The Writers Strike: Who you gonna believe? Internet Aliased Trolls or Real People on Video?

Since the beginning of this strike, a lot of sentiment has been played out on internet blogs and message boards. Some of them public, some private for WGA members. UnitedHollywood.com is a public blog run by WGA writers. Every time they make a good case for the WGA the AMPTP trolls reply with all kinds of anti-writers comments. They seek to split union members, cause infighting, and push the AMPTP ideals - like slavery.

The problem is that writers generally don't want to get into these politics, and they don't want to make a bad name for themselves with future employers. So they tend to keep their statements simple, usually to a few words that make nice chants on the picket lines. Things like 'fair deal', 'piece of the pie', 'as long as it takes'. And it is really very simple. It's the AMPTP who make it more complicated than it is. It's simply about getting the 2.5% residual rate they want on new media. That's the main issue that the AMPTP will not even consider, will not even sit down to discuss.

From UnitedHollywood.com::

Two Sides to Every Story: The Truth...and Everything Else

As the strike continues and things heat up around the DGA negotiations, apparently the multi-national media mega-corps and their $100K a month crisis management flaks are ramping up their online psy-ops and misinformation campaigns. Deadline Hollywood Daily, in a post detailing a range of less than savory actions taken by AMPTP members against WGA supporters, reported that "AMPTP staffers, consultants and members (especially corporate publicity departments) are busily posting comments on WGA-friendly websites and blogs that Hollywood visits regularly and filling them with hate-filled rants against the WGA leadership, the A-list actors, and the companies who've made WGA side deals. The goal is to turn off readers and drive traffic away and in the process spread pro-AMPTP propaganda and make it look as if the strike is breaking apart." Well, we at UH.com can certainly confirm the hate-filled rants. How bad has it gotten? Well, what are the most vile things you can imagine? Did you include references to Hitler, comparisons to the 9/11 terrorists, the "C-word" and every conceivable variation of the F-bomb? Okay, now imagine someone posting that, oh... 40 or 50 times a day, sometimes 10 times in the span of 10 minutes. In fact, it's that kind of stuff - not the obvious trolls - that caused us to turn on comment moderation. And now we can add a new tactic: pretending to be WGA members in online comment sections.

and then we have the writers speaking out for themselves on video where we can verify who thaey are:

Voices4Action!

For the past month we've been filming interviews with writers, directors, actors, futurists, DPs, and people on the picket line, asking them to talk about the strike. Oliver Stone looked back at his years in the business, remembering how it used to be before the corporations' greed overwhelmed the movie business. Maria Maggenti told us about the importance of residuals to her career. Tony Gilroy talked about fairness. Adam Brooks about fighting for the future. The picketers outside Fox just before the holidays, called for "Action!" We've heard these ideas before, but, for us, the interviews personalized the issues of the strike. Voices4Action is also a place where we'll be talking about the future of story-telling in the new digital marketplaces. The congloms say they don't know how the internet will work, if there is, in fact, any money to be made on-line. Putting aside their disingenuousness, there is an honest fact that can't be denied. The internet is evolving and changing in ways difficult to predict.

So who you gonna believe?

If you want to do something simple and easy to help the writers get this strike over sooner, go out and post your support for the writers and what you believe to be real. If you do I would hope you'd have the guts to use your real name instead of hiding behind a non-credible alias. Writers do it, actors do it, you can do it.

And complaining about WGA tactics ain't gonna do it, especially if you're not in the WGA. That's not your concern anymore than your family bank account is the WGA's concern.

The Unconstitutionality of the Internet Movie Download Scenario

The expectation is that DVDs will soon become obsolete, as will cable TV. We will be getting our entertainment through the internet which will be upgraded to have much better quality streaming and support for the large media files. But what happens when we don't buy DVDs anymore? Do we subscribe to a service that downloads them to a hard drive, something like TVO? Do we stream them over the net from a server maintained by a movie distributor?

