Joe's Jottings

Category: Personal Stuff

  • Civil Partership ceremonies on religious premises….some contradiction in terms?

    Over the last decade or so, the number of times when New Labour has created legislation in what ‘the Simpsons’ would call ‘the American way’ – i.e. do a ‘half arsed job’ – has been legion.  There must be some sort of finishing school for NuLab legislators where they go to have that bit of the brain responsible for common sense somehow removed.  And now Lord Ali has kept up the tradition by tabling an amendment to the Equality Bill that allows civil partnership ceremonies on religious premises.  Note the juxtaposition of words there…civil…and religious.

    In a letter to The Times, Lord Carey, a former Archbishop of Canterbury, has expressed his concerns about this amendment.

    Now, I was of the impression that the reason civil partnerships existed was for people who could not or would not undertake a religious marriage (irrespective of religion) but still wanted to publicly commit themselves to each other.  Look what the direct.gov website has to say on the issue:

    “A civil marriage ceremony cannot have any religious content, but you may be able to arrange for individual touches such as non-religious music and readings to be added to the legal wording, and for the ceremony to be videoed. The register office where you intend to marry will be able to tell you more about the options available.

    A Civil Partnership is legally formed by the signing of the civil partnership schedule. Like a civil marriage, this is also non-religious, but couples who wish to arrange for a ceremony should discuss this with the registration officials.”

    Seems pretty straight forward there.  They even say ‘cannot have any religious content’.  With me so far?  Good.  Let’s take a moment to thing about religious buildings – and I’m going to include churches, mosques, chapels, synagogues and temples here.  Most religious buildings are built with certain tenets, based on the religion in question, in mind.  Ignoring the theological issues around whether the church refers to the building or the people who celebrate there, and focusing purely on the building itself, there are aspects of the construction and furnishing of most churches (and other religious buildings) that are symbolic – altars, crosses, positioning of certain fittings and furnishings, the orientation of a building within a plot of land – all can be highly symbolic, and hence ‘religious’.  So, to be strictly within the letter of the law, any ceremonies held would have to somehow remove the symbolism from the building.  Do we have to take away a cross because it might show up on a video, for example?

    We then have the whole raft of issues around desecration; if a Mosque were to be used, do we insist on all those entering the main part of the room to be barefoot to respect the building, or do we allow any footwear?  Same with clothing.  Or is it likely that this opening up of religious buildings would only apply to, for example, Christian denominations or faiths that do not insist on certain rules around footwear / clothing / etc.?

    And this applies whether the couple participating in the ceremony are heterosexual or homosexual; we have here a simple issue of a law being bought in as part of an ‘Equality Bill’ that will actually remove the rights of religious communities to indicate how their buildings are used by non-believers.  Hardly equal rites for them, is it?  Especially as in many religious communities the fabric of the buildings is maintained not by state or local government but by the religious group themselves.

    A religious building is for the celebration of religious events.  It’s not to provide a photogenic backdrop for people with no beliefs at all.  It isn’t to provide yet another football in the political battles around the rights of homosexuals vs heterosexuals in our communities.  By hanging this legislation of the Equality Bill, I’m afraid that it will end up putting some priests, Imans and vicars in a terrible position of being asked to go against their conscience or against the law in the name of equal rites – which don’t seem to apply very much to religious folks in these sorts of situations.  A vicar can refuse to marry people in a Church based on any number of reasons – divorce, where the people live, lack of obvious connection with the Church / parish.  These restrictions have been in place for centuries in some cases, and apply to everyone irrespective or sexuality, race, whatever who wish to use the Church.

    This law seeks to effectively de-consecrate religious buildings for a short period of time – it should be resisted.

    Now – here is where what I write will start getting contentious and I expect to be upsetting a few folks with what I say next. 

