Since it is illegal to advertise smoking on TV and Hollywood and TV directors are being increasingly discouraged from glamourising the practice, nicotine peddlers are following ‘citizen journalists’ into DIY media. One savvy entrepreneur has decided to produce the Up in Smoke Video Podcast - guest starring technology pundits John C. Dvorak and Steve Gibson to give it some online word of mouth - and is trying to promote it via bloggers (the creator contacted me via my weblog).

I note that while the website of the company selling the cigars and producing and promoting the podcast asks that you be over 18 to view it, there is no such barrier to access the website or directly download the podcast and the only barrier to downloading the programme via iTunes is that it is rated ‘explicit’ (a tag normally used to describe language or nudity). iTunes does let you restrict access to ‘explicit’ content but that parental control option is not switched on by default.
Alas, the hype around weblogs being a ‘free’ media where the plucky independent citizen can challenge corrupt corporate and governmental interests is obscuring the manner in which business interests are sheltering behind its current lack of regulation for their own ends (as I have blogged before).

P.S. Smoking cigars is a fatal addiction - just say no!

P.P.S. To save you a lengthy download, the quality of the acting in this ‘mini sitcom’ is, perhaps unsurprisingly, truly awful. Not even laughably awful…

Who are the scholars who have written most about the social function of phatic speech? (For example, “turned out rainy again today” - a favourite British expression). I have a feeling it’s something Goffman or Garfinkel or Harvey Sacks might have studied but I am not sure which texts to look in. I am not so much interested in the structure of such speech but why people do it, what they expect from people who they talk to and perhaps something about the power relations implied.