Comments on blogs aren't really a thing anymore, especially on this here blog, but I occasionally have someone pop in via WordPress Reader, I think, and while checking out the blog of one such commenter, It's The Bageler!, I discovered "The Year-Long Scavenger Hunt" at Birdie's Book Nook.
That desire for community, to connect with others who share your interests, is what drives the best and worst of what, as a whole, makes the internet so invaluable -- from the early days of Usenet to Tumblr and whatever comes next -- and for some (including business execs who don't get it), so dangerous. I'm sure there are plenty of business lessons to be learned from all of this, and I'm sure there will be plenty of think pieces and hot takes addressing those, but I'm far more interested in grappling with the human element.
People will continue to read printed books for a long time, just as some people still watch movies on VHS. But the printed book will be "dead" in a few short years in the sense that the bulk of the adoption curve, the pragmatic majority, will have moved on. --Arvind Narayanan, "The death of the printed book is closer than you think" Narayanan's post is the latest addition to the tiresome "print is dead" meme, and like the vast majority of digital evangelists, he presents a false dilemma, posits a zero-sum scenario, and evokes the tired and largely irrelevant example…
“If the people who make the decisions are the people who will also bear the consequences of those decisions, perhaps better decisions will result.”
John Abrams, The Company We Keep: Reinventing Small Business for People, Community and Place
I hate pundits.
[ETA: Maybe I should have said I hate Twitter? Update at the end of the post.]
Whether in politics, sports or publishing, on radio, TV or Twitter, they’re the know-it-alls who usually have no skin in the game, no accountability and, worse, no interest in seeing the big picture. They love to hear themselves talk, to offer their opinions on how things should be done, and to stir things up just to see what happens.
They also tend to love motivational quotes, dropping them into their speeches, and blogs, and tweets as if they were offering actionable advice and original insights; precious wine from water for the thirsty!
“Meh,” I say. “Meh.”
“For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life, please press three.”
Alice Kahn
I follow a lot of experienced marketers on Twitter, along with several whose real-world experience is questionable, and one of the most annoying memes I’ve seen is the belief that everyone should be on Twitter, particularly major brands and small businesses. When a colleague tweeted a link to a study that claimed “97% of users believe that brands should engage with their customers on Twitter”, I literally laughed out loud, noting that 97% of the people who’d take a poll like that are probably marketers.
I should have said “social media gurus” instead of marketers, because the “study” — a statistically irrelevant, 6-question survey of 208 people — is the kind of vacuous “data” that gets referenced by the former all the time.
NEWSFLASH: You’re not a guru, you just tweet a lot!
Twitter is a great personal networking tool, and there are numerous examples of businesses using it well to engage in genuine conversations with their fans, customers and critics (ie: my dustup with Starbucks), but at the end of the day, some conversations simply aren’t worth having because they can bring even more attention to your shortcomings, leading to the worst case scenario: public disengagement.
Among the most tiresome memes dominating the publishing world right now — memes that I’ve admittedly contributed to at times — the worst are the self-righteous rants about self-publishing, Amazon, and the long-rumored death of print.
There are the writers who think their publishers should be doing more for them while smugly looking down their noses at the writers willing to do it all for themselves; and the passionate-to-a-fault DIYers who feel the need to answer every single ill-considered critique with defensive point-by-point rebuttals.
There’s the indie publishers and bookstores who complain about Amazon’s success while having no real online presence of their own to speak of, nor the good sense to leverage their respective strengths and develop their own niche communities around the two things Amazon will never be able to compete with: content and relationships.
And, of course, there’s the much belabored death of print, an arguably self-inflicted wound that’s far from lethal, unless whining and navel-gazing continue to be the priority.
Blame it on the state of the economy and the debatable bailouts of mismanaged, seemingly undeserving companies and/or homeowners, but underneath it all there is an overwhelming sense of entitlement, a belief that someone — publishers, writers, readers, the Internet itself — owes them something and their current plight is someone else’s fault.
My short response: STFU and GBTW.
David Brothers was one of the smartest comics bloggers on the scene a few years back when I was at my peak of following the industry, and he’s remained one of the few whom I still follow despite my current pull list being a shadow of its former self.
[Side note: Have to get to Midtown soon before they cancel my bare-minimum pull list again. Particularly looking forward to Joshua Dysart’s Unknown Soldier.]
He has a great post up at his site, 4thLetter, called SuperHHero KKKomics 200Hate: A Year In Review, an exponentially more substantiative response to the knee-jerk (but cleverly illustrated) 2008: The Year of Misogyny, that starts as a typical rant about the poor treatment of blacks in comics, but quickly becomes something much, much better.
Some of my favorite highlights of 200Hate include:
Barack Obama– leader of Dark Reign, gullible enough to trust Norman Osborn
Crispus Allen– killed his own son, has to have some old white lady re-ignite his faith in God after he tries to kill his best friend for being a lesbian, probably Pro Prop 8, forced to wear goatee as racial identifier, likely never-nude
Falcon– lost his best friend, hasn’t appeared in Captain America lately, was set on fire once
Manhattan Guardian– tossed aside the second a WHITE Guardian shows up
Martian Manhunter– murdered with a spear (martians count as black, see also Lil Wayne “We are not the same, I am a martian”)
Spawn– blows own head off in own comic, promoting the suicide of strong and proud black men
Spawn (Michael Jai White)– Killed by the Joker in The Dark Knight, movie goes on to make a billion dollars
Storm– taken from high profile X-Men appearances to be a supporting character in some lower-selling book, forced into arranged marriage, needs Emma Frost (who once enslaved her) to call her names just so she can feel like she belongs somewhere
Tyler Perry– still not invited to write a Black Panther story where T’Challa remembers how his big grandma was the one that scared him into following the path of the warrior, leaving untold the story of Bg’mama, the true power of wakanda