#oneaday Day 994: I Don’t Care

I’m coming to the rather cynical conclusion that I’m not sure I care enough about certain issues to want to shout and scream and rant and rave about them all day, every day. A big part of the reason behind this is the fact that people who do care enough about certain issues to shout and scream and rant and rave about them all day, every day are wearing me down significantly. I won’t get into specifics, as that will likely only provoke more shouting, screaming, ranting and raving, but suffice to say I really can’t be arsed with it any more.

I am fully aware that taking this rather apathetic attitude towards Big Issues makes me officially Part of the Problem. But, you know, I just don’t care any more. I have had my share of shit things happen to me in my life — nothing on a par with the abuse and crap some social groups have to put up with, though, obviously — and I am just exhausted. I am 31 years old and I just want to settle down with a nice, quiet life. I want to have a nice house with a cat and/or a dog, a car that doesn’t rattle when it goes around corners, a job that I enjoy that also allows me the free time to do things I want to do. I am partway there already (mainly on the job front) after a difficult couple of years, and I just do not have the energy to get upset and angry over things outside of my immediate situation any more. It’s selfish, and I’m completely aware of that — and mildly guilty about it, to my annoyance — but it’s true. I want my own life to be sorted before I try and fix the rest of the world, and I’ve still got a long way to go yet.

In honesty, it’s not that I genuinely don’t give a shit about the issues in question and don’t think they’re a problem. It’s that any time a “discussion” on said issues comes up, it devolves within a matter of seconds into people throwing tables at each other, telling each other to “get a grip” or that Their Opinion Is Wrong. I’ve tried on several occasions to engage in such discussions in a reasonable, rational manner and every time this pattern has emerged, without fail. It’s utterly predictable. Someone makes an inflammatory statement deliberately designed to provoke, someone else comes along with a counterpoint, then both sides gather the troops and proceed to bitch and scream at one another with no resolution being reached. Then the whole thing just happens again and again and again. In some cases, people in question repeatedly stoke the fire in an attempt to get the arguments to flare up again long after the initial flurry has passed.

I have one far-off friend in particular whom I otherwise like very much who I now feel I can’t really engage with via social media any more because 90% of their posts seem to follow the pattern outlined above. This sort of person attracts like-minded individuals, most of whom are strong-willed and keen to argue their case aggressively. I hate unnecessary aggression and will do anything possible to avoid it, whether it’s in actual conversation or on the Internet. If that means no longer talking to someone online, then it’s a sad situation for sure, but it’s what I’ll do.

There’s also the fact that in a lot of cases these screaming matches don’t achieve anything whatsoever. A lot of the people who hold these strong opinions can very much talk the talk but then don’t do anything to back up their bold words. If they took some sort of action regarding the things they feel so strongly about, I might be more inclined to care more one way or the other. But when the same old arguments arise day after day after day, I just get tired and don’t want to engage with it any more. The impact is lost. I don’t care any more. I just want to have a quiet life. If your points are making me — and doubtless plenty of others like me — feel like that, you are not arguing your case well.

Is that such a bad thing? Apparently so. But if it’s wrong, to mangle the cliché, I really don’t have the energy or give enough of a shit to be right.

#oneaday Day 962: Signal to Noise

We’re reaching saturation point with social media. In fact, I think we got past that point a long time ago, meaning that we’re at the “completely sodden and dribbling all over the carpet” stage.

There is too much social media. There are too many possible places for people to share things that nobody cares about with people they don’t know. And it seems that every day some bright-eyed startup CEO decides that what we really need is yet another social network service of some description.

I’ve indulged in a few of these superfluous social networks over the years. GetGlue was a bit of fun, allowing you to “check in” to movies, books, games and even “topics” that you were interested in, leave comments and discuss things with other community members. This was at the height of the “gamification” craze, so there were plenty of achievements to collect, and you could even get some real-life physical stickers sent to you if you collected enough achievements.

Similarly, Foursquare and the now-defunct Gowalla proved fun for a little while. During the period of time when I was unemployed and quite spectacularly depressed, I made extensive use of Gowalla to “tag” various places around Southampton and assist with building up a crowdsourced map of places of interest. I even made some actual real-life friends through it, but since then location check-ins have lost their lustre — what’s the point, really?

Then I tried Path, which promised to be a high-quality mobile-focused social network. But since you can access Facebook, Twitter and Google+ — the biggest social networks in the world — via your mobile phone, why on Earth would you need a mobile-specific one? Sure, Path had a lovely interface and the bizarre ability to track when you woke up and went to sleep, but it was ultimately pointless.

Today, I reviewed an app/social network whose purpose remained completely obtuse to me even as I made use of it — and even as an employee of the company frantically tried to convince me that the service was worthwhile via both Twitter and the service itself. (I’m not going to name it as I really can’t be bothered to be chased further — I gave it a fair shot, I explored it, I found it to be a complete waste of time. Sorry.)

