Thursday, September 16, 2010Opinion

The Brownsville States-Graphic

page 4

By 28th Judicial District Circuit Court Judge Clayburn Peeples

Calvin's Corner

By Calvin Carter, Staff Writer

The Brownsville States-Graphic(USPS ISSN 08909938) is published weekly by Haywood County Newspapers

L.L.C., 42 South Washington, P.O. Box 59, Brownsville TN 38012.

Periodicals postage paid at Brownsville, TN.POSTMASTER: Send address changes to

The Brownsville States-Graphic, P.O. Box 59, Brownsville, TN 38012

“A publication of American Hometown Publishing”DEADLINES:

News, Monday at Noon • Advertising, Monday at NoonClassifi ed Advertising, Monday at Noon

Society news, Monday at Noon Legals, Monday at Noon

SUBSCRIPTIONS (PER YEAR):Haywood County $35; In-state $42; Out-of-state $49

Communications with the newspaper

must include the author’s signature,

address and telephone number. All letters to the editor refl ect the opinions of the

writer and are not necessarily those of the newspaper. The newspaper is

not responsible for unsolicited material. We reserve the right to reject or shorten letter to the editor.

731-772-1172

BrownsvilleSTATES-GRAPHICSTATES-GRAPHIC

Scott Whaley,Editor & Publisher

Calvin Carter,Rebecca GrayStaff Writer

Sara Clark,Josh AndersonGraphic Design

Terry ThompsonSales Manager

Leticia OrozcoReceptionist

Vicky Fawcett,Office Manager

Scott Whaley,Editor & Publisher

Vicky Fawcett,Offi ce Manager

Terry ThompsonSales Manager

Ceree Peace PostonReceptionist

Calvin Carter,Staff Writer

Julie Pickard,Staff Writer

Matt GarrettGraphic Designer

The Brownsville States-Graphic(USPS ISSN 08909938) is published weekly by Haywood County Newspapers

L.L.C., 42 South Washington, P.O. Box 59, Brownsville TN 38012.

Periodicals postage paid at Brownsville, TN.POSTMASTER: Send address changes to

The Brownsville States-Graphic, P.O. Box 59, Brownsville, TN 38012

“A publication of American Hometown Publishing”DEADLINES:

News, Monday at Noon • Advertising, Monday at NoonClassifi ed Advertising, Monday at Noon

Society news, Monday at Noon Legals, Monday at Noon

SUBSCRIPTIONS (PER YEAR):Haywood County $35; In-state $42; Out-of-state $49

Communications with the newspaper

must include the author’s signature,

address and telephone number. All letters to the editor refl ect the opinions of the

writer and are not necessarily those of the newspaper. The newspaper is

not responsible for unsolicited material. We reserve the right to reject or shorten letter to the editor.

731-772-1172

BrownsvilleSTATES-GRAPHICSTATES-GRAPHIC

Scott Whaley,Editor & Publisher

Calvin Carter,Rebecca GrayStaff Writer

Sara Clark,Josh AndersonGraphic Design

Terry ThompsonSales Manager

Leticia OrozcoReceptionist

Vicky Fawcett,Office Manager

Scott Whaley,Editor & Publisher

Vicky Fawcett,Offi ce Manager

Terry ThompsonSales Manager

Ceree Peace PostonReceptionist

Calvin Carter,Staff Writer

Julie Pickard,Staff Writer

Matt GarrettGraphic Designer

Jeff PerrySports Writer

I watched MTV’s Video Music Awards (VMAs) last Sunday night. This normally wouldn’t come off as such a big deal, but my eyes haven’t perused the grand Moon Man awarding show in seven years.

It wasn’t an immediate plan. Sure, thanks to advertising dollars spent by Viacom to shoot their promo commercials on all their 30 plus channels, and a deal with Taco Bell that would help further advertise the date of their show on the fast food chain’s cups—on the path to being healthier, Taco Bell is still a minor indulgence of mine—there was no way of me not knowing when the darn show was going to hit airwaves.