    It’s no secret that I am a religious man.  I like to think of myself as a fairly tolerant and reasonably non-judgemental fellow, but it increasingly seems to me that when our Government talks of tolerance and equality it usually means that religious folks are going to get it in the neck, and be expected to suspend some of our personal beliefs in how we conduct ourselves in our day to day lives.  If we’re now going to start being told who we can and can’t allow to use our own churches and holy places, then our rights are being eroded, and perhaps it’s time for some tolerance to be shown to us and our beliefs.

  • I sometimes wonder….

    As some of you will know, I’m what’s best described as an (occasionally) practising Christian.  Just to get the joke out of the way early, I’ll keep practising and one day I hope to get it right!  Yesterday I attended a Christening in a different Church to my usual one, and the sermon offered was about the topic of expectation; funnily enough, over the last 24 hours I found myself pondering a few issues around the topic of expectation – what I expected form others, and what others expected from me.

    The funny thing is that this isn’t the first time that this has happened to me.  Before I became a ‘regular’ attender at Church, I’d sometimes go on a whim and was quite surprised at how often the sermon or a reading in Church would provide me with insights in to whatever was uppermost in my mind at that time.  Of course, I’m aware that there are any number of explanations for this sort of thing.  The first is that I remember only the times when there was a relationship between my state of mind / concerns and the sermon given on a particular day.  A second explanation is that I read more in to the sermon or reading that is actually warranted.  And there are probably more….

    But…it sometimes makes me wonder.

    Whether coincidence, causality or synchronicity I do find the experience useful, and in many ways that’s all that counts.  I get inspiration, guidance and intellectual provocation from what I hear at Church, as well as an affirmation of my faith.  I sometimes wonder if these ‘coincidences’ are actually some sort of answer to prayers that I’ve not said out loud – they are often so very relevant and provide me with inspiration and insight to get stuff done. 

    As an aside, I just heard the following line of dialogue from the TV show ‘FlashForward’ that ‘What some people see as coincidence is actually God at work’. 

    Daft as it may sound, I think that’s a great point to finish this post.

  • All your personal info belongs to…some web site or other?

    This is an interesting little article about a new product from Mozilla Labs for Firefox – it allows you to grab tour personal contact data from various web services and sources, and then keep it in a repository from where you can decide exactly what to make available to OTHER web services and sites.   The data is stored and indexed locally – as @timoreilly tweeted – “I like the idea of a smarter client-side address book, so my social data doesn’t end up belonging to someone else. ”

    And so do I.

    I have a large contact list in Outlook on my PC which definitely goes nowhere near any online web service.  In a similar way, 95% of people I deal with on Facebook I deal with purely on Facebook; same with twitter and any Internet Forums I belong to.  If  Twitter and Facebook disappeared overnight, I’d lose access to quite a few contacts I have in those two ‘depositories’ of data, but some folks on there that I would DEFINITELY miss in the event of Social Networking meltdown I’ve got alternative means of contact for – usually e-mail addresses, occasionally phone numbers.  As for e-mail, I tend to use good old fashioned ‘Mail Client’ software – Outlook again, I’m afraid! – and rarely use web mail.

    I guess the bottom line is that I don’t really trust any server outside of my direct control when it comes to storing my personal data.  I wouldn’t feel 100% safe with having all of my contacts lists on the servers of someone like Microsoft or Google for a couple of reasons:

    • Your access to your contacts is gone if they have connectivity issues or a server goes.
    • Your contacts are open to exploitation from hackers / spammers.
    • Your contacts contribute to the ‘database of intentions’ – if your contacts have accounts with people like Google or Amazon using the email address in your list, it’s potentially possible for their interests to be used to target ‘social advertising’ at you when you use your email address to access a site.

    This is without starting to worry about the issues surrounding storing my content on other people’s servers.  No, I’m much happier to keep my central list of contacts on my PC.  I can back it up, it’s always there when I have access to my PC, if I want to put it on another machine it’s just a case of copying it over.

    The Mozilla application looks useful in terms of getting backups of such data – which is great – but I’m still going to be terribly inefficient and keep my contacts where I know what’s happening to ’em!

  • Facebook user hypocrisy or common sense?