The service in question allows users to, like GetGlue, “Like” things. Any things. Like cake? Then “Like” cake. Like Tori Amos? Then “Like” Tori Amos. Not sure whether you like broccoli and stilton soup? Then add it to your “To-Do” list, then “Like” it if you like it. Great. Sure. Fine. One question: why?

This questionable usefulness was only further obscured by the fact that the app also, for some utterly unfathomable reason, allows its users to “plant” “Likes” at actual physical locations, meaning you can claim to have hidden, say, an iPhone 5 in your local McDonalds, or Jedward in your local sewage works. Fun for about five minutes again, sure — and a means of seeing who lives vaguely near you and likes Jedward — but again… why?

There’s too much noise and not enough signal in social media these days, in short, and this fact is a big part of why I stripped back on all “non-essential” social apps a while back. I keep Facebook, Twitter and G+ around because there are people I regularly speak to on all of those, but outside of those “big three”? There’s really very little reason for a lot of these services and apps to exist, but the amount of money being thrown at them by venture capitalists is terrifying.

Kind of makes me think that I should come up with an “innovative” idea for a mobile social network in order to attract several million dollars’ worth of funding.

Okay… give me a minute.

Thinking.

Eureka! I got it. Everyone likes taking Instagram photos of food, right? Well, I propose a social photography network that is nothing but pictures of food with a selection of retro filters (some of which are available via in-app purchase). You can “check in” to the food you’re eating, discuss it with other people and share photographs of your lunchbox. It’ll be a big hit. I’ll call it “füd”, all in lower case, naturally.

That’ll be two million dollars, please, Mr Venture Capitalist. KTHX.

#oneaday Day 936: Biggest != Best

No, I’m not talking about penises.

Let’s talk about Facebook.

Facebook is massive. Facebook has taken over most people’s daily existence on the Web to such a degree that there are plenty of people out there who genuinely believe that it is the Web. Like, all of it.

It’s not. But then you probably knew that already.

But the fact stands that it is a massive global phenomenon, and something that has happily grown and evolved over time from its humble beginnings up to the multi-bajillion dollar business it is today.

Thing is, though, as it’s grown, it’s sort of lost sight of what it’s for.

“Facebook is a social tool that connects you with people around you,” the login screen used to say. When adding a friend, you used to have to indicate how you knew them, and the recipient of that friend request had to verify your story. It was actually quite a good idea that got around the MySpace “friend collecting” issue, whereby people would just add and add and add each other and then not talk to any of their 40,000 friends. Facebook’s systems ensured that you 1) were actually friends with the people you marked as friends and 2) didn’t fall into the “popularity contest” trap.

Whizz forward to today, and the Facebook of 2012 is a very different place. Now we get people promising “2,000+ friend requests” if you Like one of their pictures. I don’t want two thousand friends. I want my online friends to reflect people I actually know, and occasionally give me the opportunity to meet someone new who is relevant to my interests and/or knows people that I know. Give me two thousand newcomers from all over the world, all of whom are vying for my attention simply to make some arbitrary number higher than everyone else, and you sort of lose that.

Part of the reason for this change is the different in what Facebook thinks we should use it for these days. I first joined the site quite a while after many of my friends had — at the time, I assumed it was going to be one of those passing fads like MySpace, and would quickly disappear into obscurity. But I found its value while on a trip to the States to visit my brother — while abroad, I could share the photographs I’d taken and easily stay in touch with my friends as a large group rather than emailing them individually. It was nice.

Over time, things started to shift. Facebook’s big change to something a bit closer to its current layout upset a lot of people, and the addition of “applications” marked the beginning of how the social network looks now. At the time, I was of the attitude that the people complaining about it were bleating on about nothing, but in retrospect they may have had a point. As everyone’s news feed started filling up with FarmVille brag posts, the signal to noise ratio started getting worse.

Then came the brands. Facebook undoubtedly thought they were doing everyone a favour when they opened up the previously “personal” social network to companies and businesses who wanted to grow their social presence. And in some cases, it worked well, with companies able to engage with their customers and post important information as and when needed.

Unfortunately, this too lost the plot somewhere. Now, pretty much every brand page uses the same obnoxious “engagement strategies” to keep people commenting, talking and Liking — the worst of which by far is the fucking awful “fill in the blank” status update that invites commenters to give their own meaningless opinion on something utterly asinine and irrelevant to the company’s product. (“My favorite color is ____________!” proclaimed the Facebook Page for The Sims 3 on one memorable occasion. Over four thousand people replied.)

You see, people seem to absolutely love posting things that have absolutely no value. People love thinking their opinion is important, that they are being listened to, that the things they say are somehow valuable to someone.

The things you say are valuable to someone. The people they are important to are called your family and friends. Not the PR representative for The Sims 3. They don’t care what your favourite colour is. They just want you to keep giving them page impressions and comments and Likes.

