNZ, Closeup, television’s least adept presenter-walrus blend, the Sainsbury.

I didn’t watch the show. I can’t stand Close Up, it’s one of the worst shows on television (including Rock of Love Bus and I Love Money 2) and makes me so angry I can’t even rant like this. But if I had I imagine it would have reminded me of Family Guy’s Peter Griffin presenting “That Really Grinds My Gears” only from the perspective of rich people. Hey retards, picking up a flippant and clearly stupid story and [conjecture here] running a couple of vox pop pieces on it [conjecture over] just makes your show look ridiculous!

I have a couple of things to rant about today, so I’ll split them into a couple of posts.

First subject: TVNZ News, “Matt” McClean (he was “Matty” on Breakfast, I’m not sure he’s grown up enough to shed those two letters).

Saying “the weight of emotion, clear on this young man’s face” while showing shots of a guy’s hand scars and his sad face does not amount to journalism. We’re not writing a fucking novella here. If we were, we’d probably not leave the verb out of the sentence. But we’re not, this is supposed to be a news report. It’s a story about a guy trying to save people from a house fire in which a six-year-old child died, and the guy with the sore hands looks emotional. We get it. Really, even an actual psychopath would likely deduce that there are emotions happening here.

OK, to be fair there are two issues within this issue. Firstly, you’re filling the report up with worthless dross. This could mean that there is no editing process at TVNZ news, or more likely that TVNZ are well aware that they have three minutes of actual news and another 45 minutes or airtime to pad out with live crosses, press releases, rugby players patting each other on the back and this sort of crap. I would say it also says that McClean dropped out of a creative short story course, but I don’t think that’s the case, because once on Breakfast they showed a video of him at a high-school media course. It was hot.

Secondly, The News (capitals intended) now has very little to do with the news, and a lot to do with gloss and very bad psychology. But you all knew that, and I know that you all knew that. I guess it was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

And look, nothing against Matty McClean. He’s perfectly entertaining in a magazine-style show (and seems relatively intelligent). But on a show that, for some reason I have these ridiculous expectations of being concise, serious and informative, he slides comfortably in beside all the other vacuous blondes. And by “comfortably,” I mean he makes me want to punch myself in the face repeatedly.