The flap over the Motrin ad still hasn’t died down. Monday and Tuesday were spent with a lot of armchair quarterbacking. Some was by marketing professionals wondering how Johnson & Johnson could have handled things better. The rest was done by groups of people who felt that the reaction was hyperbolic, at best, and insane, at worst.
Personally, I sent one message on Twitter with my reaction to the campaign (which I believe included the term “facepalm” at some point), posted an article for The Industry Standard with my take on J&J’s social media mishap, and thought I was calling it a day.
Of course, it’s always fun to take shots at others, which is where the “debate” began. Those of us who felt the ad was stupid or offensive were told that we were off-base, and that our time should be spent on more important causes. Personally, I don’t feel that typing a maximum of 140 characters is a huge expension of effort, and I get paid to write articles discussing news surrounding technology. I’m also very concerned with other causes and probably have a nice, fat file somewhere with copies of the various rants I’ve sent to my elected officials over the years. I certainly didn’t spend even a fraction of the time I’d usually spend writing about something on that single Tweet. Commenters on my post telling people to butt out as well as commenters on FriendFeed and Twitter and IM tended to the extreme. I got one link back calling me a “mommyblogger” which is pretty ironic since I have only blogged about any of my kids once on this blog, and that was in reference to a reaction to a post I wrote on Louis Gray’s blog.
Of course, I spent a good portion of my weekend and all of Monday and part of yesterday interviewing people and working on what has turned into a three-part series on how the No on Prop 8 rallies were organized on Saturday. I’ve interviewed and emailed and called people, and spent hours on the pieces, amazed at how a single blog post could, via the power of the Internet, turn into over a million people protesting worldwide in eight days. That first piece posted yesterday? No comments. No likes on FriendFeed. Zero reaction.
Generally, I don’t pay attention to that sort of thing. Some things I write will spark an interest, and some others won’t. It’s part of the job, and while I hope that what I write will get the attention of an audience, I know that I’m not always going to hit that target. However, when it comes nearly back to back with the Motrin blow-up, when I’m told I should be paying attention to more important things, and when those more important things are quickly scrolled by, I realize that the Motrin issue wasn’t really about the issue at all for most people, but rather, wanting to grab a little bit of that attention spotlight for themselves, no matter what they thought of the ad.
One accusation lobbed on HuffPo yesterday was that tech bloggers and mommy bloggers were also overlooking IMPORTANT LEGISLATION to protect children. I’d written about similar legislation a year earlier. I noted that it was uselss then, and it’s just as useless now. Considering that my piece on the similar legislation, written for Profy, received about as much reaction as my interview yesterday with Amy Balliett, I didn’t bother repeating myself.
Overall, this is just a vent on more of the same-old, same-old in the echo chamber. But just once I’d like someone to look into a mirror before they accuse others of over-reacting on an issue, claiming the high ground when it comes to “paying attention to what matters.” The reality is that most of us can tell you how many children Brangelina have but not the name of the Malaysian blogger jailed over an article (I’ll save you the Google search; his name is Raja Petra Kamarudin).
I just introduced my father to Facebook two weeks ago. He’s not the most tech-savvy parent, but he works in the development office of a school, and in addition to being able to keep in touch with nieces and nephews out of town (he hasn’t seen a picture of my godson in a couple of years), I realized it would be a useful tool for him in his job.
As I was walking him through “People You May Know,” it came with an admonishment: don’t friend MY friends unless they send you a request first, and don’t friend any minors at your school.
It’s a sad commentary on our society that it’s something we need to worry about in social networking circles, but even the slightest tinge of inappropriate conduct raises hackles. As Louis Gray noted this summer, our culture makes it feel creepy on both sides of the equation by creating even a virtual relationship with someone a great deal younger than us, even within the confines of a social network.
It’s the same reason why there are several children of friends who aren’t in my circle, even though I see them regularly, and see pictures on their parents’ pages. Every parent in my circle with a child old enough to be on Facebook requires that their child have them as friends (to keep an eye on things), but no one is on a friend list of a child of friends.
Writers have it even tougher, as Clark Hoyt notes in discussion of Jodi Kantor’s Facebook messages to teens who attend the same school as Cindy McCain’s daughter. After the resulting flap, the New York Times has put a policy in place that reporters have to follow if they want to use a minor as a source. Writing about tech, I rarely have to use a minor, but in the odd case where I’m looking at an application designed for children, I’m able to use my own in most cases. But as the Kantor issue reveals, not everyone has that same creepy vibe from contacting minors online. As training and education race to catch up with an ever-changing online world, ethical standards will surely develop. In the meantime, writers should probably avoid using minors as sources online unless a parent has agreed in advance and monitors the conversation.
The Motrin ad snafu has been the talk of social media sites over the weekend, and today, while for some it continues, for other, the opportunity has arisen for backlash. There are bloggers and commenters railing against those who expressed their offense, often using the argument that “there are more important things to worry about.”
Ironically, many of those same individuals are responsible for much of the trivial content on social media, ranging from the faux-inspirational posters that derive from 4chan posts to LOLcat after LOLcat. In the usual snarkfest, others are bound and determined to instruct others on what should be important and relevant to share, and what should be shuffled under the carpet as “a glib comment.”