Likes. Fuck Likes. The Like button is Facebook’s most enduring legacy, and one of the biggest blows to actual communication in today’s connected world. Why comment any more when you can just click “Like”? It means nothing, particularly when it’s connected to a sentence for which the verb “like” is completely inappropriate. (“My grandad died. So sad right now.” “Insensitive Twat likes this.”) It’s a meaningless metric designed to measure how many people have seen something you have posted and want to interact with it, but are slightly too lazy to actually write anything.

The diminishing sense of Facebook’s usefulness for actual communication is perhaps best exemplified by the current way someone’s profile looks. Known as “Timeline”, the theory behind it is that it is an easy to navigate history charting everything interesting that has happened in someone’s life.

It’s a sound plan. Unfortunately its implementation is just terrible.

The problem is that there’s no consistency in how posts show up, and seemingly no understanding of how people read content. Leaving aside the fact that one’s profile cover image and fairly pointless basic information takes up over 500 lines — or nearly half of a 1920×1080 display — there’s seemingly no rhyme or reason as to what gets posted at the “top” of one’s profile.

The conventions established by blogs and earlier social networks dictate that the most recent things go at the top, so anyone checking in on someone’s page doesn’t have to scroll around or search to find something new. Yet with all the sources from which Facebook can pull information these days — games, external sites, apps, Spotify, Netflix — there is no consistency in what goes where. For example, at the time of writing, this is what the top of my Timeline looks like:

What a mess, and very little of it is stuff that I 1) actively shared and 2) feel people really need to know. I deliberately shared the RunKeeper stuff because I like sharing my fitness achievements because it helps keep me honest, but I have no need to show people who eight of my friends are, nor do people need to know that I achieved Bronze Level 2 in Five-O Poker, a game I reviewed earlier in the week and specifically told not to share shit on my timeline. At the other end of the spectrum, pages that I have “Liked” elsewhere on the Internet — and thus wanted to share with others, perhaps because I wrote them or just found them interesting — have been unhelpfully collected into a single box that shows just four of them. This behaviour changes seemingly daily, with Liked pages sometimes showing up as individual posts on one’s Timeline (useful) and sometimes being collected into that box (not useful). At the time of writing, Facebook appears to have decided that “not useful” is the way to go on this one.

Let’s scroll down a few “page heights” and see what else we have:

The left column? Sort of all right. The right column, though?

SO MUCH IRRELEVANT CRAP.

Including posts from games that I 1) didn’t press a “Share” button in once and 2) have since removed from my Facebook account.

There. After five screen-heights worth of scrolling, I finally get to one thing that I actually want to share with people — my recent WordPress posts, aka a feed from this blog to my Facebook Timeline. Again, though, like the Likes, they have been collected together into a box that displays very little relevant information and, in this case, is put in a stupid, stupid place. Why stupid? Because the most recent post in that little WordPress.com box came considerably after the RunKeeper post at the top of my Timeline — and certainly considerably after all the spammy crap those games have plastered all over that infuriatingly useless right column.

“Facebook is a social tool that connects you with people around you” my arse. “Facebook is a digital scrapbook maintained by a five-year old with ADHD,” more like.

I’ll see you on Twitter.

#oneaday Day 914: Chinese Whispers

Twitter was angry today. There was some degree of justification — the horrific shooting in Aurora at the screening of the new Batman movie had emotions running high, and I certainly don’t begrudge anyone that. But it demonstrated, once again, some of the dangers inherent in social media — a force which should, by all accounts, be a positive thing.

Misinformation spreads like wildfire on the Internet thanks to services like Twitter. People post things without thinking, without bothering to back things up with research and evidence. Journalists encourage this, with TV news being a particular offender, inviting people to contribute their own thoughts on a particularly pertinent story using hashtags. It thus becomes something of a challenge to determine exactly what the facts are, and what is simple hyperbole dreamed up by the increasingly-hysterical mass of people who suddenly all think that They Know Best.

I shan’t talk too much about the Aurora shooting specifically here because I haven’t read up on all the gory details myself as yet. I will refer to a couple of other recent incidents where this phenomenon became particularly apparent, however.

Most recently was the “Arctic Ready” campaign, in which Shell apparently made the amateurish misstep of opening up a slogan competition on a controversial subject — drilling in the Arctic — to the public. The “Let’s Go! Social” gallery page promptly became filled with anti-drilling, environmentalist slogans and it looked, by all accounts, to be one of the most colossal fuck-ups in social marketing history.

Except that it wasn’t. It was actually a genius piece of social marketing, but not by Shell. No; the whole thing was, in fact, a clever ruse by Greenpeace, who then went on to troll Shell even further by picking a “winner” from the supposed competition and putting it on a billboard right outside Shell’s Houston headquarters.

