"When you’re in public, you’re in public. What happens in public, is the very definition of it."

"I don’t want you telling me that I can’t take pictures in public without your permission."

Jeff Jarvis, quoted in an article about the intrusions of Google Glass.

Mr. Jarvis said we’ve been through a similar ruckus about cameras in public before, in the 1890s when Kodak cameras started to appear in parks and on city streets.

The New York Times addressed people’s concerns at the time in an article in August 1899, about a group of camera users, the so-called Kodak fiends, who snapped pictures of women with their new cameras.

“About the cottage colony there is a decided rebellion against the promiscuous use of photographing machines,” The Times wrote from Newport, R.I. “Threats are being made against any one who continues to use cameras as freely.” In another article, a woman pulled a knife on a man who tried to take her picture, “demolishing” the camera before going on her way.

Interesting things about that old NYT article:

1.  The word "kodak" — with a lower-case k — is used repeatedly in place of the word "camera," and the word "camera" appears once, toward the end, and only after "photographing machines." Less attention was paid back then, it seems, to the interest in preserving the trademark in brand names. (The loss of "aspirin" and "heroin" as Bayer trademarks came after WWI.)

2. The word "fiends," used repeatedly, connotes evil and addiction. From the same time period, the OED quotes: "The autograph-fiend; the cyclist-fiend; the interviewer-fiend; the newsboy-fiend; the organ-fiend" (1896), "‘A dope fiend’... A victim of the opium habit" (1896).

3. The word "promiscuous" fits with the nature of the perceived harm: women are victims. The article refers to "married men" wanting to bring lawsuits against the photographers. One man is said to have consulted a lawyer about whether "an assault could be charged" if the photograph is taken "against the will." But how sexual is the word "promiscuous"? The etymology connected it to "mixed up," and the oldest meaning is, according to the OED: "Done or applied with no regard for method, order, etc.; random, indiscriminate, unsystematic." The OED has some great quotes for the specifically sexual meaning that seems so central to us today:

1804   S. T. Coleridge Coll. Lett. (1956) II. 1119   He is..addicted to almost promiscuous Intercourse with women of all Classes.
1879   Harlequin Prince Cherrytop 29   Better frig, howe'er the mind it shocks, Than from promiscuous fucking catch the pox....
1924   C. Connolly Let. Dec. in Romantic Friendship (1975) 32,   I am not promiscuous but I can't be loyal to an icicle....
1978   S. Herzel in P. Moore Man, Woman, & Priesthood viii. 119   It is precisely because men can compartmentalize that they are more easily promiscuous than women.

The FTC going after bloggers and social media is like "sending a government goon into Denny’s to listen to the conversations in the corner booth and demand that you disclose that your Uncle Vinnie owns the pizzeria whose product you just endorsed."

Says Jeff Jarvis, because most people who blog and use Facebook and the like "don’t think they are doing anything remotely connected to journalism."

The most absurd part of it is the way the FTC is trying to make it okay by assuring us that they will be selective in deciding which writers on the internet to pursue. That is, they've deliberately made a grotesquely overbroad rule, enough to sweep so many of us into technical violations, but we're supposed to feel soothed by the knowledge that government agents will decide who among us gets fined. No, no, no. Overbreath itself is a problem. And so is selective enforcement.

Continued fallout from the "Quick, change that headline!" post.

On Sunday, I posted about the NYT changing a headline on an article about the voting in Iraq. Its original headline had been "Amid Attacks, a Party Atmosphere on Baghdad's Closed Streets," which took us to an article by Dexter Filkins and John F. Burns that began:

After a slow start, voters turned out in very large numbers in Baghdad today, packing polling places and creating a party atmosphere in the streets as Iraqis here and nationwide turned out to cast ballots in the country's first free elections in 50 years.

American officials were showing confidence that today was going to be a big success, despite attacks in Baghdad and other parts of the country that took at least two dozen lives. The Interior Ministry said 36 people had been killed in attacks, Agence France-Presse reported.

But the violence did not seem to have deterred most Iraqis. In Baghdad, Basra in the South, the holy Shiite city of Najaf and even the restive Northern city of Mosul, Iraqi civilians crowded the polling sites, navigating their way through tight security and sometimes proudly displaying the deep blue ink stain on their fingers that confirmed they had voted.