What social media proponents seem to forget on a regular basis is that everyone comes to it with a different set of experiences and values. Your experience and values are not mine, which is why I agree with blogger Mona Nomura when she points out that an effort to bring additional media attention to the same-sex marriage issue is met with less discussion or support on FriendFeed than LOLcat shares or bacon-related posts.
I’m absolutely fine with the idea that the advertisement may not have offended you, or that you disagree with my analysis of the PR storm Johnson & Johnson is dealing with over it. But you can just shut right up if you plan to tell me I’m wrong. I am a mother. I did wear my children. And as someone who has spend somewhere in the hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars on Johnson & Johnson products for my children, I don’t take kindly to having the company who’s taken those dollars being snide in the interest of advertising. And if I want to be offended, then I’m entitled to be. Just as you are entitled to continue posting your LOLcats and clogging my feeds.
Posted in tech vents on October 28th, 2008 by cyndy| | 6 Comments.
I was tempted to title this post “I’m quitting the Internet because everyone is quitting.”
I’ll be completely honest; it’s that time of the month when my hormones leave me with much less patience for my fellow humans. On the bad side, it gives me a short temper, but on the good side, I’m unafraid to call everyone a bunch of whiny attention whores.
Lately, it seems everyone is quitting some social network or another, and the reason given is something that tries to transfer the blame onto the other denizens of the network. In reality, people are announcing their resignations for the attention, and quitting because they aren’t getting their way. People are disagreeing with them. Or people are discussing topics that the quitters aren’t interested in.
Any social network will give only what you put into it. I’ve been online for longer than I care to think about, belonging to IRC and USENET communities before moving to the Web. I’m still connected to people I met online nearly 15 years ago, many of us on the same forum type as we started on. The reason that those communities are still together? The core group of individuals are amazingly tolerant of others. Silliness mixes with tech talk and political conversation. They recognize that others won’t always agree or like the same thing, and have learned how to disagree (sometimes in the equivalent of a screaming match online) and not carry it past that disagreement.
The difference, however, is that the people in those communities aren’t a bunch of whiny two-year-olds, always demanding their own way. They recognize that an actual social network is more than the cool AJAX features, and is comprised of actual people. If people who trumpeted Web 2.0 never figured that out, then the wasteland of revenue-missing apps made no progress at all.
I actually created the image here of “journalist” Barbara West after a one-off “Hey someone make this” but the sentiment stands: journalism is dying and no one cares.
As someone who grew up watching greats like Walter Cronkite, it’s staggering to me that there is almost no difference between the headlines in the tabs and the teasers on the nightly news. Barbara West’s obvious partisan questioning of Senators McCain and Biden is merely a lightning rod in a huge storm. Once upon a time, there was at least a facade letting viewers think they were getting an impartial viewpoint. Now, a good chunk of reporters might as well show up on TV wearing t-shirts for their favorite candidates. Any semblance of objectivity has gone right out the window.
I have a feeling that if the reporting was this biased about any other section of the news, viewers would be up in arms. But when it comes to a political arena as divided and vicious as this one is, people are willing to tolerate it. Yellow journalism is supposed to be a taboo, not a standard.
Posted in tech vents on October 21st, 2008 by cyndy| | 0 Comments.
Of course, the bitchmeme du jour will be Paul Boutin’s piece in Wired. It’s so hip and cool to declare things dead: print journalism, journalism ethics, blogs, MySpace, Google, Yahoo… the list goes on an one. And Boutin, the edgy/hip writer who made it through the Denton bloodbath at Gawker, is no stranger to writing things to get noticed; after all, Valleywag is the PR goal of half the hoi polloi of Silicon Valley.
The irony, however, is that Boutin’s piece appeared in Wired. In its heyday, Wired was the go-to for all things cutting edge in the Web world. A single subscribed copy at a development shop would be dogeared and tattered by the time the next month’s arrived, passed from one coder to another to devour.
In recent years, however, Wired has struggled to retain its relevancy in the newer, instant-story world of the Web. Let’s face it; bloggers get to stories first in most cases. The long magazine news cycle is dying faster than the trees the rags are printed on. And Wired has succumbed to grasp at whatever cultural relevancy it can. A cover of Valleywag’s It Girl Julia Allison was one of the magazine’s best sellers recently, and yet Wired doesn’t seem to get that a relatively attractive woman quasi-involved in tech is what it takes the magazine to sell instead of compelling stories?
The Web is passing Wired by. It can no longer tell the difference between activists who use griefing as a tool and /b/tards. Quality writing, no matter what its form, will never be passé. Facebook and Twitter may be passing you by, Wired, but they’ll never kill a good story.
Posted in tech vents on October 19th, 2008 by cyndy| | 1 Comments.
Through Robert Scoble’s blog, I learned of the Go Go Gadget Blogger Jet for CES. I hadn’t even planned on writing about it at all; after all, I live on the absolutely wrong coast and I can’t comprehend “private jet” having never been out of steerage myself, but as I read through all the ways to get extra entries in their contest, I ended up in hysterics. One way to get an extra entry is to forward all your spammy pitches to an email address for them to use to hit up potential sponsors.