It should have been pretty obvious to anyone who stopped to think about the whole thing for a moment that this clearly wasn’t Shell’s doing. The kind of people who handle social media marketing are generally fairly savvy sorts (though there are exceptions) and would have stepped in to deal with the mass trolling of the supposed competition. In fact, they would have probably removed it altogether fairly sharpish. They certainly wouldn’t have left it up for several weeks, opened up a new Twitter account just to repeatedly request that people don’t retweet “offensive” adverts and generally keep poking the fire.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t obvious to a lot of people. It caught people out not once, but twice — first, when the “Arctic Ready” site first appeared, and again a few weeks later when the Twitter account appeared. People posted, retweeted and commented without stopping to think about whether or not it was real. Others who were wise to it posted, retweeted and commented about how it was clearly fake. But amid all the noise from both sides it became impossible to differentiate who was talking sense and who was simply repeating the digital equivalent of what they had heard down the pub while drunk.

The Shell incident isn’t the only one either. The “Today Is The Day They Went To In Back To The Future Part II” hoax has been around twice, too. Both times it caught people out. Why? Because, again, no-one bothered to check. No-one took a moment to fire up the movie and take a look. If they had, they would have seen that the claims made by whoever started that ridiculous rumour on each occasion were patent nonsense.

It happens in journalism too, and particularly in games journalism. One site posts a “Rumour:” or “Report:” story, and others pick up on it. The content spreads and becomes somewhat distorted over time. It happened today with a story from MCV which, as it turned out, apparently misreported the facts in the first place (or rather, more accurately, posted a story with a misleading headline) and was then sourced by Destructoid and a ton of other sites. This then inspired Ben Kuchera, official unelected and self-styled arbiter of How To Do Games Journalism On The Internet, to pen this piece bemoaning the whole situation, and by God I hate agreeing with Ben Kuchera — but he had a point. With a bit of research (or indeed just carefully reading the quotes that MCV included in its own piece) it’s clear that the “story” (or, more specifically, the headline) that was going around simply wasn’t true.

It’s exhausting at times to keep up with all this stuff, and while it’s great to be able to tap the pulse of everyone at the same time on a hot topic, it’s less great to find yourself in the world’s biggest game of Chinese Whispers. So do me a favour. Before you blindly retweet something that seems a little “off”, take a minute and check to see whether or not it’s actually genuine.

#oneaday Day 909: The Internet Is As Big As You Make It

Over the years, my Internet habits have changed significantly. This has been at least partly due to changes in technology over the years, but I still find it an interesting observation to think back on how times have changed since I first “got online.”

My earliest experiences were with CompuServe which, for the unfamiliar, was somewhat like an online “walled garden”. It included much of the things we take for granted on the Internet today — email, topic-specific forums, places to download stuff, real-time chat and probably, if you looked hard enough, something which could be used by someone as porn. Initially, you were limited to talking only to other CompuServe subscribers, but over time access opened up: firstly to allow emailing to Internet email addresses, and eventually to access the Web proper. I remember vividly trying (and failing) to get the browser Mosaic to work with CompuServe.

At this time, since I was just a kid and living at home, my Internet (or equivalent) access was severely limited. I had to plan out what it was I was going to look at (usually the Gamers’ Forum and occasional delves into the “CB Simulator” — aka real-time chat rooms — to try (and fail) to pick up girls. (a/s/l?)

Over time, the Internet opened up to all, and we were all able to gain access to the information we wanted and some we didn’t. The best free porn sites were (apparently) passed around in the schoolyard; the best sites to download shareware games were common knowledge; little communities started to spring up as people figured out things like “forums”, “personal homepages” and “search engines”.

Fast forward to today and, with an Internet that is growing at a frightening rate, I find myself limiting what I’m doing to a very small number of sites. Despite becoming increasingly irritated with it, I check Facebook. I check my GMail. I check in on the Squadron of Shame Squawkbox if there’s been a new post. I write this blog. Occasionally I might check a gaming site for news of something I’m interested in, but that’s really about it. I tweet from my phone and everything else that I really want to do is covered by those sites — and Google if I can’t find the information I’m looking for straight away. I find myself going around and around and around the same sites over and over, hoping that something new and interesting has come up in the five minutes since I last looked. (It never does.)

One thing I’ve found myself not using anywhere near as much as I used to is dedicated, specific communities. Every time I find a forum that looks vaguely interesting, I might check it out and post there for a few days and then promptly forget all about it — even if it’s a community I have little doubt that I’d really enjoy being a part of. This is kind of sad, since it limits my contact with people who are specifically in to the exact same things as me, but it’s primarily a result of the fact that forum software tends to not play overly-nice with mobile devices — which, nine times out of ten, is the place where I want to be casually browsing. (Okay, a lot of forums bring up that annoying popup about Tapatalk, which I’ve never tried and might be the best thing ever, but still.)

