Picking The Wrong #ewaste "Underdogs" Part I

Happy 4th of July (from France).  Everyone here is talking about "underdogs" - though without a solid French translation. Different translations convey different assumptions.  Opprime is "oppressed", perdants is "losers". Sous-estime is "underestimated" (which works after the unexpected victory, in hindsight).

When Iceland beat England in the Euro Cup, and Wales beat Belgium, it was a surprise.  When Leicester City - facing elimination from the Premier League a year earlier - won the entire British Isles championship, the French sportscaster seemed to be missing a handle for the story.

Could 2016 be the Year of the Underdog?   One long-running theme of this Good Point: Ethical E-Waste Blog is our critical look at how #photojournalism can create, leverage, or ignore underdogs.  The audience of mankind is highly evolved to nurture the young and oppressed (what I call the Steve Pinker "nurture" instinct), which causes us to support scrappy underdogs vs. big corporations. Mass media is not an umpire - it's a player in the game.  Media controls who's perceived as worthy of nurture, and who's perceived as "imperialist" or "bully".  We nurture the oppressed, we root for the underdogs.  And when it's an obscure, technical, or foreign story, we depend on the media to tell us who the bullys and who the underdogs are.

Here's a kind of derivative take.  Mass media can create a "loser" who "wins" the underdog blessing. Being an underdog is a blessing of "moral currency". We see this in everyday society, people exaggerating their "rags to riches" history, the tourists' propensity to validate their "close encounter" with poverty.  And I need of course little excuse to repost the greatest comedic clip of all time, BBC's "The Four Yorkshiremen" sketch (pre-Monty Python's "Finally 1948" show).



So on July 4, Superpower USA reflects back on the scrappy 1776 Minutemen who overcame the King of England, the United Kingdom's rule.  Like Luke Skywalker and Hans Solo and Princess Leiah, a handful of colonies "against all odds" threw off the yoke of the 1700's greatest superpower, Great Britain.  Iceland, Bernie Sanders, Wales, Leicester City, and George Washington, the lovable underdogs.

The underdog card...

Does Spotify Turn Pandora into MySpace?

I have been an absolute lover and fan of Pandora Radio for years.  The music service is free, and you enter in an artist you like.   The artist may play, but as likely you will hear some other artist which people who liked the first artist are likely to also appreciate.  If you don't like a song, click thumbs down, and that gets factored into the future of your playlists on the station.

I love Neil Young, discover Greg Brown.  I find out that my dad's not just weird, that people who like Gordon Lightfoot also like Uncle John's Band by Grateful Dead (without liking other deadhead tunes quitesomuchthanks)... You can't choose what song to play next, but absent that choice it's like a radio station, background music.  I discovered some of my favorite songs during the past 5 years via Pandora.  Became a paid subscriber in January for my birthday present.

Now Spotify:  Similar to Pandora, but also like limewire or napster in it's display and order-by-artist-by-song selection, but legal and supported by ads.

(Note:  Recording Industry was a dumb idiot for not immediately embracing the technology and creating Columbia Record Club for big-value-teaser-downloads in the 1990s, the industry could have been Facebook now but chose to fight the last tape-recorder war over copyright.  ITunes finally kind of caught on but does kind of a lousy job in my opinion).

Love Spotify so far.  But would I have discovered MIA Paper Planes (a gem I discovered on Pandora) or Avalanches Frontier Psychiatrist (Boy Needs Therapy)?

(Note: savvy commenter already suggests grooveshark.com)