That original headline represented the article fairly. I praised the Times's headlines earlier that day as "a subtle mix of positive and negative," giving us "a sense of the importance of what is happening [without allowing] the bad to overshadow the good." A number of prominent bloggers, linking to the Filkins-Burns article, drew special attention to the "party atmosphere" language in the headline. Later in the day, I noticed that the headline had been changed to "Insurgent Attacks in Baghdad and Elsewhere Kill at Least 24," which completely failed to convey the gist of the article, the text of which had not changed. (The headline became even more negative later: "Attacks in Baghdad and Elsewhere Reportedly Kill Several Dozen.") I thought the headline change was worth blogging, along with my observation that it was "pathetic" -- pathetic to pick out the negative from an article full of positive.

Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly somehow saw fit to launch into an attack, calling me a "wingnut" and delivering an irrelevant lecture about how newspaper headlines are written and websites updated. You certainly can't tell from reading his garbled post that I was writing about changing the headline on the same article and changing it to something that did not fit the article. I've exchanged some emails with Drum, who has an elaborate justification for putting an inappropriate headline on one article so that the whole mix of headlines on the main page that day would not be excessively positive. There was violence in Iraq, the theory goes, so one of the headlines needed to refer to violence, and since there was some reference to violence in the Filkins-Burns article, that was a good place to put the negative headline. I think that may be the best thing that might be said in defense of the Times, though I still have a problem with it. But I have much more of a problem with Drum, who -- despite his lecture about how websites can be frequently updated -- has not seen fit to update his post and make it clear that he misrepresented my post. Frankly, he owes me a public apology, on his website, for calling me a wingnut and for ridiculing me based on his own misreading (or deliberate misrepresentation).

Now, I see that Howard Kurtz at The Washington Post has reprinted Drum's post, nearly in its entirety, without any criticism of it, passing along Drum's insult and distortion. I know it's in quotes, but I'd really prefer not to see myself referred to as a "wingnut" in The Washington Post!

UPDATE: Poliblogger writes that Drum should apologize.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Howard Kurtz quotes part of this response in his Wednesday column. He also quotes this post, which says something I really do care very deeply about.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: One of the comments over at the Washington Monthly link abuses me for not allowing comments on my blog, which is just rich: I was forced to cancel the comments function over here because I had no way to block the commenters who were resorting to abusive, ugly forms of expression that I did not want on my blog. You can go over there and see the kind of comments that are being made about me, which would be smeared all over my blog if I had comments. Here, I explain why I cancelled the comments. It's a little funny to me to reread that post today, where I summarized the nasty things that commenters were saying about me, becuase some of the comments over there at Washington Monthly fit the categories I came up with last spring, especially: "I claim to be a moderate, but I'm only posing as a moderate for some nefarious reason."

Some people who haunt comments pages are parasites: Why don't they have their own blogs and just link? Because they aren't good enough on their own to attract visitors. Some of them are so bad it's almost funny, like the one today who is saying:

Professor Ann Althouse is a faux moderate in the style of Jeff Jarvis and Michael Totten. She has discovered that the Right pays a hell of a lot better than the Left, and is promoting her own fortunes as fast as she can by sucking up. Like Totten. And like Jarvis. And like them, she has absolutely nothing good to say ever about liberals or liberalism, while making googly eyes at those big strong conservatives, while expressing dismay at the criticism she gets from the left. It's a transparent pose. She completely lacks integrity. Winnable? Anyone who can look at the bunch of criminals in the White House currently and remain neutral is stupid. Someone who just pretends they are in order to line their pockets is beneath contempt.

I hope Jarvis and Totten know this character is on to our little game of sucking up to right wingers for those big cash payouts.

"Real Time."

I hope you got the chance to see this week's "Real Time," the Bill Maher show on HBO. Not only did Andrew Sullivan passionately revile Noam Chomsky, but former Senator Alan Simpson went all Zell Miller on Bill Maher. And why didn't the "Real Time" producers edit out Sullivan very conspicuously and embarrassingly scratching himself? (It happens during the closing credits sequence.) I can only conclude that they deliberately decided to humiliate him!

UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis has an extended recount of the show. He makes fun of Susan Sarandon, who really was awful.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Slate's Dana Stevens can't say enough about Sullivan's scratching himself. Sullivan is duly irked. Stevens manages to completely miss what Simpson and Sullivan were arguing with Maher about.