Last night, for no discernible reason, the whole MYSQL database for this site turned into oatmeal and was eaten by a goat.
Everything from the last dreamhost backup (6 weeks ago) was restored. I will be working to get the goat to cough up the last two months worth of posts, which will be getting added back manually.
Please pardon any links that take you to goat droppings instead of what should have been there.
And if you happen to be savvy about this kind of thing, and can give some advice about how the hell it can be prevented from ever happening again, I’d be really grateful. 99% of what was lost can be replaced, but that 1% is pretty devastating to lose nonetheless.
Amanda Lepore in an ad for the Jawbone headset. Just saw it in Vanity Fair (the one with Marilyn Monroe on the cover). The image on the opposite page, was of a “surgeon”:
Right after writing about how cool I thought it would be to bring fictional characters to life on social media, I discovered that the employees of Sterling Cooper, the Madison Ave. advertising agency where the characters on AMC’s series Mad Men work, were all up on Twitter. For anyone unfamiliar, Twitter.com is a social networking site that allows users to communicate with their friends online and via text messages using posts of up to 140 characters in length (a.k.a. micro-blogging.) The characters’ profiles linked back to the AMC site, and they communicated with one another, and with their followers, “in character” and even in speech true to the show’s 1960’s-era time-period. So while it was never explicitly evident, it seemed only logical to assume, as many did, that AMC was behind this progressive and endearing move to use social media to enable its show’s characters to communicate and coexist with its fans. And then, not two weeks after first discovering their appearance on Twitter, the Mad Men characters’ profiles began being systematically suspended.
At the urging of Deep Focus, AMC’s marketing group, the profiles were un-suspended. “Better to embrace the community than negate their efforts,” said a Deep Focus spokesman. (Not to mention all that free, fan-generated promotion.) To the legal dept. these actions were perceived as a hostile menace, and yet to the marketing side, this was exactly the kind of fan behavior AMC should support. The manifesto on wearesterlingcooper.com, which came into existence shortly after the reinstatement of the profiles, speaks to the this kind of emergent disconnect:
Fan fiction. Brand hijacking. Copyright misuse. Sheer devotion. Call it what you will, but we call it the blurred line between content creators and content consumers, and it’s not going away. We’re your biggest fans, your die-hard proponents, and when your show gets cancelled we’ll be among the first to pass around the petition. Talk to us. Befriend us. Engage us. But please, don’t treat us like criminals.
All along, whenever fans have climbed a little too far, or gotten a little too close, or somehow managed to gain an unauthorized degree of power, they have always been treated like criminals. The difference in the digital age is that this kind of power is now within reach to more and more fans. Our capacity to affect that which we fancy is now, in many ways, as accessible as the internet, and suddenly it means that the rules that once applied to the dangerously overzealous can now be a response to all fans. This contention in the line between fans and criminals is perhaps nowhere more heated than around music.
A few days after the Mad Men Twitter profiles were back in action, the LA Times business section headline read: “Blogger Kevin Cogill charged with felony in leak of Guns N’ Roses songs.” Having “waited half his life for a new album,” Cogill posted nine not-yet-released tracks from the 15-years-in-the-making album, Chinese Democracy, streaming (not for download) on his website. Because of the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act of 2005 he now faces felony (vs. civil) charges, which if he is convicted mean $250,000 in fines and three years in prison. Asked for comment, Slash, former Guns N’ Roses lead guitarist, said, “I hope he rots in jail.“
I mean, “I hope he rots in jail,” is an epithet more applicable to, like, a rapist or something, but here it is, nevertheless, being flung at someone motivated by a desire to share his love for a band, and increase that love for more people. Even just in writing this post I am noticing that it’s gotten kind of hard to say pretty much anything sympathetic about the actions of music fans these days without it sounding like a defense of music piracy. Which is more than a little problematic, because what does it mean for any entity that thrives on the support of an engaged fan-base, when its most avid enthusiasts can be just a matter of perspective away from its greatest threat?
The Wall Street Journal just published an article about how various companies are dealing with negative domain names such as ihatestarbucks.com or boycottwalmart.org. Some companies, like xerox, pre-emptively buy up negative domains before some disgruntled customer can, and then leave sites like ihatexerox.net and ihatexerox.org blank. Southwestsucks.com, on the other hand, redirects to a customer service page on the actual Southwest Airlines site, where people can then submit their complaints. And Bank of America apparently even goes so far as to solicit feedback and address consumer concerns on bankofamericasucks.comāwhich it does not own. None of the strategies mentioned in the post involved pursuing any kind of take-down notice or legal action. God bless the haters, and all, but when fans’ freedom to express themselves is considered a bigger threat, seems like maybe it’s time to reexamine the situation.
For the US governmentāwhich has no plans to stop using taxpayer money to bring more cases like Cogill’s in the futureāthere isn’t really a difference in the way that it would go about treating individual music fans vs. big commercial piracy rings. Craig Missakian, an assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, said, “Prosecution like this makes others think twice.” I’m thinking, anyone for whom success and fan support are inextricably linked (governments need not apply) could stand to think twice, or three times even, about the changing nature of this relationship.