It’s mostly a time issue. I have lots of things I want to do every day, and I rarely (no, make that never) get to do all of them. So far as “priorities” go, checking forums, posting things and getting to know yet another online community is not particularly high up the list.

Perhaps it should be. There are a lot of things I am into that I would like to talk more about with others. Without thinking very hard, I can immediately point to both My Little Pony and The Secret World as communities I would like to be more involved with. And there are doubtless more out there. When I think about how vapid and pointless 95% of the conversations on Facebook are, I do sometimes wonder if my “social” time online could be better spent in a more focused community rather than browsing creepy baby photos posted by people I haven’t seen since school.

Perhaps I should leave my own prejudices at the door and jump in to one of these communities to see what will happen. You never know where new friends are lurking, after all.

#oneaday Day 887: Things I Don’t Understand

Herein follows an updated (though not comprehensive) list of Things I Really Don’t Get, in no particular order.

Football. (Soccer for the Americans.) Those who have known me for a long time will be well-familiar with my aversion to the supposed “beautiful game” by now, and its popularity continues to elude me even as I’m supposed to be feeling patriotic and English while Euro 2012 is going on. I just couldn’t give a toss, though. Related: I also don’t understand why those who like football complain about ITV’s coverage of it and then don’t protest about it in a form any stronger than passive-aggressive tweets. Don’t watch it if it bothers you that much. Crashing viewing figures would get their attention. (One response I received to this tonight was that they had “no choice” but to watch. This attitude is unfathomable to me when the vehement, often expletive-ridden criticisms of ITV’s coverage is taken into account.)
Carly Rae Jepsen. Who the fuck is this person and why is their song Call Me Maybe so inexplicably popular at present? I listened to it out of curiosity on Spotify the other day and discovered a bland, predictable if marginally catchy pop song — certainly nothing remarkable to elevate it above similar offerings from other cheeseballs artists such as Ke$ha et al.
Rage of Bahamut. Discussed in greater detail here.
People who park in the pick-up area at supermarkets. Is your time so valuable to you that you need to park in an area that isn’t a parking space, Mr BMW driver? (Because it inevitably is a male driver, usually in an expensive German car) There are free spaces over there. I’m sure it won’t hurt you to get out and walk for an additional five seconds.
People who comment on brand pages on Facebook. Discussed somewhat here. It seems that for some people, the “like” and “comment” buttons have some sort of irresistible magnetic force that makes these people unable to leave an inane post by a brand alone before they’ve posted “lol” or some equally asinine comment. I follow J-List on Facebook because (1) I like the pictures (2) I find the posts about Japan interesting
Radio 1 giving an on-air guided tour of a festival ground when nothing was happening there. Radio 1 had/are having (I don’t care enough to check) some sort of festival, and the other day they devoted a good ten minutes or so to someone walking around the (unoccupied) festival grounds explaining where everything was going to be. The impact was somewhat lost by radio’s inherent lack of pictures.
Jedward. Come on. Are we not over this supposed “joke” yet?
Beauty products. Women must all be fucking scientists to understand all that crap they sell in Boots. I certainly wouldn’t know when to buy a “serum” and when to buy “body butter”.
The enduring popularity of shit TV. I don’t think Take Me Out is on at the moment, but the sheer number of otherwise normal-ish people I follow on Twitter who voluntarily subjected themselves to this televisual carcrash is astonishing. Most claim they only did so in order to bitch about it on Twitter, but I can think of far less infuriating ways to spend an evening.
Instapaper, Read It Later et al. I’ve never used one of these services so I don’t really understand what they do and can’t really fathom out how they work from their descriptions. I’m something of a traditionalist in the way I read stuff on the Internet — I go to the site, I read it. If I don’t have Internet access at the time, I don’t read it. If you’re lucky I’ll subscribe to your blog by email but that’s about it – I don’t use Google Reader or anything either.
How you can play the same (non-MMORPG) multiplayer game for over 100 hours and not get bored. I got bored of the one time I tried Call of Duty multiplayer after about two or three hours tops. I got sort of into it for a little while but then realised that I wasn’t really having as much fun as I thought I should be having and that I didn’t feel like I was getting any better, either, so I stopped. The prospect of playing a multiplayer shooter enough to contemplate voluntarily paying a subscription fee for it is unfathomable to me.
How Microsoft Word still doesn’t work properly yet. Word first came out in 1983, yet here in 2012 I am still getting frustrated by the fact it occasionally and unpredictably changes fonts for no apparent reason, decides to format my entire document in bullet points when I tell it to undo my last action and is just generally a big buggy mess. Surely it can’t be that hard to get right? It’s not as if I’m even doing anything advanced; this is basic text editing that still encounters these glaring flaws on a regular (but unpredictable) basis.
How it’s possible to have a “collector’s edition” of a game that is only available via digital download. Special edition, fine. Premium edition, fine. But “collector’s edition”? No.
Why all car parks don’t take cards. I never have any cash on me because I rarely need it, so I can imagine there are plenty of other people who live their lives in a similar fashion. Payment cards are so ubiquitous now; why can’t you pay for your parking with a credit or debit card in 95% of British car parks? (I made that statistic up. But it’s certainly a lot of them.)
Fruit tea. It smells so good; it tastes so much like dirty bath water. Why must Nature be so cruel?

