MTV Europe Music Awards "rickrolled"

Original Article from BBC:

Rick brands MTV win 'ridiculous'

Eighties pop star Rick Astley has branded his surprise victory in the best act ever category at the MTV Europe Music Awards as "ridiculous".

The singer beat U2, Green Day and Christina Aguilera to the gong, which was voted for by the public.

He said: "I just felt it was a bit of a daft award.

"How can you present the best act in the world ever especially when you've got Paul McCartney on the show as well? It was just a bit ridiculous."

Although he played down the victory, the singer said he was very pleased that the public had voted for him.

"They mentioned the phrase "rickrolling" (a phrase coined after his hit Never Gonna Give You Up was hidden behind a variety of fake web links as an online prank) last night and I think MTV were thoroughly rickrolled," he said.

"I really appreciate all the guys that did vote for me but I also feel for all the artists who got rickrolled a bit last night because there were obviously some people there that perhaps deserved it more than me.

"You've got people like U2 in that category and Christine Aguilera so it's a bit of a funny one."

Despite his famous win the singer said he had no plans to make a return.

He added: "I don't have the desire to come back with a new single. I still do gigs and sing my old tunes and pretend I'm 21 again for an hour which is nice.

"I don't really crave having a record again in that way. I think those days are gone. They're best left where they are."

The '80s pop star also admitted that he was a big fan of talent shows such as The X Factor.

He said: "The one thing I like about X Factor and those shows is the people are getting to say what they want.

"They're actually voting and it's down to them at the end of the day.

"I genuinely think Daniel (Evans) has got a lot of fans because what he does, he does well.

"It shows you can't decide what people want at the end of the day. You can try and ram it down their throats but you can't."

Behold the epiphany of unfiltered news

Two guys came up with a software that points out bias news. 

Thank you.

You said, "I love you," I said, "Wait." I was going to say, "Take me," you said, "Go away." The movie that changed my life could be resumed to the quote above. A film about love, jealousy, pretension, and the unpredictability of human feelings. Truffaut's masterpiece cannot be underestimated, though. It's not just about a love triangle and "bros before hos". Of course the characters are interesting - and completely fictitious -, and the plot, of course, is very entertaining, but what actually caught me in this movie was the way Truffaut conducted the twists and ironies in the story, sprinkling it with wild actions and radical images - Catherine's whimsical ways, mostly. And how the scenes are visually constructed following the actual facts, with sudden ups and downs, rough cuts, how narration is so extensively explored and how sensible and beautiful some o f the scenes are, like the most famous one of the movie, seen above.
Personally, "Jules et Jim" changed the way I perceived and appreciated films, for it was the first time I saw something so different from everything else, so powerful and subtle at the same time. It also changed the way I perceived people, love and relationships, in that order. People seemed more human, more likely to be mean - not by meaning to harm anyone, but by beiyng selfish. Love seemed much deeper than I had ever realized: it struck me as something impossibly controlable and wild, that no one could even fully comprehend. Relationships became much more fragile for me, and I was able to see the thin line between healthy and sick, and the result of years upon years of frustration, confusion and madness.

That the print journalism industry is being forced to make some drastic changes due to the expansion of internet, everyone knows. The key issue in this discussion is how. Just throwing the print edition content online has been proved not to work, and lots of people have absolutely no idea of what they are doing.
I started reading the NYT online in 2006, to exercise my vocabulary and have a better, more reliable news source than my hometown's newspaper. I've been noticing great advances in the multimedia aspect of the NYT online: videos, podcasts, personalized news, and the also personalized daily update by e-mail. You get just what you want to know about, and they still give you the option to read everything that was published on the print edition.
My local newspaper has done basically the same: interactive graphics, videos, neighborhood specials, a whole section for high school and college students, reader concerts and theater reviews and the "picture of the day", - all very well put together by a model that uses, as stated at Editors Weblog, "Cross-platform planning, budget and promotion". In other words, Zero Hora, the newspaper owned by RBS group, refers to the website, which gives the reader access to TV produced content, and the TV stations advertise the radio stations, and the radio stations promote the print edition. The converged approach adopted by RBS makes everything run really smoothly and it seems to me this is the future of media: integration, convergence, "organicity" - something analog to a body, with organs that have different functions but the same objectives: transmit the information to the receiver.
The Wired article says that opening doors for the reader is the way to go for print journalism. The NYT has been doing that since they started to publish average people's wedding photos on their print edition. Of course nowadays the reader wants more than the passive appearance on the paper. The reader wants to be part of the paper, part of the tv, part of the radio - and that's where we can see internet has spoiled us: we can't be satisfied without interactivity. And this is, in my opinion, combined with a converged environment like RBS', the key to success.

