People tend to stage themself and media also stage people. Real TV is a good exemple of staging people : Tv channels are presenting these shows as a a vision of reality but people don't behave naturally in front of videocameras and most of the time, there are scripts written for each candidate. This is the most obvious and well-known exemple, but it's true for almost everything you can see on your TV screen. The recent buzz created by the RTBF around the fact that workers were casted according to size so they won't be taller than the French President brought this common practice to the public's notice. Here's the video.
But you have to watch out the other side of the coin. Transparency also mean there is no "off" anymore. Thanks to new tools such as cellphone taking pictures and recording video, good and bad acts show up faster and more than ever in the web. There are innumerable cases of politicians' slip-ups, from the french minister Devedjian's "bitch" to the famous Sarkozy's "get out of my way, asshole!"
Transparency also concerns the crowd of unknowns. In the Internet, you have to remember constantly that Big Brother is watching you. Dominique B, a 49 year-old woman, beared the brunt of web transparency. Because she posted the comment : "liar!" on a video of a french secretary of state on dailymotion, she had been summoned to appear in court after the secretary lodged a complaint. Here's a french article about the "liar affair".
So before posting a comment, think twice!
MM
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