I think that’ll do for now. Feel free to share your own Things You Don’t Understand in the comments.

#oneaday Day 885: Foul-Smelling Vagina

There, that got your attention, didn’t it? Mention a stinky faff in your headline and everyone suddenly takes note. I’ll remember that for the future.

Anyway, I do actually sort of want to talk about fragrant fannies today, but not in quite the way you might be expecting. I am instead referring to the social media backlash which “intimate hygiene” product line Femfresh encountered today on its Facebook page.

There were a number of reasons that Femfresh drew the ire of the Internet community today, but one of the most common complaints was its cover photo. Here it is:

Apparently, it seems a lot of ladies find the company’s seeming inability to use “adult” words for their respective minges somewhat patronising — and before I go any further, I will point out that my use of various offensive euphemisms throughout this post is purely for facetious comedy value (and variety) rather than any ulterior motive — and thus took umbrage with Femfresh’s page as soon as they saw the top of it. (Quite what they were doing on it in the first place is their business and their business alone.)

Not only that, but it seems that on the whole (shush!) women are, in fact, rather well-educated about what is and isn’t appropriate to smear over or stick up their flange. “Bacterial vaginosis” is the result of using the wrong things, it seems, and no, I haven’t Googled that because I don’t want to. Don’t let me stop you from doing so, however, if you’re curious. Just don’t come crying to me if Google Images decides to serve you up some tasty treats.

Anyway. Here are a few choice comments from the public:

“I call it a vagina because I’m not 12 years old and because I love it I’ll go nowhere near this vile ‘care range. Cheers.”
— Holly Rae Smith.

“Are you kidding me? Trivialising something innately precious by calling it something so thoroughly ridiculous offends me and, believe it or not, all the posters on this page. Did you not perform any market research on this area and then develop a communication and marketing strategy? It appears not otherwise you wouldn’t have received such an insane backlash on your attempts to flog a thoroughly unnecessary and damaging product…”
— Helen T

“Just to clarify, is Femfresh for vaginas or vulvas? Because your ad says vagina, which implies your product is a douche, in which case you’re advertising a harmful product. If it’s for vulvas only, change the words you’re using to make it clear.”
— Kirsten Hey

I shan’t talk any more about the science of quim because I’m not a gynaecologist (I can, however, spell gynaecologist without using spellcheck) but I will focus on the larger issue here, which is that social media advertising campaigns can and will go very, very wrong if they’re not thought out effectively. Instead of simply advertising their (apparently controversial) product, Femfresh made the mistake of attempting to engage with their “fans” when there was really no need to. By actively encouraging people to comment on their posts (and by posting vapid, patronising nonsense) they essentially brought about their own downfall. Everyone has been talking about Femfresh today, and they haven’t come off too well. “All publicity is good publicity” doesn’t really apply when the vast majority of those “publicising” your product are pointing out proven health risks.

The broader issue here is that social advertising should not be “essential” as so many advertisers seem to believe it to be. On Facebook, you can “Like” everything from HP sauce to a favourite video game. Doing so used to simply be a means of self-expression — quite literally, demonstrating that you liked something. Now, publicly “Liking” something is inviting the brand in question to bombard you with crap, ask you asinine questions at all hours of the day in an attempt to “build a community” around things that really don’t need a community built around them. If people honestly think that their lives are going to be enriched when they click “Like” on the page of a thing that they’re quite fond of, they are sorely mistaken.

Those who have “Liked” (or at least come across) Femfresh have taken a stand against this sort of pointless nonsense that is infesting social media like, well, bacterial vaginosis. In this case, it’s because the advertising was both patronising and inaccurate. For less contentious products, it’s going to be harder to train people to not be corporate shills — the last post on Pepsi’s Facebook page has 1,094 “likes” and 74 comments, for example, none of which say anything remotely meaningful — but it seems we’re starting to see a backlash of people who are no longer willing to be an unpaid part of a product’s promotional team. I’ve certainly started “unliking” pages on Facebook that post nothing but pointless questions or fill-in-the-blank exercises rather than useful information (although seriously, what “useful information” could the official social media presence of HP Sauce ever really give you?) and I’d encourage others to do so too. This form of social advertising adds nothing of worth to society and, as Femfresh have seen today, can be completely counter-productive for the brand in question. (I guess there’s an argument for the fact that today’s debacle may have educated some women about bacterial vaginosis, but still.)