    I came across this article in my Twitstream today about how young professionals are changing their name and doing other things to camoflage their presence on Facebook and other social networking sites in order to cover their tracks from potential employers or head hunters who might find some aspects of their personalities or character less employable than might be desired.

    For a while now there has been a suggestion that people should run separate Facebook accounts for their ‘private’ life and their ‘professional’ life, and make sure that all the partying, socialising, membership of bizarre societies, etc. ends up in the ‘private’ account with the privacy restrictions applied to restrict access to friends only, and ideally with a suitable disguised name.  The suggestions made in the article above have included people setting up accounts under their middle names for one account, for example.

    At first glance it seems to be a rather sensible idea; but recently I’ve started wondering whether the establishment of public and private personas in this way is not so much common sense as hypocrisy or even dishonesty.  Let me elaborate…

    Many years ago – in the days before Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, what have you, the general rule of thumb was to believe that anything you posted on the Internet would most likely come back to haunt you at some point.  this is more the case today.  My personal way of looking at this is to imagine anything you post on a public forum, blog, Facebook or Twitter being read out to your mother, bank manager, boss and spiritual leader on a busy afternoon in the middle of the local High Street. 🙂 

    So at first glance it might make sense to get all the less reputable stuff tucked away somewhere safe….

    But hang on a minute – it’s still you!  If your politics, religion or sexuality is such that you fear that they may put potential employers off of recruiting you, then perhaps you need to think about whether you would really want to work for such a company, and whether you would be happy there.  Getting recruited in to an organisation where you have already hidden some core aspects of your personality is not the best start to a working relationship; let’s face it, it will turn up at some point in your career!  And if it’s some aspect of your behaviour, then again – it’s still you.  We all have occasions when we get a little worse for wear on drink, and get photographed in that state, and we all make the occasional ‘off colour’ jokes.  As soon as you start hiding these things away from people who’re wanting to employ you then you’re basically selling a false personality to your recruiters – again, dishonest.  And if you’re dumb enough to post up details of serious indiscretions – drugs use, minor crime, etc. – then to be honest you’re an idiot who deserves what you get.

    Of course, it’s not always that easy; some employers are so ‘straight up’ that any deviation from the straight and narrow is regarded as evidence of gross moral turpitude.  And you can’t always determine what photographs your friends take and display – I’ve spoken about this elsewhere on this blog – but then again, there is the old saying about ‘A man is judged by the company he keeps.’

    My own advice, for what it’s worth?  Don’t bother having dual Facebook accounts; just stick with the one, set up good privacy settings and be civilised with what you post to it.  Anything else is hypocrisy.

  • New Media, Old Manners

    This post is based on some comments I made on another blog recently – dealing with the question of whether using Social media turns us in to rude bumpkins.  Whilst it’s true that the decision to participate or not in all this Tweeting and Facebooking is in our own hands, the amount of general rudeness that this sort of all pervasive social media generates is astonishing.  I appreciate that I come from an older generation who had very different ideas of what behaviours are acceptable, so I hope you’ll pardon me if I appear to be something of a dinosaur!

    Here are a  couple of ‘old style’ rules of thumb that I was taught years ago about the etiquette of using technology that I still use today.

    • If you have a visitor, hold the phone calls.  If a call gets through, ask briefly if it’s important, as you have a guest.  Then if it proves not to be important, arrange to call the caller back later.  If you’re responsible for your own calls, let an answering machine take it. 
    • If you are in a conversation on the phone, don’t multi-task and email at the same time.  No matter how good you think you are at multi-tasking, the person on the other end of the phone will know you’re doing something else.
    • If someone asks you for the contact details of a third party, then contact the third party first and ask, or mail that person on behalf of the person asking with THEIR details.  Don’t give the personal details of someone else away without asking.

