Thursday evenings are always a good night for The Feed crew – it’s always a fairly broad reaching episode that manages to touch on a lot of different topics, and last night’s was no different. Opening with the nightly wrap, we were subject to (/able to view, depending on how generous you’re feeling) Tony Abbott’s now infamous wink on televised radio during a conversation with a phone sex operator. No matter your political allegiance (well, it matters a little), there’s no denying the cringe-inducing beauty of that moment. Everything about it is wrong and it’s amazing. There’s no excuse to not see it on TV. Also touched upon was the crowd sources ad campaign adult tube site PornHub has been running. Opinions are varied on this one, but some of the ads were damn funny and very clever. It’s obvious that the effect of the campaign would be to get people talking about it, so it that sense PornHub has achieved its goal. Could a news program more tightly controlled/censored than The Feed show the ads though? Perhaps not.
The first long running piece was on internet security, specifically focusing on eBay’s recent hack and the company’s poor response to this. When should a company tell its users they’ve been compromised? What measures should they take in protecting data? How often should users change their passwords? These questions were explored through interviews and stories, yet there are obviously no solid answers. eBay made a mistake in how they handled this hack- yet all this event really shows is how young the internet really still is, and how unchartered much of the territory we’re wading through every day is.
Staying on the topic of internet culture, the second feature focused on memes, specifically the human faces behind them. What could’ve been a brief, “ha ha” idea was explored with a real human touch and with fascinating results. The idea that one’s real life identity could be so compromised by online memetic mutation is really quite troubling. One Melbourne lady suffering from a form of ichthyosis found this out first hand, when a photo from her blog – featuring the ailment’s trademark red skin – was plastered around the web for jokes and humour, all at her expense. What action can a person reasonably take against this? Once an image is popular, legal action is obviously for the birds. The most successful result in this case was simple conversation. Talking to the Reddit users posting the image about her condition led to a deeper connection and understanding. Yet this is only once case- it’s odd to think about there being a real person behind the Scumbag Steve meme pictures posted every time a politician does something bad.
Ending on a more positive note, as the crew does, the show concluded with news that the popular Israeli Happy singers (check it here) have been released from jail after being imprisoned for breaking the country’s strict public dress laws. So yes! Great note to end a great week on.
Review Score: THREE AND A HALF STARS (OUT OF FIVE)
The Feed airs Monday-Thursday, 7:35 (repeated 10:30) on SBS2
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