08 February 2013 @ 08:26 am
ATTF: Super-heroism in the Information Age  

Good morning, Best Bar On Earth!  Yep, it’s that Time Of The Week again – time to turn your Friday thoughts to our favourite assassins.  

If you’re like me, you’ve been following the daily explosion of prompts for the Valentine's Day  Massacre Promptathon with awe and delight.  To relieve the pressure of the wait, today’s topic offers an opportunity to unleash small, short, smartbomblets of creativity and hopefully have some fun along the way.

The Premise:

Those of you who have ever worked on something that attracted public interest will know that media reports and internet theories relating to stuff you are deeply familiar with are often howlingly inaccurate, badly researched, and full of “spin.”  (Because hey, just reporting the news is boring and journos want people to pay attention to them -- so why not find that angle, sensationalize, or simply make stuff up to fill in the blanks?) Tweeters can get even worse -- internet anonymity allows the wildest ideas and most intrusive photos to zip around the globe in the time it takes Clint to nock an arrow.  And then there are the ordinary citizens caught up in the fray.  How do they see all this gods-and-monsters stuff

The Scene:

In the last scenes of the movie Fury stands in front of a bank of monitors with newsfeeds, amateur videos of the Chitauri battle, so we know the stuff is out there – it’s practically canon!!!  ("Superheroes in New York???  Gimme a break ...")  The awe-inspiringly productive [livejournal.com profile] anuna_81  left a prompt for the VD extravaganza (something about all the incredible media footage and newspaper/magazine articles about Avengers”); my own personal head canon has Clint and Natasha amusing each other while leveling out by reading blogs, tweets and news coverage of their supposed exploits. The time is clearly right...

Your Challenge:

Give us your reports, blogs, tweets, PMs, YouTube clips, pics, diary entries, e-mails and water cooler rehashes of The Day New York Exploded.  Pick the perspective, the degree of accuracy, the spin -- maybe the reaction of C or N to seeing stuff about themselves?  Or else, give us your meta and thinky thoughts on what all that media coverage might mean for future SHIELD undercover ops, for the appearance of stalking fans, *cough* LJ sites devoted to *cough* certain assassins ...

I’m currently reclining on my couch at home so I can read anything I want, but for those of you who aren’t -- remember to put anything truly compromising/NSFW under cut!  <3<3<3

 
 
Current Location: Park Avenue, May 2012
Current Mood: geeky
Current Music: Black Sabbath
 
 
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[identity profile] hufflepuffsneak.livejournal.com on February 8th, 2013 06:47 pm (UTC)
Re the journos: oh, the stories I could tell -- of straw men being built, evidence-free, followed by the fact that no evidence could be found being used as the basis for even more excited stories

Yeah, and even when journalists are acting in good faith, it's like with wikipedia- you think you read an article and you're getting the story, but then you actually study it and see everything is oversimplified to the point of being wrong. But as long as you get in quotes and do it in AP style, it's all good. Which is why we actually need experts! /preaching to the choir.

My head canon has SHIELD trying to pull as much of that stuff and prevent its publication, so they won't lose their assets' undercover potential -- there'd be a story in that

I wonder if Fury will be like "Since you had to go off an be heroes, it's your job to clean up your mess" or if rookie Agents Smith and Jones get assigned keeping Black Widow and Hawkeye out of the media.