The Lair

I’ve watched The Watchmen before. But not in Sri Lanka, and not with the crowd I usually hang out with here. So off to the cinema we went. The first time, it was the movie experience. This time around, it was the movie going experience. For the past decade or so, I’ve probably watched more movies in a tiny screen embedded into the back of an airplane seat than I have on a large screen.

False alarm of the day: Despite dire warnings, the national anthem was not played before the start of the movie. In retrospect, I can’t even articulate why the concept of having a national anthem played before a movie screening bothers me so much. Except it does and I was glad when it didn’t happen. Maybe the practice has fallen out of favour?

The movie itself: the movie rating system in SL confuses me greatly. Back in the day, you had your general audience movies, the “more suitable for adults” shtick (which in the late 80s really meant a proverbial flash of ankle and petticoat) and the “adults only omgz” which probably included a flash of mammaries at most. Now The Watchmen is rated R in the US and 18+ in the UK. There is violence (big deal, this is the country which repeatedly televised the bug eyed terrorist corpse face with much gusto, we’re sort of used to seeing pieces of limbs and lots of blood everywhere) and nudity. You’d expect it to be an adults only classification here, right? Even the permissive UK slapped a 18+ on it, right? Umm. No. The Watchmen was classified “more suitable for adults” in Sri Lanka. Go figure. I don’t know what people were thinking either.

Then there was the actual movie; which surprisingly enough featured very little in the way of creative editing by censorious morality police. Yes, so Dr. Manhattan’s nether regions were perpetually blurred out (prompting much sniggering from myself). In a blatant double standard, his magnificent blue buttcheeks (I can’t believe I just typed those words out) were left exposed to the cinema goer. The infamous, cringe inducing sex scene aboard the Archimedes was (almost) uncensored, which surprised me no end. All in all, the movie was left intact.

Finally, there was the saga of the beer. Yes, apparently beer can be purchased by cinema going folk (Ok, it’s been years since I was in a Sri Lankan cinema, ok? I don’t know these things). But as usual, there are caveats and rules which make the experience slightly less enjoyable than it could be…

First, no beer purchases before 1700 in the evening. Not unreasonable, you might argue – until you realize that the movie starts at 1630. Or it would have, if they had bothered starting on time (they didn’t).

Second, containers of beer cannot be taken inside the hall. Note that this does not apply to other beverages, which people happily carted in – but apparently beer is … umm … special. Ok, I can see the logic in that too (someone could easily be buying for minors in the cinema hall proper) except that this requires beer be purchased and downed during intermission.

Which brings me to the last element in this hideous trifecta of beerfail – for some inexplicable reason, the intermission was barely 5 minutes long. Ice cold beverage chugged down in 30 seconds or less because omg-the-movie-is-starting-up-again and this is the part where Manhattan is accused of giving people cancer?. Yeah, instant brainfreeze. Not fun.

But hey, it was fun. I probably wouldn’t do that again in a hurry though – if I want to pay for the privilege of sitting in an unpleasantly musty smelling hall; I’d go back to school or something.

When it started out, Wikipedia was a poster child for everything that mainstream media outlets wasn’t – decentralized control and editing abilities (“anyone can edit anything!”) and filled with obscure yet fascinating pieces of information. Is it the same today? Yes, yes it is but the limits under which Wikipedia (like most other organizations) must operate have become clearer. Because yes, there are limits. A free-for-all editing structure requires more rules, not fewer.

The first signs: banning Church of Scientology IP addresses from editing Wikipedia. So, not such a big deal after all – Wikipedia routinely bars most open proxy IPs from editing pages, after repeated and sustained editing abuse. This is all part and parcel of Wikipedia practice, made necessary because of the anonymous internet. Perhaps it was the first time that Wikipedia had performed an organizational IP block, though (although I doubt it).

But this most recent case? Much worse, depending on your perspective. The New York Times is reporting that Wikipedia voluntarily suppressed news about a kidnapping in order to prevent the ransom value from going up.