    Social Media users often breach the equivalents of these old style social guidelines.  We Tweet when talking to people, share personal information like locations and photographs of third parties with people who may be total strangers.  We forget that the people we’re WITH are more important than the often relatively anonymous folks in our extended electronic network.  I have to say that I find it strange to be sitting in the pub with people and have half the group tweeting or Facebooking – it’s a habit that I’ve started acquiring a little as well.  I find it equally weird to be in courses or seminars – or presentations – and find people Tweeting – even if they’re encouraged to do so!  I just find it hard to believe that people can be paying attention to what’s being said whilst using social media.

    I have to wonder how much of the use of Social Media by some people is akin to the mobile phone using buffoon portrayed by comedia Dom Jolly in which a guy is bustling along holding a gigantic mobile phone and is yelling in to it – it’s an ego-prop rather than a communications tool. 

    Do you REALLY need the world and their dog to know you’re arriving at your hotel?  Or is it all about ego?

  • Facebook and the panic button….

    Since the recent case in which a teenage girl was groomed and murdered by a paedophile via the Facebook site, there has been a lot of pressure from the UK Government for Facebook to put a ‘Panic Button’ style link on the site – a move supported by the CEOP organisation.  Facebook have commented that they have no objection in principle to making it easier to report abuse on the site, but that they feel that the CEOP supported option is not necessarily the best way.

    Facebook are far from perfect in the way that they treat their users; I think all of us who use the site would have our own grumbles about privacy and the attitude of Facebook as a whole towards individual users now that they’ve got big.  But to be honest I think I would rather central Government stayed out of issues like this – especially New Labour, who seem to have spent the last decade dismantling our civil liberties bit by bit.  For a previous broader comment on this issue, I direct you to this item from a year ago, in which author Phillip Pullman commented on the behaviour of New Labour.

    Since then we’ve had the Digital Economy Bill – even without the Lib Dem Peers’ Amendments it was a pretty poor piece of legislation.  With the amendments it offers a wonderful means of stifling debate by simply shutting down access to any site that breaches copyright.  Under the Bill, as it stands, and if it were strictly applied, YouTube could be blocked to UK ISPs because of material that breaches copyright. 

    Part of the problem with New Labour is their amazing ability to put together piss-poor legislation on a ‘knee jerk’ basis.  A lone gun nut leads to a total handgun ban – which doesn’t affect criminals as they tend to disobey the law anyway.   Despite massive increases in the legislation aimed at child protection, the very basic laws that were there all along fail to be implemented and children keep getting killed.  And there are many more examples.  One interpretation of this repeated series of cock-ups is that they’re just incompetent; my own interpretation is that New Labour are just incredibly keen on reducing our civil liberties as much as they can to have a nicely compliant and obedient citizenry.

    The issue for me here is not just the Facebook reporting mechanism; I’m afraid I regard that as something of a ‘thin end of the wedge’, by which Government could influence and impact the policies of web sites not even based in Britain.  It’s not far from that sort of thing to the  censorship policies adopted by China and, more recently, but to a lesser degree, Australia.  Protesting about this sort of Government activity, which initially starts with child protection, is a little bit like trying to answer the question ‘Have you stopped beating your wife?’ in a way that doesn’t make you guilty.  But given this Governments record on civil liberties I’m afraid I do not and cannot trust them. 

    As  Rousseau said “Free people, remember this maxim: we may acquire liberty, but it is never recovered if it is once lost. ”

    And we’re losing it bit by bit.

  • Caprica 90210

    I am an enormous fan of the re-visioning of ‘Battlestar Galactica’ – good story and plot, good characters, nice combination of high tech and retro gadgets (loved the old style telephone handset that was used in the command centre).  Combine that with excellent soundtrack – just the best TV science fiction in recent years.  When I heard that a ‘prequel’ of BSG was in the works, I was a little bit concerned, but hopeful – same folks involved, should be worth watching.  And so I watched the pilot of Caprica with interest….

