A look at the lack of tweets after the Canada-Norway world juniors game Wednesday night.
Archive for Media
Margaret Wente’s disdain for social media pains me so
In March, I blogged in response to a column by The Globe and Mail‘s Margaret Wente saying that all bloggers are male (and she’s obviously right; there are no female bloggers out there).
This weekend, Wente once again tried her old-media hand at new media. And, once again, Wente failed in a spectacular fashion.
In “You’re really not that interesting, and neither am I,” Wente talks about how social media (specifically Facebook, with a dash of Twitter thrown in) is utterly ridiculous and that she doesn’t see what the point is. Now Wente’s anti-Twitter stance is no surprise (she hasn’t tweeted from her account since March of 2009).
It’s not that Wente hasn’t tried this whole Facebook-thing (because she says it would be snobby to turn her nose up at something she has no clue about):
I signed up and began friending anyone who asked. I now have 147 friends, almost none of whom I actually know. Most seem very nice. Their tastes and activities are as ordinary as my own. I have 64 unanswered messages, four unreturned pokes and 28 new friend requests. I feel incredibly popular, but also guilty, because I’m not a very good friend. I never tell them anything about myself. I haven’t even put my picture on my Facebook page. I simply don’t believe I’m all that interesting to anyone but me. Besides, it’s none of their business.
Hmm. Well, assuming of the five Margaret Wente’s I found on Facebook this one is actually her, then (like many other people on social media), Wente inflated her friends count. She really has 103.
And on Twitter, of which Wente is such an avid user, she says:
Tweeting strikes me as an even more pointless waste of time. The answer to “What are you doing?” tends to be utterly inane…
My chief problem with Wente’s complaints about social media is that they are so 2006. Really.
I have over 100 friends on Facebook, which I have cut down by choice, I could have more. But I’ve found it’s more rewarding for me to be friends with people on Facebook I actually interact with.
The same goes on Twitter, I follow under 200 people and only follow those who interest me. I’m not interested in the inane status updates. And the people who post those? They tend not to have too many friends/followers either. It’s not just you, Margaret who is not interested in reading those — no one is.
Social media is just that — social. It’s about a discussion, about seeing things in a new light. Wente seems to have a very old-media approach to social media. She says it herself — she doesn’t interact with her “friends” on her Facebook, she watches them interact. She prefers to tell people what to think through her column and not participate in the discussion that results from that.
Other journalists are not like this. There are a number of Canadian journalists and columnists who are active on Twitter, discussing with their readers and not sitting alone knowing they are right and everyone else is wrong. This is the journalism of the future. This is what will save our industry.
And if social media is such a waste of time, I have one question for Margaret Wente: Why is that Facebook like button above your article? Why can I click a button to easily tweet a link to it to everyone in my network?
Why, if my status updates are so inane and boring, would anyone ever want to read anything I recommend on social media? (Even if that update is a link to your article.)
Marie Claire does it again
After their social media flub earlier this month, Marie Claire is making the rounds on Twitter and blogs once again for something they’ve posted online.
In a blog entry for marieclaire.com, Maura Kelly asks the question: “Should fatties get a room? (Even on TV?)” where she writes about the new CBS sitcom Mike and Molly. Mike and Molly is a sitcom about two overweight people who meet at Overeaters Anonymous and fall in love.
Kelly wastes no time getting to her true feelings:
Yes, I think I’d be grossed out if I had to watch two characters with rolls and rolls of fat kissing each other … because I’d be grossed out if I had to watch them doing anything.
She details that the two main characters are more than overweight, they’re (gasp!) obese. That’s where the problem lies for Kelly, and not just on TV, she continues:
To be brutally honest, even in real life, I find it aesthetically displeasing to watch a very, very fat person simply walk across a room — just like I’d find it distressing if I saw a very drunk person stumbling across a bar or a heroine addict slumping in a chair.
Kelly wrote an post-note at the bottom of the entry saying that she didn’t mean to offend anyone and apologized if her post made her sound like a bully or if she was being insensitive. She even blamed her anti-fat people stance due to problems she has had with anorexia and eating disorders in the past (yes, fat people make her sick because she’s afraid of becoming one).
Kelly’s criticism (if you can call it that) missed a great point where she could have said something about the shift on American television that Mike and Molly represents. More and more Americans (and North Americans in general) are overweight than they were decades ago. Even our kids are not eating healthy and they’re not active enough.
Instead of opening up a dialogue on how Mike and Molly may be representing that shift in America as a whole or how the show portrays ordinary Americans more fairly than shows featuring stick-thin actors, Kelly decided to make it more about Fat Monica.
I also find it very short-sighted for a women’s magazine to approve a blog post with the thesis that fat people make me sick since so many women’s magazines are trying to claim the opposite is true. I don’t read Marie Claire, so I can’t say if they are doing the same thing, but Glamour has been on a push to say that you are beautiful even if you’re not stick-thin.