Times executives believed that publicity would raise Mr. Rohde’s value to his captors as a bargaining chip and reduce his chance of survival. Persuading another publication or a broadcaster not to report the kidnapping usually meant just a phone call from one editor to another, said Bill Keller, executive editor of The Times

Mmmm. Collusion to prevent the publication of items with legitimate news interest to the public? check. Self censorship? check.

And then it gets better.

The Wikipedia page history shows that the next day, Nov. 13, someone without a user name edited the entry on Mr. Rohde for the first time to include the kidnapping. Mr. Moss deleted the addition, and the same unidentified user promptly restored it, adding a note protesting the removal
…
Around that time, Catherine J. Mathis, the chief spokeswoman for the New York Times Company, called Mr. Wales and asked for his help.

And then there is a (not very) interesting story of cat-and-mouse, of editorial freezings of pages and so on.

What does this all mean? The person asked by the article author seems to think that –

[Wikipedia] role in suppressing news about Mr. Rohde would [probably not] prompt an outcry among longtime editors, because in the Rohde case, lives were at stake

That’s probably true. I don’t think there was any other choice for Jimmy Wales and his administrators, even if they had contemplated alternatives. But on the other hand, the media is responsible for the destruction of lives too. What made the life of a random reporter (who must have known about the risks going in) more important than media witch hunts which bring down so many?

Part of the appeal of a true crowd sourcing was that interests were diluted. No single person is accountable, no single point of view pushed (but then again, we all know that with Wikipedia editorial politics, that was never true at any point anyway). What if the next people who’s lives are at stake don’t have Jimmy Wales on their rolodeck to call and ask for a special favour? Democracy didn’t die with the publication of this story. The illusion that any crowd sourced site is more powerful than the administrative cabal probably did though. And not a moment too soon.

It seems like a made-for-a-VC-presentation fairytale – an oppressed people rise up, converge online and overthrow the comedic villain that everyone loves to hate. It could even be the next “You Got Mail” (You Can Haz Tweets?). On the face of it, I should be all over this – power to the people, information should be free, and hey, it’s Iran. My (completely irrelevant and probably unedified) view from several thousand miles away is that there could be worse things that a change of regime. And that this view is probably diametrically opposed to my country’s foreign policy causes me much amusement.

But somewhere, Iran’s Twitter Revolution went a little bit awry.

By no means the first, but (as usual) one of the most succinct descriptions came from the Economist.

Meanwhile the much-ballyhooed Twitter swiftly degraded into pointlessness. By deluging threads like Iranelection with cries of support for the protesters, Americans and Britons rendered the site almost useless as a source of information—something that Iran’s government had tried and failed to do

A quick anecdote – count the number of Iranians on the #iranelection hashtag page. Come back when you reach 10. Take provisions, you may be gone a while.

But there was more to come. The next big thing was the Sea of Green where everyone was supposed to give their Twitter avatar a sickly (or hulk-like) cast of green. And here, Twitter to the rescue.

Slowly buy (sic) surely, green-shaded Twitter icons of bored American housewives will destroy the grand ayatollah’s will to go on

And there is even an unsurprising followup.

My little tweet about how sad it is that in 2009, activism = turning your Twitter icon green, got me in a little bit of hot water last night

Because I know exactly how many things have been solved by hand wringing, blog posts ad nauseum, tweets and even candlelight vigils and demonstrations at busy roundabouts. Answer: a bit less than the people doing them might think.

ETA: Saw this post a couple of days ago. I love the picture of the failwhale.
ETA-2: The latest thing appears to be changing the timezone/location of your Twitter profile to match Tehran. Because allegedly, security forces are using these pieces of information to crack down on Iranian sources. Clearly, this is far easier than Iranians (who may genuinely be at risk) changing their information to something like GMT/London in order to blend in. Anyway, I would be shocked if Twitter and Facebook were still accessible via normal means from within Iran.