    The following will help understand this post if you’ve not watched Caprica.  Daniel Graystons, father of Zoe, has a company involve din military robotics and AI.  They’ve made something called a Cylon, which needs an electronic brain called an MCP to work.  Joseph Adama, a top lawyer, has a daughter, Tamara, who was killed in a terrorist attack along with Zoe.  Both girls had ‘avatars’ in a VR game, and these avatars have retained form after their death.  Zoe ends up in the electronic brain of the prototype Cylon.  Tamara ends up left in the VR systems.

    With me so far?  Where the frack did it all go wrong?

    Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t all doom and gloom in Caprica, (list of episodes and plot here) and at one level that makes it worse – every now and again stuff starts happening and you’re at the stage of ‘Oh yeah, here we go, they’re gonna start turning out Cylons in a production facility, and Zoe – that teenage lass who’s consciousness is in the prototype – will….er…..do something…but hey, we’re looking at some serious tin men whupping Colonial Marine action!’  But then we cut back to a frackin’ boarding school or a VR representation of Dawson’s Creek.

    And that’s the problem.  There is simply too much attention being paid to teenagers in this whole saga.  And that’s the flaw.  Last night we had Zoe going on a virtual reality date with the teenager who is helping her father work out why the ‘brain’ of the one working prototype works and others don’t.  The two teenagers end up with a suggestion that may point to the problem.  Back in the lab, old man Graystone is told this by his teenage assistant and it’s as if he’d never thought of it.  Hello?  This guy is the Stephen Hawking of robotics and AI.  His company make the holographic interfaces that people use to go in to immersive virtual realities in Caprica.  He’s not Homer J Simpson, for crying out loud!

    Elsewhere, the head of the other family involved in the saga, Joseph Adama, is swanning around in a VR ‘game’ called ‘New Cap City’ trying to find the avatar of Tamara.  It works well, some shoot ’em up and folks with the same tailor as Neo and Trinity from ‘The Matrix’ – I’m hopeful that this will go places.  The religious / spiritual angle – monotheism emerging in a polytheistic culture – is really interesting as well.

    But then we get the bloody teenagers again and I weep in to my tea.

    Come on guys – I can see that you want to reach the teen demographic, but don’t forget the rest of us.

  • If this is being a Man, I bagsy being a Penguin…

    I have a thing for penguins.  I have no idea why, but they appeal to me.  It all started 20 odd years ago when I saw the ‘Bloom County’ cartoon strip that featured Opus the penguin (he who features wherever I need an avatar online).  Quite why penguins appeal to me I have no idea.  I think part of the reason is that it’s really difficult to be a pompous twit if your online persona  is a fat, big-nosed, a non-flying sea bird.

    I found myself thinking about Opus this morning when I read this article from the Mail on Sunday about yet another one of these courses designed to put men (lower case ‘m’) in touch with their masculinity and become Men (upper case ‘M’).  the chap who wrote the article ended up adopting the name ‘Relaxed Penguin’ as his ‘Warrior Name’ on the course.  This, along with the tone of the article and the photographs illustrating the piece indicated to me that perhaps his take on the topic of the article wasn’t as serious as it might have been; which is a shame, as taking the piss out of tehse weekends is pretty easy,  which can make it easy to miss the more important problem with this sort of  short cut to being a man confident in his masculinity – however he chooses to define it – in the 21st century.

    I’ve read some books from the so called ‘Men’s Movement’ over the years; I have to say that I’ve not been terribly impressed with most of them, or the philosophies espoused.  The most famous book that gave rise to a lot of what is known as ‘Menswork’ and particular the sort of experience that Mitchelson goes through in the article above was ‘Iron John’ by Robert Bly.  In it Bly examines a Grimm’s fairy tale from a ‘masculine’ perspective.  It did bugger all for me, but seemed to give rise to the stereotypical view of men discovering themselves by sitting around forest clearings, half naked, playing drums – the so-called ‘mythopoetic’ approach. 

