{"id":587,"date":"2004-05-14T22:40:34","date_gmt":"2004-05-15T02:40:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/2004\/05\/14\/the-many-forms-of-porn\/"},"modified":"2007-02-15T23:12:23","modified_gmt":"2007-02-16T03:12:23","slug":"the-many-forms-of-porn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/2004\/05\/14\/the-many-forms-of-porn\/","title":{"rendered":"The many forms of porn"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a name=\"a1354\"><\/a>  I understand that the execution of Nick Berg is viewable on the internet.  Why would anyone watch this?  I don&#8217;t understand: why would you look?  The Washington Post had an article about Berg that included a photograph of his father collapsing to the ground, a distraught relative at his side.  An older man, skinny, all arms and legs, sunken in on himself, in utter grief over his son&#8217;s death.  Seeing that was enough, I can imagine the rest.  If anyone still needs to see the video after seeing Mr. Berg&#8217;s grief, well, you have no imagination.  Narrow-minded ideologues of all stripes want to colonise your imagination, cripple it, fill it with junk or pornographic obscenity, make you incapable of using it, until all you can do is watch with cold, paralysed eyes, hands folded in your lap &#8212; or poised on your computer mouse.    Surrealists, situationists, and strange artists have dreamed that the world would change if imagination came to power.  Maybe they knew that there are differences between pictures and media, between the ways of conveying matters, and between dissemination to a tiny handful versus to a massed many.  Goya didn&#8217;t have video, and if he had, he would have used it differently.  Today, however, technology banishes the elitism of the 19th century artist&#8217;s craft, and any asshole with a video camera thinks he&#8217;s Goya.  Who saw Goya&#8217;s etchings when he first made them?  Who had access?  Just a few, whereas now everyone&#8217;s potentially a captive audience for tv and video and the rest.  Break out of jail, set your imagination free.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I understand that the execution of Nick Berg is viewable on the internet. Why would anyone watch this? I don&#8217;t understand: why would you look? The Washington Post had an article about Berg that included a photograph of his father collapsing to the ground, a distraught relative at his side. An older man, skinny, all [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":311,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[600],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-587","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-yulelogstories"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/587","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/311"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=587"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/587\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}