As I said, there was no set plan. And yet, as soon as 8 p.m. hit, there I was, hanging with my little sister, about to watch one of the biggest time wasters of the year.

No that was a little harsh.

Sure, my time could have been better spent on some productive action, but something compelled me to watch.

I guess the appropriate cliché to use here is train wreck. And oh, what a wreck it was.

My sister and I had so much fun making fun of everything the show had to offer, save for Kanye West’s performance, which while could be seen as slightly pretentious, was still one of the best artistic and musical performances in hip hop I’ve seen this year.

Maybe that’s not really saying much.

Mom of course later joined in the fun, once her Sunday night affair with reality TV ended. Dad, who I’ve personally never known to really sit through an entire VMA, was in a trance with the NFL.

As a kid and budding pop culture junkie, the VMA’s were a much bigger deal to me. It was this entertainment cornucopia stuffed to the brim with video battles between the creative and the popular, myth-making antics from celebrity stars

and musical artists prior to a tweeter happy world, and a messy gala of special performances. These were the songs you’d heard year round, but they were grandiose, over-the-top, sometimes a disaster but often times much more entertaining and visually striking. Artists had to bring their A game.

Or maybe these are just the dusty shades of nostalgia, distorting my view.

It seemed to me, that the VMA’s always served as this living, breathing time capsule; it’s this yearly moment of time hungrily ingested with these other bite-sized moments in time in mainstream music, fashion and culture.

Need to know what was going on in 1999. View the 1999 edition of the VMA’s. You’ll see that rappers were all about showcasing their expensive taste and status via jewelry pieces, 12-25 year-old males enjoyed stomping and moshing about to loud detuned metal that flirted with hip-hop B-Boy toughness, and the popular kids enjoyed dancing to hyper sexualized messages of former Disney Channel sweethearts.

All this is realized when looking back, as well as the fact that Chris Rock was at the peak of his popularity.

So if the view holds true for the VMA’s, what can be said about this year’s show?

Well, it’s apparent that MTV is only covering a tiny fraction of what’s really going on with music these days. Maybe that’s always been the case. It’s just that now, the channel does a really poor job of lying about it.

It was usually the same names of artists: Lady Gaga, Drake, Eminem, Paramore, and etc. These are usually the same group of names plastered all over the channel all year.

Of course, this also reveals that the channel really is a former shell of itself. By now, my generation has already cried the mantra of “MTV doesn’t show any music videos anymore.” And honestly, they really don’t

show that much. And what they do show is only a teeny tiny sliver of what’s going on with music.

But maybe this is the cost of living in the Internet age.

TV can’t keep up. I usually discover a

new artist or song every day. A new genre or sub-genre pops its head out to me every month. I have this wonderful problem of there being too much music for me to listen to before I die. That’s not a bad problem to have at all. If, as they say, variety is the spice of life, then my musical life will be a well-seasoned delicacy.

Maybe the network cannot cover and award every single music video created this year. I guess that’s why they tend to only cater to mainstream hits. Well that, and because I’m sure the major record companies have worked out deals with the networks to ensure that their artists get coverage.

Really, what is a musical video other than a glorified commercial for a song or record? Sure a video can contain artistic integrity and an important moral observation or message, but at the end of the day, it’s still nothing more than just another reason to buy a record. Don’t get me wrong. I love music videos. I grew up on them and would be one of the first to defend them as another art form, but they are still a profitable art form.

On the mainstream level, they’re mostly all the same.

If you look deeper into it, this all would suggest that major record companies are honestly afraid to take any real chances. Everything is so homogenous.

Or maybe these are just the grumpy ramblings of an older music nerd. Again, dusty nostalgia may be covering my eyes, and it’s very possible that I’m only hitting on a realization on mainstream music that everyone comes to at some point in their life, especially when I say, “Man, things just aren’t what they use to be.”