I’ll leave you with this:

#oneaday Day 853: Friend Collecting

I didn’t understand it back in the MySpace days, and I still don’t understand it now.

Friend collecting. Why? Just… why?

I am, of course, referring to the phenomenon seen in the comments thread of this Facebook post here:

(with apologies to Kalam, who is nothing to do with this.)

“Who wants 2,000+ friend requests?” asks Ahmed Hamoui, only with poorer use of punctuation and a seeming inability to use the number keys on his keyboard.

To his question, I answer “Not me. Fuck off.”

Facebook is noisy enough at the best of times. Can you imagine how chaotic and useless it would be if you 1) got 2,000 friend requests and 2) accepted all of them? It would completely negate the core concept of Facebook (or what it used to be, at least) which is to be a “social tool” that helps you to connect with family and friends. The very nature of the way Facebook works pretty much encourages you to limit the friends you add to being people you actually know, otherwise there’s that horrid risk of people seeing photos they shouldn’t. Because despite the fact that everyone knows you shouldn’t post embarrassing photos online, everyone still does. (Not to mention the fact that you have no control over what other people post.)

This sort of thing happens on Twitter, too, with the whole “#TeamFollowBack” thing, whereby certain tweeters promise to follow back if you follow them. At heart, this sounds like a relatively admirable thing to do, promoting mutual, equal discussions and– oh wait, most of them are just collecting followers for no apparent reason then filling their entire timeline alternating between bragging about how many followers they have and bleating about how close to the next “milestone” they are. (Please RT.)

I trimmed my Twitter list massively a month or two back because it was just getting too much to deal with. I flip-flopped between two equally annoying problems: things moving too fast for me to be able to keep up with, and everyone posting the exact same thing at the exact same time either due to press embargoes or the death of a celebrity. So rather than complain about it, I cut the people who were irritating me or whom I hadn’t “spoken” to for a while, and now enjoy a much more pleasurable life online. Sure, my timeline still gets flooded every time a celebrity (usually one I’ve never heard of) dies, but at least I can keep up with the conversations for the most part.

Which makes me wonder why on Earth you would want to put yourself in a position on Facebook or Twitter where it is literally impossible to follow and engage with that many people. Surely at that point social media ceases being at all “social” and simply becomes white noise?

Or perhaps I’m just getting old. It seems to be mostly young kids (particularly Justin Bieber fans for some reason) engaging in this behaviour. Perhaps they have a much greater tolerance for being bombarded with crap than I do. Perhaps they’re numb to it. Perhaps they don’t really want to “socialise” at all online, simply grow a bigger e-peen than their friends and/or strangers they don’t know.

Whatever. I don’t really care. I have cultivated a relatively small but close-knit circle of friends online, much as in “real life”, and I’m happy with it that way. It’s nice to have occasional new people trickle into the mix through, say, this blog or Twitter or what have you, but I certainly don’t feel any need to bellow at the top of my lungs about how close I am to 1,500 Twitter followers, and I have no idea how many friends I have on Facebook — nor do I care.

If you’d like 2,000 friend requests on Facebook, simply “Like” this post then go fuck yourself.

#oneaday Day 841: Badass Teacher

I know I’ve said many, many times on this blog that I’d never go back to teaching (and for the sake of my own mental health it’s probably for the best that I don’t) but I still, at times, find myself idly wondering how I’d manage The Perfect Classroom. By that I mean at a school that wasn’t struggling to keep its head above water, that was adequately staffed, that was populated by children of a decent range of ability levels but whom weren’t misbehaving little shitbags. A non-existent school, then, but a good starting point for a dream nonetheless.

Let’s assume for the sake of argument this Perfect Classroom is at a primary school, because that generally means sticking with the same class the whole time and building up a good relationship with them. On balance, I think I slightly preferred that to the constant coming and going of secondary education in which it was very difficult to learn names even after several months of teaching the same children.

Organisation is the key to a successful classroom, so I’d have some sort of technological solution — ideally portable — in place to keep things organise. I’m thinking an iPad, tooled up with a specialised app such as TeacherPal or a more generalised database like Bento. Within said technological solution I’d keep detailed, ongoing records on my students and also include a photograph to help prevent forgotten names. Using said technological solution I’d be able to quickly call up information on a particular student’s work and progress when required, be that for report-writing season or a parents’ evening.

Said portable device would also, ideally, be hooked up to the interactive whiteboards that are present in most classrooms (essentially giant touchscreens with a projector) in order to allow presentation of material on the screen while remaining “mobile”. (The inspectors love it when you don’t stay at the front of the room all the time.)