    Part of my problem with this approach – both back 20 years ago and today – is that, like the more ‘out there’ aspects of ‘wimmin’s work’ , I believe that it is irrelevant to most men.  Self awareness, a spriritual underpinning, a moral and ethical compass, a sense of fair-play, and a sense of purpose are what I regard as essential for anyone – man or woman – in the world today. Whilst it’s obvious that there are differences between men and women – which is just as well! – there is very little difference between the genders when it comes down to behaving like a civilised human being. 

    There are obvious psychological, social and cultural differences between men and women, and whilst it’s true in our society that we lack the rites of passage in to manhood that many cultures have, that doesn’t mean that by creating them artificially on courses like this we somehow make men into Men just by their participation. My own attitude is to simply be a decent human being, take your responsibilities and duties seriously and be there for familyand friends.  Respect yourself, those around you, and the world in which we live.

     These sorts of things seem to be sadly missing form these sessions in the woods, and I’m afraid I don’t believe that you can be a real Man without them.

  • Dumb beyond reason – Children’s Commissioner suggests raising English Age of Criminality

    Regular readers of this blog will realise that there are certain hobby horses that I have.  One is that I ask for little from Government except that they do what only Governments CAN and SHOULD do, and otherwise stay out of my face.  The other is that I genuinely believe that there are people who can be described as evil, and that Moral Relativism is a seriously dangerous philosophy.  I explored that territory in this post – I commented at the time how surprised I was when I found a number of people on another online site berating me for calling the boys involved ‘evil’.

    Well, I guess I’d better get ready for some more berating, because this suggestion from Maggie Atkinson, Children’s Commissioner for England, is a typically daft liberal riposte to a problem caused by the worst form of liberalism.  The suggestion is to raise the age of crimninality from 10 to 12, because most 10 year old criminals don’t know what they’re doing.  Bollocks.

    OK…deep breath….

    Ms Atkinson.  There is one question to answer here.  The vast majority of 10 year old kids do not take a toddler from a shopping mall, lie to people who stopped them about their relationship with the toddler, and then  torture the toddler to death on a railway line.  Which to me indicates one of the following:

    1. The desire to do so is very, very rare and when it does occur in someone needs to be regarded as abnormal.
    2. The desire to do so maybe more common but most children of 10 are aware of right and wrong and know it would be wrong.
    3. That even if someone did want to do it they’d be scared by the consequences.
    4. That the desire to do so is rare, AND most children of 10 are aware of right and wrong and know it would be wrong.

    Now, I’d argue – being a fairly average man in the street – that (4) is the reason why this sort of crime is rare.  Most kids wouldn’t even think about it.  Videos and media imagery may bring such thoughts to the heads of a few more children, but then (2) and (3) usually kick in.  And if someone gets as far as (1) then we’re looking at someone who is either mad or bad, but is undeniably dangerous.

    The Bulger killers were given a lot of help in trying to rehabilitate, but in at least one of the killers, the efforts at rehabilitation seem to have failed and he’s back inside after release on licence. 

    Now.  The two boys were approached when they had James with them, and lied about their relationship with him and where they were going.  They also attempted to cover up their actions.  Now, call me simple minded if you will – and I promise I won’t mind at all – but to me lying and cover up means that at least one of them WAS aware that what they had done was wrong.  And even if only one was aware, the other went along with it, rather than admitting the situation to his parents.  So he was ashamed of what he’d done – again, that frequently indicates that we know that what we’ve done is wrong.

    My point is that these kids, in my opinion, knew wholeheartedly that they’d done wrong – just like the Edlington kids.  Whilst I accept that media influences and bad parenting may have contributed to both cases, the bottom line is that in both cases I believe that it is inconceivable that they didn’t know that what they were doing was wrong.

    So…there is an element of bad there…possibly some mad…but definitely dangerous.  As for rehabilitation and releasing them, even on licence, I refer you again to the story of the Scorpion and the Frog which I first related here:

    There’s a fable that’s been repeated in many places, about a Scorpion who wants to cross a river.  He ponders this problem for a while when he sees a frog hopping along.  He asks the frog whether it would be possible to ride on his back whilst the frog swims the river. The frog points out that the scorpion is likely to sting him on the journey and kill him.  The scorpion replies that were he to do that, then he too would drown, as well as the frog.  The frog goes along with this, and the pair start the river crossing.  Half way across the scorpion stings the frog, and as they both drown the frog asks ‘Why?’  The scorpion sadly remarks ‘It’s in my nature.’  

