A Sign of the Time: Magazine’s Most Influential Person a Pornographer
Mary Eberstadt recently opined in Is Pornography the New Tobacco? that pornography in today’s society has reached levels of acceptance and ubiquity equal to those of smoking in the fifties.
Time Magazine’s internet survey to determine the World’s Most Influential Person has neatly confirmed her hypothesis. 21-year old Christopher Poole (aka moot), founder of an internet forum with relaxed posting restrictions that allow users to upload pornography for public consumption, is apparently the most influential person in the world.
When I ran across Modern Catholic Mom’s post this morning, I couldn’t really believe what I read. A pornographer the world’s most influential person? Before checking the Time article, I decided I needed to see this forum for myself. I knew that the site must be NSFW when it was caught by my Safe Eyes filter on my Macbook. In fact, I had to completely disable the filter to access it (which only I can do as admin) and what I found was perhaps even more surprising than Time handing one of their biggest awards to a pornographer.
The forum leaves a lot to be desired aesthetically, and right in the middle of the category listing was an entire adult section, advertising everything from naked pictures to hardcore pornography, with all sorts of variations in between. My inquiries stopped there, but I instead clicked on video games to drill down and get a feel for what the site is like.
I about threw up. Seriously. In front of me was a completely disjointed, almost unreadable forum format, with random pictures—mostly of Japanese anime characters—littered throughout.
Time seeks to semi-justify Poole’s placement at the top by citing his traffic: 13 million page views a day, and 5.6 million visitors a month. And, surely with a wry smile, made this grudging acknowledgment:
Undoubtedly, many people will question moot’s worthiness of the title World’s Most Influential Person.
After looking at the rest of the poll results, not so much. Filipino boxer Manny Pacquioa received the most votes—over 19 million more votes than Barack Obama—but was edged by Poole on the influence scale, which is apparently some sort of objective measurement of the particular person’s influence over the voter’s life. I can’t, however, take any objective measurement too seriously that tells me that Kobe Bryant has over twice the amount of influence over people’s lives that the Pope, Dalai Lama, and Barack Obama have combined. (Other great ones: T-Pain over Vladimir Putin, Brittney Spears over Oprah).
As laughable as this poll obviously is, we have to question Time Magazine‘s judgment in putting a site containing hardcore pornography that anyone can view into such a bright spotlight. Unfortunately, in a society where pornography is the “new tobacco,” we simply can’t rely on the media to be good stewards of the information they put in the public square and who might be affected by it.
It is up to families to control the media’s influence and decide what is right for themselves. Anyone who ran across this “award” as I did—with Safe Eyes installed on their PC or Mac—would have been able to read the blog post and the Time article but would have been blocked from viewing the forum. In other words, all of the good web, none of the bad.
Filed under: Internet Safety News
Well, the methodology is definitely flawed – though I suspect it’s deliberate to draw attention to the problem.
Perhaps Opera is less “pervasive” than Britney Spears. That’s not to say Britney could do what Opera does. It’s to say that her cumulative impact, or Kobe’s impact, however devoid the message is of power, is more completely encoded into the mindscape.
The list sounds absolutely absurd…well, because it is. The list was manipulated by hackers from that website, if you look at the first letter of the first 21 person…the message is “marblecake, also the game”.
Here is a more detailed account of how they hacked it – http://musicmachinery.com/2009/04/15/inside-the-precision-hack/
One of the person that hacked Time’s list –
“Zombocom joked to one of his friends “it would be funny to troll Time.com and put us up as most influential, but since we are not explicitly on the list we’ll have to spell it out. â€? His friend thought it was impossible. But two weeks later, “marblecake’ was indeed spelled out for all to see at the top of the Time.com poll.
So what is the significance of ‘marblecake’? Zombocom says: â€? Marblecake was an irc channel where the “Message to Scientologyâ€? video originated. Many believe we are “deadâ€? or only doing hugraids etc, so I thought it would also be a way of saying : we’re still around and we don’t just do only “moralfagâ€? stuff .”
Well, if porn is the new tobacco they should put a sin tax on it. In this economy we could use the revenue. Tax the porn!
Doing a search online for Christopher Poole, I came across the Wikipedia page that talked about his 4chan.org website. The article made specific mention as those here have also spoke of, that the Time magazine internet poll was falsely manipulated, either by hackers or by the enormous fanbase the 4chan website has. If a website with that large of a fanbase asks all its readers to go vote for them, and that causes the site to make the list, I really believe that is a testament to the site’s large influence.
It is very similar to Howard Stern, and his bid for governor of New York years ago. His enormous popularity and influence would have succeeded in him becoming governor, were it not for his dropping out of the race.
Oprah Winfrey is another person who has an enormous influence. She only needs to make a casual reference to something (e.g. a book) and it immediately tops the best seller list. This is the kind of influence that Time is talking about, and the fact this man made the list proves his influence.
Walt D in LV
P.S. Likewise, ANYONE else could recruit and/or request their fans/following to flock to the site to vote so that they may make the list.
Oh, and in response to Seattle Mom:
“Seattle Mom, on May 5th, 2009 at 3:36 pm Said:
Well, if porn is the new tobacco they should put a sin tax on it. In this economy we could use the revenue. Tax the porn!”
Most pornography nowadays is available for free, so it’s impossible, if not impractical to tax pornography. Even if you put a 5, 10, 20, or 100% tax on it. 100% of zero is still zero.
Walt D in LV
Walt D in LV … if you honestly expect people to believe that there is not huge revenue flowing through these channels, not just ad space dollars but actual subscription fees, you really are insulting the general populace by asking them to be as gullible as you yourself are.
As for the poll and the influence (or whatever portion of the poll you are trying say constitutes some type a “real” influence that should be counted, beyond the effects of the hacking), skewed polling techniques are standard advertising operating procedure, and can be manipulated and generated a lot of ways. If you honestly think that a more highly mobilized fan-base necessarily means a fan-base that is a larger percentage of the general populace (ie the persons being influenced), then you really are a sucker for advertising. Yes, anybody could swing the vote that way if they mobilized enough … but then not everybody will have that same motivation will they? A company making even banner-ad dollars, let alone subscriptions, will have much more incentive to drum up people to go vote than just about anybody else … greed is a great motivator and airtime/web-hits generate cash. anybody who tells you differently is selling something … and it looks like you bought it.
Wonderful stuff.. really full of usefull information. I’ll grab the RSS feed and will stay tuned for more. Oh, and I threw you a StumbleUpon vote