To mark the launch of Windows 7 I’ve raised the bullshit alert level to CrapCon 1 today, its maximum possible setting. Everyone dedicated to Talknormalism should be very alarmed. I’m not saying the world was better in my day – I grew up in Scunthorpe in the 1970s and Scunthorpe’s a hole. But when Microsoft’s marketing department can describe what’s essentially a small upgrade to a failed operating system as a sexy experience, all I can conclude is that they have not had much sex recently.
Scunthorpe: even less sexy than Windows 7
If any reader who is currently in a sexual relationship with a member of the Microsoft staff would care to email me to compare the quality of these relations with the erotic power of Windows 7, I will respect your anonymity and send you a Talk Normal mug. Then at least you can have a nice cup of tea instead.
From time to time, in order to protect ourselves from those who would subjugate us with needless conference calls and kill our spirit with pointless blue sky thinking, we need to be aware of imminent and terrifying threats to Talknormalism. That’s why I’m raising the Talk Normal Crap Defence Readiness Condition to CrapCon 2 this week, its highest level yet. Well, the only level yet. It puts us on guard that there are people who would destroy everything we stand for to achieve their aims. That’s why there is a little amber light in the column on the right. Ha! Take that, world.
The reason, of course, is the imminent launch of Windows 7 and the marketing drivel that accompanies it. Most software launches contain their fair share of meaningless aspirational twaddle spoken by paunchy men in casual shirts, but Microsoft has always outperformed the market in this respect. Older Talknormalists will recall the launch of Windows 95, which included displaying the Microsoft logo on the Empire State Building and sailing a four-storey-high Windows 95 box into Sydney Harbour (a feat of self-regard copied later on the Thames by Michael Jackson. Draw your own conclusions).
This is an image from that era which will haunt me for a long time:
You make a grown man cry. Indeed.
Fast forward 12 years, and for the launch of a product like Windows Vista most sensible companies would have coughed gently and stared at their shoes. Microsoft parked a stage in the forecourt of the British Library and put on a concert by The Feeling to Crank UP the Wow! (their emphasis on “up”) as fearful academics cowered inside and waited for guys in branded polo shirts to sod off.
You’d have thought that the evidence from the Windows 95 video would have warned the PR company not to do anything to encourage Microsoft employees to dance. Maybe permitting them to jig about self-consciously is less embarrassing than letting them speak? We’ll soon have plenty more evidence to help us decide. Until then, I wish you luck in the dark days to come.
As one of the blogosphere’s true thought leaders, I was wondering who else claims this atttribute. In my mind I imagine the world of thought leaderhip is something like this graph, where the people who think the most talk the most about thinking, and the circus chisellers who haven’t had an original idea in years mostly shut the **** up about it:
First stop: the top 10 of the BusinessWeek Most Innovative Companies 2009. Searching for mentions of thought leadership on their corporate web sites I was sadly disappointed. Toyota, Nintendo and Nokia had no mention of thought leadership at all. Google, a company that often seems so enthusiastic about its cleverness that it could eat itself, had but a single mention, as did HP. Research in Motion managed four thought leaderships. Apple clocked up 32 mentions – but then I found out that they were all the titles of iTunes Podcasts, and so they don’t really count. Microsoft upped the average with 96 mentions.
Only IBM goes big on claiming thought leadership, with 887 mentions of the phrase – but that’s because it’s a job title in IBM. But cut IBM some slack! That’s only one mention for every five patents the company was awarded in 2008 (the most patents in the US for the gazillionth year in a row), or 177 for every Nobel prize an IBM employee has won. That’s quite a lot of thought with which to lead, I think we can agree.
I note also that, while innovation leader number 10 Wal-Mart couldn’t find any actual mentions of thought leadership on its web site, it helpfully suggested partial matches – the top one of which was an excellent Transformers Revenge of the Fallen Autobot ($35 plus postage, in stock). We can only marvel at its desperation to make a sale, no matter how irelevant, to absolutely anyone who visits its site.