    It’s in my nature.  Whether mad or bad, boys such as this are evil and dangerous.  Their nature would, to me, preclude them from release; not for any desire for punishment, but because they cannot be trusted not to do something similar again.  But that’s another story, and I await the bleeding hearts telling me why I am so wrong.

  • Blogger or marketer – your choice.

    I encountered this article in my Twitter feed today, and to be honest it bought a lump to my throat.  No, not that good sort of lump – the sort that makes you want to run for the bathroom.

    Let me start by saying that I don’t get paid for blogging, and won’t be carrying adverts on the blog.  It’s so cheap to run – in the course of a year I spend less money on this baby than I spent the other night buying a round of beers in the pub.  And the time – well, I do it for the love of it.  I don’t expect to get paid for the time that I spend doing my other hobbies, so why this one?  If folks run a blog as part of a business, then so be it – that’s good practice these days.  Or even if the blog IS the business – excellent if you can do it.  All I’m saying is know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.

    A quote from the article:

    “The blogosphere is where authentic conversation is happening,” said Pamela Parker, a senior manager with Federated Media, which sells ad space for an A-list roster of about 150 bloggers that includes superstars like Dooce and the Pioneer Woman, who’ve parlayed their blogs into lucrative one-woman industries.”

    I think this and:

    “Last summer, one blogger organized a weeklong public relations blackout in which bloggers were urged to eschew contests, product reviews and giveaways and instead get “back to basics” by writing about their lives. Another blogger replied that she couldn’t do so because the blackout fell the week of her daughter’s first birthday party, which she was promoting on her blog. With sponsors and giveaways.”

    were the bits that made me reach for my sick-bag.  ‘Authentic conversations’ where a mother gets her baby’s first birthday party sponsored, for crying out loud?  Did the kids get thrown out if they weren’t drinking the right brand of fruit juice?  Come on, people!

    As soon any form of advertorial, promotion or marketing gumf comes in to view, the concept of an authentic conversation goes out the window.  I’d respect people more if they just said ‘We’re here to sell.  We’d like you to write editorial items that can push our goods.  Oh, and we’ll pay you in some way’.  Or, ‘I write articles for my website that are actually promotions for goods and services’.  But this sort of double-speak?  Authentic conversations my arse.

    I subscribe to a number of freelance sites where people looking for freelancers post their needs.  A common requirement is to write ‘copy’ for what are described as ‘blogs’.  A typical description is as follows:

    “You must be able to obtain an adequate amount of knowledge for a specific topic, as well as generate the information necessary for that topic within the relevant market. Then write captivating and very original content about the topic (i.e. a new weight loss product.)”

    If I ever get up one morning and decide that my great desire in life is to write captivating content about drugs that stop your guts absorbing fats, then I hope one of my friends will do the decent thing and take me behind the barn and shoot me.  It’s not blogging; it’s writing advertising copy. 

    It’s the nature and job of advertising agencies and marketing companies to subvert to their own use any form of media; that’s what they do.  There’s nothing new in it.  We just need to look back at how the youth brands of the 90s tried to engage young people through ‘street culture’ – again claiming authenticity.  (Take a look at Naomi Klein’s No Logo) 

    Blogs offer an opportunity to be truly personal and original and engage people in conversations about your life – or just tell folks about what you like, dislike, whatever – like this place.  Mass media isn’t too happy with that and will, if it’s any good, try to subvert the blogosphere like they have subverted every other form of wide reach media on the planet.

    Don’t let ’em.  Run an advertising business or run a blog; know what you’re doing.  I personally hope you’ll choose to run a blog and keep that subversion out for just a little longer.

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