As any blogger knows, unsolicited pitches are part and parcel of the job. The worst pitches are the ones I’ve received addressed to the wrong name (really? for a boilerplate pitch you can’t even double-check the name? No, I’m not Brad) or the ones with a tenuous link to an article you wrote weeks before. I get regular (as in several times a week) pitches from companies I’ve never heard of, yet they act like we’ve interacted. There are also the personal pleas, social networking friend requests and the like, all designed in the hope that they will net additional coverage. The thought of using those emails for contest entries, and subjecting those pitching to pitches themselves is positively diabolical. The temptation is huge, even if I don’t enter the party plane contest.
Posted in tech vents on September 28th, 2008 by cyndy| | 3 Comments.
My husband is fond of watching a string of political shows on Sunday mornings. I try to not pay attention because all it does is raise my blood pressure WATCHING them lie. At least I can read their lies faster than they speak.
This morning, I was tormented with George Stephanopoulous interviewing John McCain and it’s never been more clear why we need a tech-savvy president. After a video taken with a camera phone was shown to him from a meet and greet with Sarah Palin, he essentially stated that it shouldn’t count since it was just her talking to some people and the only things we should pay attention to are talking points shoveled at us on national television.
What?
The proliferation of camera phones, mobile Internet, and video sharing sites has changed the old guard way of running a campaign. You are now accountable 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Just ask Hollywood celebrities if there is an “off” to public life now. If you can’t stay on message wen you are away from the network cameras or major newspaper outlets, then maybe you don’t really have a message. Leaders of other countries aren’t just watching Katie Couric and Tom Brokaw; they have staff who will show them the silly little YouTube videos you dismiss with your Vice President saying “sure, we’ll invade Pakistan to get to them thar terrists.”
You don’t get the luxury of whistle stops to wave and repeat prepared statements. This is the electronic age. And there is no off switch.
There was a 9/11-themed article in Esquire that I read this morning that has me crying. And nauseous. I won’t link to it, because it reopens the wounds of 9/11 for anyone who sat through that morning, for anyone who knew anyone who died.
There is a reason I left my originally intended Comm/J major, and it wasn’t just the one professor I couldn’t stand. The first day of class, we were taught the journalist’s mantra: “fuzz and was.” If it involves police and/or someone dead, it’s a story. I can’t turn off my human nature to report without emotion. Writing for a celebrity gossip blog at the time, I spent the entire day of Anna Nicole Smith’s death sobbing and telling anyone who’d listen how much I hated my job.
The Esquire article goes back to a picture that most Americans have trained themselves to forget, one of the many images of “jumpers” from the Towers that day. As part of the story, journalists still want to identify that person, and from an emotionless perspective, it’s an amazing image that tells more of a story than just the events of 9/11 about the differences in human nature.
But how, even as a journalist, can you look at that image and not see a son, a father, or a husband? Every body in a picture is the entire world to at least one other person, and that loss leaves a hole larger than any black hole that the LHC could create. The morning of 9/11, my sister had two people on the phone: me on one line with my husband on a plane, and on the other, one of her best friends from high school with a husband working for Cantor Fitz. Until the day I die, I will never forget that one of us had her husband come home. The other did not. And no story, no matter how riveting, should dredge up that pain again for the families.
I’ll never be a “real” journalist, I guess.
Being a work-at-home parent is one of the coolest things I have ever done. I get to stay home with my kids, schedule my work around their needs, and still earn a paycheck without immediately handing it over to daycare. Of course, it’s also one of the suckiest things I have ever done because it does occasionally mean that I can’t go play Barbie if I’m on deadline and I’m constantly behind. I’ve been looking forward to the kids getting back to school so that I could get into a more regular work schedule, but life has conspired against me, with:
1. Yet another case of Hand, Foot & Mouth Disease that resulted in tummy aches and painful blisters on my hands that made it hard to work. Hit week before school started.
2. First week of school. Four kids, three different start days. Tuesday was “meet the teacher and drop off school supplies” for kids #1 and #2. Wednesday was THEIR first day, but I also had to take #3 to meet HIS teacher Wednesday afternoon. THURSDAY was HIS first day riding on the bus and everything, and then Friday was the open house/meet the teachers for #4, who actually started HER first day the following Tuesday.
3. The first day: Lice. Yes, I am the mother whose child got sent home from school the very first day with head lice. Of course, she would get it the first summer that she didn’t GO to camp or have many sleepovers, and the nearest we can figure, she picked it up at gymnastics. Ugh. Nothing like adding to first-week-of-school stress than four hours of hair treating. I’m still not caught up on the laundry that results, and I itch every time I even think about it.
4. A birthday. Only I could manage to have a child whose birthday falls in the first week of the school year. In fact, it matched up nicely with her first day of school. I was wrapping gifts the night before at 2 AM. Then I spent the hour she had for her first day of school hunched in a corner of her classroom. She wailed when I left her there. It promises to be a long month of sitting in the waiting area at the school while she adjusts. At least I can hop on the school’s WiFi. 
Next Page »