So, to reliably find people who will claim thought leadership, I needed to look further down the innovationary league table. I went to the natural home of the barely innovative: that’s right, I searched for thought leaders in the last couple of days of posts on PR Newswire. Bingo! You can keep your Nobel prizes IBM, here’s the motherlode. A few highlights:
If you are a thought leader in the hotly-contested wound care field, the newly-announced Systagenix Medical Advisory Board is for you.
The comprehensively-named Everything Channel has announced that it will launch a new sub-group group within Channelweb Connect. “We hope that this new group will help drive conversation with thought leaders in the solution provider community,” it says. A must for fans of sub-group groups.
So you might find this graph of innovation against claim to thought leadership is a more accurate reflection of the world in which we live:
Note that I’ve marked an area which combines minimum thought and maximum bragging as the STFU zone. If you’re in this zone and are thinking about farting out another press release about thought leadership, take the hint.
Don’t know if you caught the the news from the Marist Institute in New York last week that Americans find whatever to be the most irritating phrase in the language. It even beat my particular favourite, at the end of the day, and left going forward in the dust.
A company spokesperson declines to comment
I could provide a rant about how rude it is to use “whatever” in the I don’t care if you deserve an answer, I’m a sulky teenager so I’m not talking sense, but there have already been lots of articles like that and I’m late to this party. So without defending whateverism, I’d point out that people in suits often do the same thing, but they use fancy language and have PR consultants to help them pretend it’s something else.
I’m talking about the unjustified no commenting which translates as “we know something that would be helpful to you if we told you it, we’re just choosing not to tell you it”. There were about 30 of these in the British press alone last week – and that’s just the ones that got reported.
I’m not saying that every question needs an answer. There are plenty of good reasons for not commenting. There might be legal restrictions, or you might need to keep something secret until a particular day for commercial reasons. That’s your business, I’m not your boss. But what really irks me is a no comment either when there’s a clear public interest to be served or a clear business reason to comment – because, for example, it shows respect for angry customers.
Controlling politicians and public servants are in the first category. Listening to Radio 4 – PM, or especially The World at One – it sometimes seems that every other story ends up with Eddie Mair or Martha Kearney saying “we asked the government for comment but they told us that no one was available”. It’s the worst kind of whateverism. What they mean is, “You might have a point, and we don’t want to talk to you for exactly that reason”. It’s openly admitting that self-interest comes before accountability.
The second category is made up of fools who think that talking to the media should only be done when they have something to sell, and that the rest of the time that journalists are useful idiots who can be ignored. Sometimes it’s uncomfortable to give comment when people aren’t going to tell you you’re wonderful, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea to fess up.
If you are in my lazy fool category, I have two reasons you’re an idiot:
1. People don’t automatically need and respect you any more just because you are director of X for company Y. Readers and viewers are not likely to say that’s all right then, he’s obviously too busy working in my interest, it’s not for the likes of us to question the powers that be. If you want to work in that environment, it’s best to build a time machine and set it for 1952.
2. You’re not my only source. If there’s a real problem that you’re refusing to comment on, you can ignore the conversation – but nowadays we’ll have the the conversation without you, thanks. There are literally millions of sources of news out there, and thanks to blogs, chatrooms and YouTube, saying no comment to one journalist doesn’t kill a story like it did in the good old days. You’ve still got 20 one-star reviews on Amazon whether you decide to comment or not.
It doesn’t help when idiot spokespeople copy politicians, even fictional ones. Every time someone raises an eyebrow and uses the quote from the political drama House of Cards to me, “you might think that, I couldn’t possibly comment,” I just want to punch them in their smug faces.
If more spokespeople just started saying, “yeah, like, whatever” instead of their elaborate excuses not to communicate, the world would be a more honest place. And it would open up new opportunities in corporate communications for feral teenagers, where their demographic is scandalously under-represented.
A few years ago I wrote a book about counterfeiting and piracy called Knockoff. Since then I’ve acquired two regular gigs: people interview me when there’s a counterfeiting story for their TV shows or radio programmes; and I get invited to counterfeiting conferences to say things that the people who attend the conferences won’t say to each other, even though they tell me afterwards that they agree.
