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I don’t watch much Israeli TV these days, but when I do I am usually insulted by what I perceive as a general lack of effort. One specific trend that seems to catch on, be it within the actual shows or during their commercial breaks, is this notion that the creative people have decided to call it quits and just copy the latest viral video they stumbled upon on YouTube. Zero creativity, zero added value. Copy and paste.
This YouTube-Copy-and-Paste trend is in its infancy and so I am unable to eloquently dissect and analyze it, but suffice to say it feels inauthentic and corrosive in its nature -- and yet very typical of this falsehood of a culture we are gradually becoming.
And so if all that I can do is point to it -- pointing I shall:

Excerpt from show: Dancing with the Stars

Show promo: Shavua Sof

TV Ad: Shekem Electric

Note to self: Might need to watch these videos again.

Last week Israel’s Channel 2 News had a segment about brides and grooms that want their wedding to be different. Apparently, after watching a couple of viral wedding videos they thought to themselves: “Yeah, how about we do something original for a change: Let’s do exactly what those other people did…”. Forget about holy matrimony, these people are here to entertain you on their quote-unquote “most important day” of their lives.

The segment is in Hebrew, but you don’t really need to understand the language in order to understand this copycat phenomenon should be studied by both psychologists and sociologists. You can skip over the first 55 seconds:

Captcha, those ‘Are you human?’ tests usually appear when signing up for services, but now they pop up when you least expect them, like searching for a video on YouTube. Something in the way I use YouTube must be triggering the YouTube beast, as it challenges me to a duel so often it has become a nuisance.
Now I am not dyslexic and my English skills are just fine, so when I noticed I was failing YouTube’s Captcha tests in succession, sometimes passing the test only after my sixth or seventh attempt, I started to get suspicious.
Above are 16 YouTube Captcha tests I personally believe failed recently. Some of them are so simple and obvious that you might think there would be no problem ’solving’ them – but you’d be wrong. And the fact they need to be quote-unquote solved, is just what’s wrong with the system as these reverse Turing tests are supposed to come natural. Facebook, for example, asks you to type in real words – and I never seem to fail their tests.

Aside:
Apparently Professor Lawrence Lessig has bigger problems with machines going wild. Here is a lecture he gave three days ago titled “Will Technology Change Our World”:
[blip.tv ?posts_id=2349664&dest=-1]

I have previously addressed IP-based advertising and how it virtually never works in a tiny country like Israel. Lately, I have been seeing a lot of Holocaust related content popping on my screen while I am on YouTube or Facebook, and it gets to be quite annoying.

You see, whenever anyone visits a website, there are certain details about them that are revealed automatically: their IP address, the browser they use, their screen resolution etc. Many websites do not bother to collect this information at all, while others use it for statistic purposes. A lot of websites, like Facebook in our case, show ads relevant to the visitor’s geographical location using an IP-to-city query.
Other website giants, like YouTube, are smart enough to suggest content relevant to the visitor’s location, based on the same mentioned query. All this is good and dandy, except lately everyone and their mother hopped on the user-generated content wagon, and the result for the average Israeli surfer is a bombardment of Holocaust related material, shoved in the face of every Tomer, Dikla or Ari.

Now, I would understand if YouTube somehow got a hold of a list of neo-Nazis, and wanted to mess with their heads so that every time they visit YouTube they would get non-stop Yad Vashem survivor testimonials at the ‘Featured Videos’ section. That would be awesome, and might even prove to be a positive educational experience for a bigot or two.
It’s just that I don’t understand why the unsuspecting Israeli should get the same treatment. As a third-generation Holocaust survivor, I prefer not to be lectured about it whenever I search for the latest skateboarding dog shenanigans, thank you very much.