Recreating consumerism

Ad agencies are now using cyberspace to recreate consumer culture so that they can launch and test marketing campaigns without the real-world dangers of failure. This excerpt is from an Austin American-Statesman piece:

"In the same way you can create 'SimCity,' you can create a
virtual marketplace," said Maury Giles, the head of GSD&M's
accountability and analytics department.

"Instead of spending $30 million on a campaign you're not sure is
going to work, you can try it and run it ... It's like a simulation of
what would happen if we spend this amount of money on this
message with this group of people."

Giles said Icosystem's software allows GSD&M to simulate a
population of thousands of consumers.

The space can simulate all kinds of market conditions, from a downturn to the latest scandal, and then let the virtual consumers interact. My question: are we that predictable?

No Internet

Check out this South Park clip about the town waking waking up to no Internet.
Pretty hilarious. Talk about the burning need to resolve ambiguity being taken to an extreme.
This reminds me of a story not too long ago about a sudden blackout for Blackberries. Here is a snippet from that NYT article on Aug. 19, 2007:

Stuart Gold was in Phoenix on a business trip when the service went down. Mr. Gold, the marketing director for Omniture, a software firm, noticed ominous red X’s next to his outgoing e-mails.

He is not proud of what happened next.

“I started freaking out,” he said. “I started taking it apart. Turning it off. Turning it on. I took the battery out and cleaned it on my shirt. I was running around my hotel like a freak. It’s very sad. I love this thing.”

At some point we need to heed the cautions of Mumford, Winner and other medium theorists to heart: Do we wield technology or does it wield us?

From Dana: News as Business

I found this NYT article today and I think it brings up some interesting points about news being a business. As it seems imminent that Brauchli will resign from his post as Editor at the Wall Street Journal because of the involvement of Rupert Murdoch's involvement in the daily operations of the paper it raises the question: how much should the business side of a company be involved in a paper's operations? Is this affecting the quality of the news we, as consumers, receive from these papers? Do you think Murdoch allows any bad press about himself to be published in one of the nation's most trusted newspapers?

One more point: A plea to trained journalists

I wanted to raise an issue for everyone to noodle over a bit, if you would indulge me. I am going to the Cap Times a bit later and a reporter asked me to bring up something that has caused some consternation in the newsroom: online pressures causing reporters to repackage press releases and old news as new stuff. This is a trend that has been going on for sometime -- way before online worlds, I might add (VNRs anyone?) But the technological ability to publish 24/7 combined with the ease of resurrecting archived material for new packaging (see a recent post on the Observer for a case in point), leads me to plea to all you budding journalists out there: STICK TO THE PRINCIPLES OF JOURNALISM, no matter the pressure to do otherwise. A woman in my newsroom got fired a couple years ago for publishing press releases as her own work. And this was a Gannett newsroom. My point? People still care about original reporting. If the trained journalists start taking liberties because we want to beat citizen journalists, where does that leave democracy?

Blogger or Journalist or Who Cares?

Another blogger vs journalist incident has created more debate about how we should be thinking about citizens who write about 'news' via their blogs. Mayhill Fowler, who writes for the OffTheBus.net blog (founded by Jay Rosen and Arianna Huffington), attended (and paid for) an Obama fundraiser and then wrote about the small-town comments he made there four days later. This NYT article details her inner turmoil as an Obama supporter vs her inner journalist. She came under fire from many in the blogosphere for even considering not posting the comments because of her admiration for Obama.

Can we please stop debating this? I like to think a new CyberNewsroom is developing here where citizens who want to 'be' journalists mingle with sources and reporters and audiences in a new layer of the public sphere. Their work is needed -- more so now than ever. But let's not confuse the expectations of these bloggers with what we want from journalists. In the end, Fowler posted Obama's comments -- as any good citizen should.

Mash-ups for Social Movements

Anyone who doubted that new technology could help us help ourselves and make real change in the bad stuff going on in the world should take a look at this latest news to come out of Google. Google is working in partnership with the United Nations and a bunch of non-profits to construct mash-ups of maps and networks that reveal connections and disclose happenings around the world.

This is from a CNN report today:

The maps will aid humanitarian operations as well as help inform the public about the millions who have fled their homes because of violence or hardship, according to the office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, which is working with Google on the project.

"All of the things that we do for refugees in the refugee camps around the world will become more visible," U.N. Deputy High Commissioner for Refugees L. Craig Johnstone said at the launch in Geneva.

Users can download Google Earth software to see satellite images of refugee hot spots such as Darfur, Iraq and Colombia. Information provided by the U.N. refugee agency explains where the refugees have come from and what problems they face.

The attribute I like best about these is the feature that allows people to drill down into each point on the map, to get more specific information about that refugee camp or this politician, and then donate money or find ways to help. Talk about "shifting audiences." With such in-your-face altruistic opportunity, it's kind of hard to affect that narcotizing that sometimes occurs with news consumers, who feel that simply by reading the news one has participated in democracy.

From Melissa: Citizen Journalism

I wanted to post this to go along with the citizen journalism discussion on the blog. It is a survey about citizen journalism that I thought was interesting and relevant to the previous blog posts.

(The survey reports how journalists and audiences are responding to and considering citizen journalism.)