Jackson Miller

I heard that I pissed off some women at BarCamp Nashville on Saturday. From what I understand, it had to do with some comments I made about sensationalism in the news, but I didn’t give the full back story. Before I start posting more about “3D Social Networks”, I want to first try and clear the air on this one.

Let’s just say that my talk at BarCamp was less-than-scripted. I had a general idea of the order of the bullet points, but aside from the text on the slides that I created, almost everything I said was ad-lib. What can I say, I have always been fond of improv. Unfortunately, that can get me into trouble at times.

As part of my talk I wanted to make the point that by allowing computers to observe our behaviors we can learn things about ourselves that may make us want to change our actions. The example I used was my personal propensity to click on CNN.com stories about missing 13 year old girls. I then made the unfortunate comment “I don’t give a fuck about missing 13 year old girls”. Of course, that is not true and I made a very poor assumption that everyone at BarCamp would know the back story.

Back story? What back story you ask?

Well, part of it goes back to this post that I made about Tabitha Tuders on May 1, 2003:

A 13 year old girl has gone missing in my neighborhood, and the Metro police don’t seem to be too concerned. This raises all kinds of questions.

The main question is of course where exactly is Tabitha Tuders, and how did she get there? Was it voluntary, or is this foul play. I also can’t help but wonder why this is not getting more attention by the media.

Granted, I first heard about it on the news, but it is not the top story. Why is this kind of story a really big story sometimes, and not others? Does it have to do with the victim’s financial status? Does it have to do with their appearance? Maybe it simply has to do with a lack of “better” news stories at the time.

I actually posted quite a bit about Tabitha. For a long time I was one of VERY few references on the web about the case. (1, 2, 3)

One thing that I noticed from watching that case was that a missing 13 year old girl is not really a national news story. Hell, it wasn’t even much of a local news story. Yet there was very little different about the Tabitha case and the cases that you do see on CNN. What is the difference? The vast majority of the missing teen stories on CNN have to do with AFFLUENT, PRETTY, WHITE, FEMALES. While I know it to be true in several cases, my guess is that the cases we hear about are the ones where the parents hired a good publicist.

Don’t get me wrong, if one of my kids went missing I would be hiring publicists, investigators, bounty hunters, etc. Still, I think that system encourages sensationalism and make finding missing loves one and exclusive club. That is not good.

So, by clicking on these (and other sensational stories) on sites like CNN, I am encouraging it. By observing my behavior I am able to see that I am encouraging a system that I disagree with. That makes me want to change my actions.

So, my comments we unfortunate, but they were not intended to be mean-spirited. I apologize to anyone that I offended.