This week there’s an example of the first one – I’m one of the experts on Black Market Britain, ITV, 10.35pm on 6 October (if you’re reading it on Monday, that’s tomorrow night, set your Sky Plus). I’d love to tell you what I say, but it’s been stuck in legal for such a long time that when they called me to tell me the transmission date, I’d clean forgotten the interview.
It won’t make what I’ve said obsolete. The anti-counterfeiting/anti-piracy business has a sort of Groundhog Day consistency. The people whose job it is to market anti-counterfeiting (at least 30 organisations, last time I counted), all say the same thing every year. Their figures are pretty consistent, because they’re more or less made up by these organisations for the purpose of lobbying. The terrific work done by journalist Felix Salmon here and here to highlight this deserves to be recognised, not least by other journalists. “The fact is that the statistics AREN’T generated, as opposed to simply conjured out of thin air,” he told me.
I used some of these stats in my book, and I now know I should have asked more questions. What troubles me more is what goes on at the conferences organised by the people who come up with the stats, and the law-makers that they lobby. It’s not that they’re making agreements in secret that are undemocratic, unaccountable and might have negative impacts for developing countries – they have the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement for that. It’s what’s never mentioned that bothers me.
Almost all anti-counterfeiting and anti-piracy conferences I have attended, and it’s quite a few by now, are from the group hug school of conferences: experts quote their own figures (and each other) and lament the state of the problem, but no one involved will blame anyone who might be in the room, for example. And so it goes on: an identical conference, with the same people involved and a different sponsor, will be held a few months later in a different hotel.
Talk Normal’s going to get on to the appallingly low standard of trade conferences as soon as I get the time. But for now I’m thinking about something that Felix Salmon said to me:
It never ceases to astonish me what the press will print if it’s asserted with enough bravado from a self-styled expert.
It occurs to me that on this subject I’ve occasionally been both the credulous hack and the self-styled expert. I’m hoping that I’m neither on Tuesday night.
From an excellent story in this month’s Atlantic Monthly magazine:
The collapse of journalism means that the quest for information has been superseded by the quest for ammunition.
Mark Bowden, the reporter, investigates what happened when Judge Sonia Sotomayor was nominated to the Supreme Court. Immediately all the TV networks possessed the same package of video of her seeming to make extremist comments. Bowden tracks down the blogger who unearthed the videos and the advocacy groups that disseminated them.
On the face of it, blogger does the legwork that journalists don’t and gets a story is a good-news story about internet culture. Anyone who complains about citizen journalists doing their job must be a bitter old-school journalist, you think.
I say: not so. Bowden makes two points:
1. When journalists do not have the time or the skills, someone else will step in to provide ready-made stories. The lack of resource in journalism means these stories go straight on to the page or the screen, and so are effectively endorsed by the publication.
2. The people who do it have their own agenda:
Work formerly done by reporters and producers is now routinely performed by political operatives and amateur ideologues of one stripe or another, whose goal is not to educate the public but to win. This is a trend not likely to change.
And that’s the important difference. Most citizen journalists, advocacy groups, public relations companies are not motivated by the desire to get to the truth, but to deliver a point of view. No problem: it’s their job to work backwards from a conclusion (Or, for citizen journalists, it is their vocation). It is the job of the reporter to check whether that conclusion has any value.
And so professional journalists must take some responsibility. For years we have been pleased to have stories fed to us like baby food, complete with partial research, friendly quotes and conclusions. We can’t suddenly complain when we realise that it has made us into the advocacy industry’s gimps. Now, thanks to forces beyond our control, many newspapers, news stations and magazines are no longer set up to check the stories they report.
Judge Sotomayor was confirmed, but the damaging news clips of her led on every major news station. In his feature Bowden checked the context and discovered that the clips, far from being the secret confession of a deranged idealogue, contained little of interest and nothing new. That is, until they were taken out of context by a politically-motivated blogger and presented to the media, who didn’t bother to check them.
If you’re in the business of winning approval for your clients, this is good news. But in the long term this culture of advocacy is dangerous. We no longer have any idea who is shaping the news at any level, and as citizens we can never know enough to separate good research from carefully-disguised bias when we watch or read the news. Bowden concludes about this type of media that:
Today it is rapidly replacing journalism, leading us toward a world where all information is spun, and where all “news” is unapologetically propaganda.