I can't say that one specific book has ever changed my life. Instead, let me say that each book I read changes me in its own way. Each chapter, each paragraph, each word affects me, and makes me think a slightly differently. There were some remarkable readings, though. One of them - or the first, if I can say that - was a novel called "Poil de Carrote", by Jules Renard. It is weird that I read this book by the age of six or seven, and it was definitely the first "adult" book I've read - and even weirder that it is a book about growing up, about innocence and family. It made me look into life with different eyes. Of course I didn't understand all the drama in the book (but when I read it again, a year ago, I did), but it made me feel happy about the life I had, since the booked portrayed things that didn't happen anymore - or shouldn't.
The second remarkable book in my life was "Insomnia", by Marcelo Carneiro da Cunha. Marketed toward young teenagers, the book tells the story of Claudia, a girl who lost her mother when she was a baby and basically takes care of her father, a clumsy scientist, while trying to organize her own life - or love life, more specifically. I read this book when I was eleven, and the strength and will power of the main character inspired me and shaped me as a woman and as a human being.
The third book was "Love in the Time of Cholera", by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Some say this book is about the triumph of true love, some argue that it's about gullibility and excessive romanticism. Personally, I believe it's about love as something so strong, so real and tangible that it can be compared to a disease - like the cholera.
The fourth and last book that I think it's worth mentioning here was Roque de Barros Laraia's "Culture: An Anthropological Concept". This book changed the way I see society, myself and my own culture and others'. I realize now how we are so influenced, how we are so impregnated by our culture - he mentions culture as eye glasses we have to take off if we want to understand the unknown, the strange, the other.
Maybe because I started reading so early, maybe becaus I always like reading, but all my life books have made me reflect and rethink my habits, my customs and my values.

Vinyls strike back

In a world where getting music is so easy due to advents of tools like iTunes store and file sharing mechanisms, and (virtually) anyone could have the music they want, it's hard to differentiate. Vinyls are the new old way to do so.
Check Alex Williams' NYTimes story.

observations

This first contact with Baran's book and the discussions we've had in class this week made me connect different fields of study in an attempt for all of the information I was absorbing to make sense. Last semester I was still going to college in Brazil, where I was double majoring in Journalism and in Anthropology. One of the greatest anthropologist of our times, Clifford Geertz, who is in fact cited in Baran's text, makes the perfect connection when defining culture as "a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which people communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life" (1973:89). Here we can see how the ability of communicate is intimately connected with the development of culture. Every action we perform is a way to communicate something, a symbol with a specific meaning inside our culture. 

Now this is really interesting: as I was looking at the figures and schemes in the book, I realized that Geertz's famous example of the out of context wink could be applied to the mass communications theory. Basically if instead of the wink you take as an example a TV advertisement, it's possible to draw the parallel by saying that if that exact same ad is shown in many countries with different cultures - or contexts -, the ad will be assimilated differently in each one. Sometimes, even with the cultural differences, the ads work - like Coca Cola's Christmas ads. Sometimes, they don't. A good example of this failure is Dove's "Real Beauty"campaign. Average-looking, but pretty women in bikinis, to prove that true beauty isn't what Hollywood dictates. In Brazil, it was a big sales success; in Germany, women took as an offense. It happens.

That's why mass communicators should know their target, their interlocutor.  Unlike Geertz's wink, mass communication is, according to Baran, "constrained by virtually every aspect of the communication situation", not flexible and experimental - millions of people are deconding the message, interpreting - then judging. 

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