If so, what do we then own when we buy a movie? Is it only a license to authorize the streaming? Must we transfer the license to each new system we buy? If we have multiple systems in the house, can we copy the license to each one? Is there a charge for that? Will the license be maintained on a server and all we need is a password? Isn't that insecure since pirates could steal a password just like identity thieves steal bank accounts?

In this world we don't own a physical copy of the movie. We just own a right to view it? What if there's a terrorist threat and we can't access the servers to download films? What if the government shuts down the servers? Must we wait for the war to end? or if there's a power outage at the server location? Now we have to worry about that on top of the possibility of similar problems on our end.

What if the distributor has a claim against us? Let's say we're behind on a bill for some other service. Can they hold us hostage by shutting down our movie account until we pay up?

We already have a serious problem with banks having total access to our money in bank accounts. If a creditor takes you to court and gets a levy on your assets the bank can give them all your money. A bank can take any fees it wants from your account. If you have an overdraft the bank takes the money first. They don't ask questions later, they just take the money. If they raise the fees, they just take them. They don't tell you later. Money is all they care about. Who's to say movie distributors won't behave the same?

Interpersonal Internet Communication or the Good Thing about Flame Wars

I studied interpersonal communication in grad school along with mass communication and communication theory, the three majors areas of study in my major. One of the tenets of interpersonal communication is feedback. Interpersonal communication is a two way street. We say something and a listener responds to it. But there are steps along the way. The listener has to first hear and listen to what is said, then process the information, and this gets into perception and a number of other big words. All that is more communication theory, my weakest area. I was most interested in mass communication having been a filmmaker.

On internet message boards we have flame wars, the heated arguments that get out of hand between people who post messages and disagree, sometimes on the most trivial points. To me this is interpersonal communication. Yet it's mass communication. Well which is it? This question, I think, could be at the heart of why we have flame wars. When we read stuff in a magazine, newspaper, or see it on TV, we come to believe whatever it is is mostly true or at least has been well researched by the writer. When we read stuff on a message board posted by anyone who happens to me a member, we should expect their words to be any more researched thane we would the words exchanged at a dinner conversation with an acquaintance we've met for the first time. Yet, I think board readers expect what they read to be reliable and when they detect that this isn't so they lash out with name calling or citing references to belittle the message poster.

People wouldn't do that at a dinner table. For one thing they have to face the respondent in person, as well an anyone else present. But this is also true on a message board. The people reading just aren't in person. So somehow we feel we can get away with making verbal attacks that we'd never do in person.

But what I really want to get at is the whole feedback cycle of interpersonal communication. It is a cycle. Person A says something to person B who processes the information and then responds with feedback to person A. Person A may then respond with a updated version of their original statement revised perhaps upon being enlightened by feedback from person B. Or person A may rephrase their statement to better clarify for person B what it is they meant.

The whole cycle breaks down in flame wars because we have person B telling person A how it is, not giving person A a chance to process their feedback and perhaps revise the original statement. We might have person A come back with a restatement to clarify their meaning and then person B will respond with charges of person A being a liar or phony because they change their meaning to fit the responses. Well that's what interpersonal communication is. If you can't understand this the don't ever bother getting married. It won't work out.

Something else I learned in class was that the concept of 'not' is exclusively human. That is to say animals and other creatures can't understand 'not'. They do know what not being hungry is. They don't know what not being loved is. They may want. But that is a positive concept. Only humans can put together that when you want something it means there is 'not' something there. What does this have to do with interpersonal communication?

Well, especially on message board debates, you get people taking stands and saying what something is while someone else says what it is not. So the 'not' concept is alive and thriving in debates and certainly on internet message boards, and this is a good thing. Debate is a great thing. It's a human thing. It's a freedom of speech thing. A freedom people have died for. So we should welcome debates and those who have their 'not' points of views. Flame wars are not pretty. But they are a symptom of a healthy society and we should condemn them and be too quick to ban people for getting into them. The internet is a new thing and we aren't used to it or fully understand what it is.