It also is disappointing that Marie Claire would choose to publish what can only be described as hateful speech. Sure fat people making out or just simply existing can gross Kelly out, but it doesn’t mean she has the right to write it and post it online for all to see. If watching black people kiss grossed her out, would Marie Claire allow her to write about that? I didn’t think so.
And if they first three paragraphs of the post weren’t bad enough, Kelly goes on to say that she finds overweight people so revolting because “obesity is something that most people have a ton of control over. It’s something they can change, if only they put their minds to it.”
Someone who has struggled with an eating disorder all her life should at least understand that people who have food issues usually have other issues buried inside. The same things that made Kelly stop eating during her bout of anorexia might be the same things that keep someone overeating and turning to food when they shouldn’t.
Oh, and if seeing fat people making out was so revolting, then would Mike and Molly really be one of the top-rated new shows of the television season? I think not.
The Russell Williams hearing: When is too much too much?
When I was 13, Paul Bernardo went to trial.
Every day on my way to school, I’d steal The Hamilton Spectator‘s news section from our front porch and read the prior day’s details in court while I walked. My teachers looked the other way when I arrived with my reading material, but no doubt were less-than-impressed to see a child take such a vested interest in such a horrific case.
I don’t remember those details clearly anymore. I know what Bernardo and his then-wife Karla Homolka did, but I don’t remember the court details except reading about them on my way to school. Years later as an adult, I bought Nick Pron’s book on the case, Lethal Marriage. It was the hardest book I’ve ever read.
Even the disappearances of Leslie Mahaffey and Kristen French didn’t hit me hard. It wasn’t until my mother and I started to watch the made-for-TV movie on French’s disappearance that I cried about it. The only thing that has stuck with me ever since that case is the shoe French left behind when she was snatched. Now every time I see a lone shoe on the street, I get a chill down my spine.
Along with everyone else in the country, I was shocked when Col. Russel Williams was arrested and charged with the murders of Jessica Lloyd and Marie-France Comeau earlier this year. Not because of the crime at that point, but because of the fact these murders were committed by someone so high-ranking in the military.
Then the colonel plead guilty, which meant we wouldn’t have to wait for the details of his crimes, we’d get them almost immediately.
The press decided to live-blog and live-tweet the court proceedings. The details were explicit and sickening. The way the press has decided to cover this hearing has raised a lot of questions about whether the coverage has gone too far.
People on Twitter are complaining that the tweets are crossing a line. Some are unfollowing journalists. Even other journalists were saying that there has been too much released to the public. The details and exhibits from the court are mind-bending, so where do we draw a line?
I wondered yesterday if cameras in courts would change the way the press had decided to cover this hearing. If people could choose to turn on the TV and watch the Williams hearing, would there be a need for live-tweeting and blogging?
Does live-tweeting cross a line because the information is coming straight to a person, they are not choosing to access it? Similarly, should the front pages of the daily papers mute the coverage and leave the explicit stuff inside?
In short, should we censor the news?
I say no.
Even with Twitter, people can choose to access this information or ignore it. If they decide to unfollow certain journalists while they do their job, then that’s what they’ll do. The information needs to be on the front pages because that’s where it belongs.
It’s not about being sensational, it’s about reporting the facts. The court is hearing salacious details of Williams’ assaults and murders and entering it into the public sphere, it is the press’ job to report on that. Murder and sexual assault are not issues that should be glossed over, nor are they issues that should be buried in the paper for fear of offence.
The news is not something you should be able to turn away from. Too often we ignore what evil is happening in our world because we live in a little bubble. We don’t like to hear about the bad parts in our world, so we look the other way. We ignore genocides, women being raped in the Congo because it’s happening “over there.” I’d wager we don’t even have a clear idea what’s really happening in Iraq or Afghanistan because it’s easier to ignore it than to feel it.
The images and tails of 9/11 were plastered on every front page in North America when it happened. That too was a tragedy. Thousands of people died. Television stations showed close ups of people jumping to their deaths from the World Trade Center. If Twitter had been around during 9/11, I’m sure it would have been live-tweeted too. But instead we watched it all live on TV — and we did all watch it.
If Paul Bernardo went to trial today, there’s no doubt those proceedings would be covered just as Williams’ is currently.
People complain the coverage is too much, yet the Williams hearing is some of the most-read stuff on Canadian news sites (The Star and the Globe as of this posting). As for the journalists everyone has decided to unfollow because of their tweets from inside the courtroom — think about what they have to endure this week being inside that courtroom.
Journalism is changing and evolving. It has to. If it doesn’t, it’s going to die. Live-tweeting and blogging is just another way to deliver the news.
Even when that news isn’t so pretty.
Why Ben Roethlisberger is not a rapist