Technology can also play a good role in home-school communication, and certainly none of the schools I worked at in the past took advantage of this. Statistically speaking, it’s highly likely that a good proportion of the parents of the children in the class would have social media accounts, so why not take advantage of that? My class would have a Twitter and Facebook presence maintained (and carefully moderated) by me. The pages would provide regular updates on what the class has been up to and, crucially, publicly note any and all homework that had been set. Homework is a thorny issue, particularly in primary education, but having it spelled out in black and white on an “official” social media page would certainly allow me and the parents of my students to keep on top of things.

The social media page wouldn’t just be a glorified homework diary, of course. It would also be a great place for celebrating achievements, which is something that pretty much every school is big on. This could range from sharing the names of who won things like attendance certificates to pictures of good work. (Obviously care would have to be taken with photos, names and other details that end up in the public domain lest the Thought Police swoop in and decry you as some sort of kiddie porn-peddling pervert.)

In the classroom’s day-to-day life, I’d make an effort to use gamification theories to encourage students to progress. I’d allow them to earn rewards of some description — perhaps some form of “experience points” system, with tangible rewards given on every “level up”, or perhaps some sort of “achievement” system, again with tangible rewards on offer for significant achievements. These wouldn’t have to be big things — a congratulatory letter home, a sticker, some crappy pound shop toy — but they’d help motivate the kids to do their best. (I know, you shouldn’t have to “bribe” children to do good work, but it certainly doesn’t hurt to make them feel good about their achievements.)

It’s a nice dream, isn’t it? Pity it will probably never happen.

#oneaday Day 823: Information Diet

Know what I hate? Chavs. Know what else? Teaching. Know what else? We could be here a while. I’ll tell you. Press embargoes.

I get why they happen, obviously — publishers and their PR people want to ensure that coverage of something is coordinated nicely so that everyone gets suitably whipped up into a frenzy all at the same time. But there’s an unfortunate side-effect if you happen to, say, follow a bunch of different video games outlets at the time a major announcement happens: everyone bellows the same fucking thing at the exact same fucking time.

It’s happening more and more nowadays, too. The most notable examples that stick in my head in recent memory are Assassin’s Creed III and Borderlands 2, both titles that I have a passing interest in but find myself becoming curiously resistant to the more and more I get battered in the face with the same information from slightly different angles.

I think, on the whole, this is the “problem” I have been having with mainstream gaming overall. There’s too much information out there — too much coverage, too many “behind the scenes” videos, too many “exclusive” interviews, too many press releases announcing a single screenshot (yes, that is a real thing I received today and I have no shame in naming Square Enix as the perpetrator). After a while, you become completely saturated with information about a product and subsequently have absolutely no inclination to want to touch it, ever. This was a big part of why I didn’t want to play Mass Effect 3, for example — EA’s appalling behaviour was just the straw that broke the camel’s back, really.

I feel for my friends who work in games PR for “B-tier” games, too. It’s hard enough to get a title like, say, Risen 2 noticed at the best of times but when you’re competing with everyone beating themselves into an orgasmic and/or angry frenzy over Mass Effect 3, there’s little hope for your title outside of groups of people like me who have forsaken the mainstream in favour of enjoying less heavily marketed titles.

Conversely, the games I have been playing and enjoying are the ones where information has been trickling out slowly, usually straight from the developers mouths without dribbling through the PR sieve. Take the “Operation Rainfall” RPGs Xenoblade Chronicles, The Last Story and Pandora’s Tower (which I’m currently playing), for example — these received very little in the way of press attention despite being fantastic games. The aforementioned Operation Rainfall, a grassroots campaign to get these three excellent games localised and released in Europe and the US, received plenty of press, but information on the games themselves was conspicuously absent. As a result, I was able to go into all three of them pretty much blind and have a fantastic experience in the process — a big part of what made all of them great is the sense of discovery inherent in all of them. That just doesn’t happen if you’ve been smothered in information for the six months leading up to the game’s release.

As a result of all this, I’ve come to a decision, and if you’re feeling the same way as me, I recommend you follow it too.

Cut back. Cut out the crap. If you follow a buttload of games journalists and outlets on Twitter, unfollow them. If you want some gaming news, pick one outlet and keep it on your follow list, but chances are if you follow lots of gaming fans, someone will retweet the news as it happens anyway. Otherwise, go seek out the news when it’s convenient for you. Check the sites when you feel like it. Subscribe to their RSS feeds. Use Google Currents or Flipboard to receive information in an easily-digestible format. Receive information on your terms, not that of a carefully-crafted PR campaign.

This doesn’t have to apply just to games — it can apply to pretty much anything that suffers from the problems described above. Film, TV, celebrity news, business, tech… anything, really.

I’m going to give this a try. It will doubtless initially feel somewhat weird to not see some familiar faces and logos in my Twitter timeline, but I have a strange feeling that I’ll be a lot happier, less frustrated and less cynical as a result. Check back with me in a week or two and we’ll see.

(If you’re one of the people I do happen to unfollow, it’s nothing personal. You just might want to consider getting separate professional and personal accounts!)