Things just aren’t what they use to be

Did you hear about the Detroit juror who boasted on Facebook that it was “ . . . gonna be fun to tell the defendant they’re GUILTY?” According to news reports, she posted that entry even before the defense had presented its case. The judge was not amused. She dismissed the juror, fined her $250.00 and made her write an essay on the Constitution as well.

More and more, Facebook figures into legal cases. Remember the corruption trial last year of former Baltimore mayor, Sheila Dixon? There, five of the 12 jurors “friended” each other and chatted at night about the case. Again, the judge was angered, and nearly declared a mistrial over it.

Then there was the man who swore to the judge he had quit drinking completely, only to have the prosecutor produce a picture of him holding a beer in each hand from his Facebook page. And that man who told the judge he simply could not afford his child support payments? He shouldn’t have posted those pictures of him and his new girlfriend scuba diving in Bermuda. And tell her to get that photo of the diamond bracelet he gave her off her page.

These, and a growing number of similar examples illustrate why lawyers love Facebook, the Internet social network that has, by some accounts, five million subscribers worldwide, 30% of whom are Americans. According to a national domestic relations lawyer organization, 81 percent of its members have either used, or faced, evidence in divorce cases that came from social networking sites on the Internet, the vast majority from Facebook. A British legal firm that specializes in divorce litigation claims that 21% of the divorce petitions it files contains at least one reference to Facebook. One woman even learned about her own divorce for the first time on Facebook. Her husband told his “friends” before he gave her the news.

You would think that by this time everyone who uses the Internet would know that there are NO secrets out there, but in spite of the regularly appearing stories of people who get into serious trouble from “oversharing”, the world is still full of people who just can’t resist blabbing all sorts of boasts on Facebook or MySpace, blissfully unaware that those 632 “friends” who have access to their accounts just might include someone who works for their former spouse’s lawyer.

And if that happens to you, your situation might just go from virtual reality

to real life legal drama. It’s why good divorce lawyers demand to see their clients’ Facebook pages at the beginning of the case, so they won’t be surprised by it during the trial or hearing. And it’s why many of them tell their clients to delete their pages at once.

But some people, hooked on the social interaction such networks provide, can’t do that, regardless of the potential cost of leaving the details of their public lives online. There’s even an evolving field of psychology, cyberpsychology, whose members study the psychological aspects of such behavior.

And here’s more bad news for those who can’t live without social networking. According to a study released a couple of weeks ago, people who post entries on Facebook tend to be less secure, more narcissistic and have lower self-esteem than the general population. And the more prolific a Facebook user’s online activity is, the more pronounced these differences are.

While sites like Facebook and MySpace are supposedly about keeping up with and making new friendships, and are used by millions of people to do just that, for huge numbers of other people they are used as a self-promotional tool, a way for people to present an “idealized identity construction.” That means they use the sites to present themselves not as they are, but as they wish they were.

Not surprisingly, men and women tend to

differ in the ways they “enhance” their Internet personas. Men tend to exaggerate their positive qualities on the written portions of the site, the “About Me” and the “Notes” sections. Women tend toward photographic self-promotion through their main photos and the “View Pictures of Me” section. They are also more likely to post provocative or digitally altered photos of themselves than are men.

And here’s a tidbit that should interest students and their parents. Kids who study with Facebook on their computers, even in the background, make 20% lower grades than kids who don’t.

And how about this; New Hampshire law enforcement officials recently broke up a burglary ring whose members were choosing homes to break into by Facebook entries the owners had made in the “Places” section about going on vacation.

Scholastic difficulties, legal problems, lowered self-esteem, crime victimization; does this mean you shouldn’t use social sharing sites? No, but it does mean that when you do, you publicize that part of your life you write about to the entire world. If you don’t want everybody to know it, don’t put it online.

Go ahead and enjoy your online experiences, but when it comes to sharing details you don’t want everyone to know, remember the words of Sgt. Phil Esterhaus, from Hill Street Blues — “Let’s be careful out there.”

In Your Face(book)