As a follow up to my post on how we’ve replaced problems with issues, someone pointed out this article from the Boston Globe’s The Word column – a sort of Talk Normal with education that people pay to read on Sundays – in which Jan Freeman dismisses a complaint from Mr G. B. that people are using the word issue more often than before.
She says:
“Mr. B. is a victim of the Frequency Illusion, to use the term coined by linguist Arnold Zwicky. He’s listening for issues, so he hears the word often, and imagines that it’s everywhere. In fact, in the specific usage he objects to – having issues instead of having problems – the problems version is still way, way ahead of issues.” Her evidence: she did a Google search for each term. On this basis she dismisses the idea that we might be uncomfortable describing problems honestly.
You’re wrong, Jan Freeman! I know they don’t pay much for columns these days, but an analysis that took more than 30 seconds on a search engine would have showed this is probably not a Zwickian illusion at all. Which makes her snobby putdown that “Mr. B.’s analysis is more puzzling than his failure to check the facts,” doubly unfortunate.
Her conclusion: “…issues aren’t always problems; they are also anxieties, conflicts, and disagreements. And if the word is meant to make those conflicts sound less dire, isn’t that a good thing? After all, anyone who’d rather have problems than issues is welcome to them.”
On the first point, I agree. There are lots of things that really are issues. On the second, absolutely not. I’d rather have been an astronaut than a journalist but, if I started turning up for interviews in a space suit, people might point out that I wasn’t facing up to the reality of my situation. It’s the same thing: when we can’t utter the word “problem” at work, we’re living a fantasy.
If N is the number of column inches, R is the relevance to current news obsessions, I is the importance of the academic whose name is attached to the press release and ∂ is a greek character that I introduced to make the whole thing look like it came from a university rather than the desk of a public relations consultant, then the formula for press coverage of a made-up scientific formula is too depressing to invent.
I’ve just been at the British Science Festival where journalist, author and enemy of chiropractors everywhere Simon Singh presented Why Journalists Love Stupid Equations and Other Problems in the Media. If you have been under a rock and so missed the stupid equation trend, over at Apathy Sketchpad there’s a collection of the Telegraph’s miserable Formula For stories. Also, the same blog’s collection of PR-concocted science from the Mail, and then there’s the Sun story on the formula which tells us if a boob line is too low – which, as Ben Goldacre points out, doesn’t even work. Idiots. You can read more detail about what Singh had to say here.
I declare an interest: a few years ago I was called in by a PR company to work out why the newspapers had stopped printing stories for their price comparison web site client. The answer: because all they did was make up increasingly asinine formulae for the tabloids, freesheets and women’s magazines. At the time they were desperately pushing the formula for a perfect bargain (I’m not making this up), which had half a dozen variables to consider, and eventually gave a number between 100 and 700 which you had to compare to a table of results. You were meant to use this calculation while staring into a shop window FFS, and they couldn’t even be bothered to (or didn’t know how to) make it come out as a percentage.
I suggested to Singh that naming the PR companies who rely on this guff might act as a deterrent. “Problem is, if you name them, then people who want to get in the papers are going to say, fantastic, we should go to that PR company,” he pointed out.
Like an internet survey of 23 people, or a the story of how some type of vegetable will save your from cancer, the fake formula offends me because it is cynical lowest-common-denominator PR. It offends me because as journalists we all know this is crap – but we publish it anyway. And it offends me because we assume this is all the science that readers can tolerate without their heads exploding while they’re reading the paper.
From time to time, in order to protect ourselves from those who would subjugate us with needless conference calls and kill our spirit with pointless blue sky thinking, we need to be aware of imminent and terrifying threats to Talknormalism. That’s why I’m raising the Talk Normal Crap Defence Readiness Condition to CrapCon 2 this week, its highest level yet. Well, the only level yet. It puts us on guard that there are people who would destroy everything we stand for to achieve their aims. That’s why there is a little amber light in the column on the right. Ha! Take that, world.
