Can you say The Streisand Effect?

by Mathew on September 17, 2008 · Comments

I was flipping through my feed reader today, when I came across a post at BoingBoing about some funny doctored photos of kids at a science fair. You may have seen some of the same ones here and there around the Internet: there’s a girl holding a giant clip from a set of jumper cables in front of a cardboard setup that says “Electricity vs. Cat,” and another kid with a ’70s shirt and a bowl haircut in front of a board with a large hole and two nearby electrical wires that says “12-volt Sex Robot.” They are hilarious. Unless, of course, you are the kid in the ’70s shirt and the bowl haircut. Then, apparently, they are salt rubbed in a very raw wound that was created 30 years ago at the high-school science fair.

The BoingBoing post doesn’t have any photos any more. At first, it had photos but the faces were blurred, and there was no link to the site they came from, because Mark Frauenfelder said that he was concerned that they were real photos of real kids. Then he got a comment — not from one of the kids, or one of the parents of one of the kids, but from the kid in the bowl haircut, or rather the adult who used to be the kid. He said:

“The first photo is of me. It was taken in 1974 when I entered a magnetically controlled electrical outlet as my science project. I don’t appreciate it being manipulated and spread on the internet without my permission.

I posted the original on Flickr in 2005 and have the CC license set to disallow derivatives. I would appreciate it if boingboing would remove it and stop helping this idiot that manipulated it into a humiliating image spread it all over the ‘net.”

As one other commenter pointed out, of course, all this comment really does is make everyone (including me) go to Google to find the picture. It took all of 10 seconds. The original appears to be gone from the Flickr photostream of Dr. Monster, also known as illustrator Travis Pitts (presumably because of a similar complaint from the kid in the bowl haircut) but there are other versions out there. Will Mr. Bowl Haircut remove them all? Perhaps. But as Barbra Streisand knows all too well, making such comments frequently causes more problems rather than less. And another question that springs to mind: If Mr. Bowl Haircut is sensitive about the photo, why upload it to Flickr and make it available to the public at all?

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Viewing 3 Comments

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    That's sort of the question I have to wonder myself. It's one thing if someone grabs a hold of your picture and manipulates it without your permission, but it's another entirely if you're the one who posted it yourself. I mean, they have public service message ads that say "Think Before You Post", maybe adults should be paying more attention to them.

    It's also all in your attitude. Mr. Bowl could easily have turned it around -- something like dressing in a snappy suit, with a caption like "That was 30 years ago. I've since sold 783,000 12-volt sex robots, and am the leader in the sex robot industry". Reminds me of the Star Wars kid.
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    ha ha ha! man this episode really made the rounds. i'm the bored illustrator who never got over his own turbulent science fair days, and came up with all the ones in question. they're all still there on my flickr except for the bowl cut kid (moniker- radiotube(sic)). and although he seemed to have blown it all out of proportion, i admit i don't know how i would have handled it if it were my 30 year old pic manipulated to make me look like someone who has sexual intercourse with a pegboard either..... so i think he handled it pretty well. after some hurt feelings on both sides, i decided to do the right thing and pull his pic. if anyone else asked me to, i would do the same. after pretty much everyone on boing boing told radiotube to relax, he did, and i think the situation is resolved. i learned a lesson that just because the pic is online, it is someone real..heh heh, and he learned that putting your pic online is pretty much releasing it into the parody wild.

    sadder still is that those pics are the highest clicked images out of all my artwork ever...and i did them in 10 minutes at work.
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    Thanks for the comment, Travis. You do good work, regardless of what radiotube thinks :-)

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