crying foul about crying foul

Cell phone users didn't need Verizon to tell us that AT&T's wireless service isn't as good as Verizon's. AT&T reinforced it themselves when all their ads boasted improved coverage after the merger with Cingular.

But seeing AT&T get all whiny about the Verizon "map" ads that overemphasize the disparity in 3G coverage, I get pretty disgusted. Some people are allowed to complain and some people aren't. Remember when white guys started kvetching (we probably didn't call it that) about getting squoze out because of "multi-culturalism?" Or when corporations started taking more and more advantage of their funny, useful, legal status as quasi-citizens? That just shouldn't be allowed.

Fine, I know that legally some of it has to be allowed. But does anyone really want to hear AT&T whine about how Verizon isn't playing fair? Everyone should have thought of that before the FTC changed the rules about comparative advertising in the early 70s.

I'm not normally one of those Teddy Roosevelt, grandpa-threw-me-in-the-lake types, but quit your damn whining. Fight back, take the high road, or shut up.

No, white guy, you don't have free reign to complain about affirmative action. No, dirty campaigner, you don't have any room to complain about being attacked for dirty campaigning. AT&T, do you really want to open the Pandora's box of lawsuits over comparative advertising? That'd be like, needing the U.S. Supreme Court to decide an election.

In an article about the dangers of the Bush v. Gore decision, Jeff Rosen talked about "the corrosive ways that legalisms infect the most informal interactions." (Ironic, given that he more recently got slammed for reporting that was a little too informal during Sotomayor.)

The law is supposed to focus on protection, not proscription. If the economy fails or the health care system bankrupts a quarter million people, yeah, some proscription is probably called for. But you don't want to live in a world where cars won't go if your seatbelt's off, and keg parties have consent forms at every exit, and ALL commercials are like Cialis commercials.

It'd be like adding David Hyde Pierce to all the Mac/PC ads, playing "The FTC." No one goes to a game to watch the umpires. Let them play. Let them play.

some evangerealism on government 2.0

There's an article by me in the latest newsletter from the Citizen Services office of the General Service Administration. The issue is devoted questions of citizen participation in governance.

I had the chance to interview some personal heroes of participatory culture, including Eben Moglen, a crystalline communicator and evangelist for the end of information ownership; Brian Reich, a guru of change-means-change and not just cool tools; and Beth Noveck, author of Wiki Government and, more importantly, keeper of the Open Government initiative at the White House.

The Intergovernmental Solutions newsletter is published in print and PDF. Nuff said. But my piece is re-posted at TechPresident.com.

The money line:

Our culture of instant punditry can make it hard to see the difference between innovation and transformation. Real change happens not at the speed of a website launch or an election night, but at the organic, often maddening, pace of institutions and behaviors.

Stay tuned for some interview audio clips in the days to come.

hope doesn't always float

Things I took away from the Balloon Boy debacle:

• The right story scales fast and now that people are channels it can scale really fast.
• Social networks scale a story best if it's a story that catches the imagination. It doesn't even have to be true.
• In fact, people like hearing, sharing and following something that catches the imagination way, way, more than they like fact-checking or following a serious news story. Community is stickier than communication.
• 360-degree media giveth and taketh away. Or, if you want to live a lie on camera, get your frakking story straight. Maybe the Heenes should have gotten Colin Powell to hide in the attic instead.
• We've got no one to blame but ourselves. The Heenes like a show more than the facts. So do we. A poorly-raised six-year-old doesn't care much about lying. How old is the press? How old are we?

Does the highbeam exposure that caught Falcon Heene's accidental confession balance out the sweet-tooth gullibility of the press and the audience? Probably not. The crowd isn't going to dig for the truth on their own like Berkeley's SETI volunteers. We need someone asking better questions sooner, and Wolf Blitzer obviously isn't going to be enough.

The media microscope of wall-to-wall coverage and the panopticon of a million person-channels sharing news are like any set of tools: They still need experts or conscientious amateurs to use them intelligently if they want to build something of value, not just hot air whipping an empty box around in the wind.

pentagon "strategic communications" plan for web is neither

EurasiaNet reports a new $10M plan by the Pentagon to build foreign-language web sites in support of U.S. foreign policy.

Let's count the ways that the plan, as described, is dopey:

• Ten million dollars?? Ten million dollars?? Do you know what Sunlight or Global Voices could do with ten million dollars? Madon', if this was somebody else's wedding...


• DoD invented the damn Internet. As a peer-to-peer information-sharing platform. They of all people should have the savvy to know that brochureware is about as effective in 2009 as those ranks of musketeers who shoot and reload like they did in the War of Independence.


• It's inauthentic. The websites, in languages including Russian, Farsi, Georgian, Azeri, will feature "news and analysis that helps garner support for US policies." Right, like your average Farsi-speaker is going to go to the U.S. Department of Defense for fair and balanced analysis of anything they care about.


• It's not DoD's job. Diplomacy is State's job. And journalism, in this case, is the job of "government-funded mass media outlets," like Voice of America and Radio Free Europe. Blurring the line between news and propaganda would be like having a newspaper's ad sales department tell the editorial department what special news sections to create, or letting U.S. foreign policy be dictated by White House political operatives (not that that would ever happen).
  
• And who's got the contract to do all this? Not Ogilvy. Not Seth Godin. Or Google. No, it's General Dynamics. Why would you ask a traditional military technology contractor to implement a new media strategy? Traditional government software contractors, in the words of free software guru Eben Moglen, "have never had to make a good program because they never made a program for anybody who had a choice of any kind about anything."

Journalist Deirdre Tynan puts it simply in the Eurasianet article: "Editorial freedom will be crucial if the new websites hope to gain credibility among skeptical readers. ..." But Tynan quotes military blogger Joshua Foust, who said, "It’s doubtful the Pentagon would allow these news outlets [websites] to have editorial freedom and highlight US missteps."

If DoD wants to get a pro-U.S. message out to foreign audiences, hostile, uninformed or otherwise, it should do the equivalent of what car companies did around the turn of the last century when customer message boards got crowded with product complaints: Send clearly-identified representatives into the online communities where Russians, Iranians, Georgians and Azeris are already spending their time, and have these real humans reach out and advocate, and listen, according to the norms of that community. Even better, look for ways to deputize, or enlist, or invite, local citizens to take pieces of the U.S. agenda and disseminate them in their own voices and on terms that actually correspond (assuming they do) to local needs and problems.