Complaints and Herd-Mentality

During the half-time show for Super Bowl 46, headlined by Madonna, British-born supporting performer MIA "flipped the bird" to camera during her brief moment front and centre. It was true "blink-and-you'll-miss-it" television, and I would expect that ninety nine in every hundred viewers who watched the half-time show didn't even spot it. Of those who did, an overwhelming majority will not have taken offence, discussing it only in context of "what do you think the FCC will do? Will they be punished?".

Already it is featured on YouTube (see below), appears on blogs (guilty!), and has been repeated on air on American TV news shows (albeit with the offending digit blurred out. These will be the first times most people become aware that it even happened, let alone have seen it. However, there is bound to be an outcry and a vast number of complaints, campaigns by family and religious groups, and conservatives with an axe to grind over those pesky troublesome liberal artist types.

I expect any likely storm about this will be less reminiscent of the Janet Jackson "wardrobe malfunction" (<--photo link), which was a little more obvious in the performance, featured the star performers, and feeds into the American puritanical obsession with sex and the body.
    Instead I expect it to be reminiscent of a very British scandal in 2008: The Russell Brand "Sachsgate" prank-call debacle on BBC Radio 2. In this instance few people complained at first. Then, the following weekend, conservative right-wing newspaper The Daily Mail published reports that exaggerated the portion, encouraging its readers to complain. They did, and in record numbers. Most had not even heard the radio show (see Sachsgate link, above).
    Likewise I expect that MIA's poorly judged but entirely predictable bad-girl behaviour will prompt few complaints from those who watched the show, but rather from those who become energised by comment and innuendo after the event. This, I feel, is a most sad state of affairs.
    If this is the biggest worry in your life that you feel the need to complain about it, then you are very lucky and privileged.