“Every record for the last fourāincluding my solo recordāhas been leaked,” Thom Yorke said in a Wired piece on The Real Value of Music. Talking about the motivation behind Radiohead’s groundbreaking release strategy for their latest album, In Rainbows, he continued, “So the idea was like, we’ll leak it, then.” Months before the CD was available in stores, fans were able to download the tracks online via Radiohead’s site, and pay what they wanted for themāeven if it was nothing. There are different ways to interpret the results and successes of this, the first experiment of its kind, but what it was unequivocally effective at is making strides to address the new dynamic between fans and music. Rather than dictating that “you are not our fan unless you’re one like WE say you can be,” this approach was designed to give fans, as Pitchfork put it, “the freedom to pay actual money for what amount[ed] to an album leak.”
Whether you’re a cable network or a music act, or anything else that develops content whose success depends on your relationship with your fans, understanding the freedoms that your fans now demand is the key. You might even discover you can appreciate their involvement.
And on that note, check out the youtube response video that Electronic Arts and Tiger Woods came up with a few days after a fan named Levinator25 posted a video of a glitch he’d found in EA’s new golf game:
My dad is an inventor. He’s got a bunch of patents, from two different continents, and an EPA award. He talks to me on instant messenger sometimes, which I find pretty impressive since he’s 76 years old and English is not his first language by more than 50 years. That half-century was spent in the USSR, the better part of it, trying to get out. Most of the people he knows his age barely know how to turn a computer on. But my dad likes on-switches. He likes buttons and technology and science and new ideas. He retired from a career as an electrical engineer but he can’t just retire from curiosity and coming up with ideas. Which is an awesome thing, unless you are unable to find other peopleāand especially people your ageāto connect with, who share your interests.
It used to be that the way you would stay connected to your industry was through your job. Whether it was access to news about industry developments, or access to participating in the course of those developments, it was all pretty much granted by your employment. Once you retiredāor were laid off at a certain age and couldn’t get rehiredāyour access was essentially denied. Perhaps, for a lot of people, who might not have been particularly thrilled about the careers they had ended up in, this would sound like a fantastic relief, but for those folks that had spent their lives passionately engaged with, and consummately fascinated by their field of work, being suddenly cut off from that entire world wouldn’t be quite so wonderful.
I’m not an expert on the institution of retirement, nor does my knowledge of the general senior citizen population extend beyond my parents and their friends, but I think it’s pretty safe to say that we have been living in a society where the options for what people over the age of 65 are expected be interested in are SLIM. They have definitely not been encouraged in any way to retain the interests they had when they were younger, or to think that they ought to. It’s as if once individuals hit senior citizen age it’s assumed they will simply want to trade in the things that had been exciting to them before, like handing back an access card to security once you’ve left a building, and instead discover their new interests lie within a finite selection of age-appropriate leisurely diversions they’d had nothing to do with before. To me the idea that an infinitely diverse array of identities would develop uniformly homogeneous interests simply by virtue of having lived to a certain age is about as accurate for teenagers as it is for senior citizens, and I think that this misconception will be completely undone by the social media generation.
Friendster, the first social network site I ever knew, can’t be older than six or seven years. Myspace is even younger. Youtube can’t be more than four of five. Facebook wasn’t even a serious contender in this space until like two years ago. And already, according to Universal McCann’s Comparative Study on Social Media Trends, April 2008:
57% of active online users (people using the internet every day or every other day) have joined a social network
73%Ā have read a blog
45% have started their own blog
39% subscribe to an RSS feed
Social Security might be nonexistent by the time my generation retires, but all these tools for social connection and personal expression available alreadyāand who even knows what future iterations are coming in our lifetimeāmean that what we will have are the resources to facilitate continuing our specific interests, and to retain our individual identities far beyond what was ever an option for the general populations of a certain age before us.
According to boomj.com, a social network site geared specifically for folks born in the two generations from the mid-1940’s to mid-1960’s, right now 41 – 64 year-olds comprise about 80 million people in the US. These are arguably the oldest generations to have already been affected by social media, and there is no doubt that they will expect a dramatically different kind of experience once they “retire,” than the generations before them. All those people joining social networks and writing and reading blogs will continue to expect access to pursuing the interests which shaped our identities and, perhaps the course of our lives,Ā well past where our grandparents could expect to get cut off. (Not to mention, access to pursuing new interests that previoulsy weren’t accommodated for “old folks.”)
Clay Shirky, In his 2005 TED Talk, pointed out that the #1 most popular interest group on meetup.comāa service that allows people to find others in their local area who share their same interests and affinities, and organize offline group “meetups”āis stay-at-home moms. When the site was first founded its creators had NO idea that this would become the most active group on the site, with the most members and the most chapters. But as Shirky explains, “In the suburbanized, dual-income United States, stay at home moms are actually missing the social infrastructure that comes from extended family and local, small-scale neighborhoods, so they they are reinventing it using these tools. Meetup is the platform, but the value here is in social infrastructure.” (After watching that TED Talk I actually helped my Dad find some science-y/tech-y meetups in Bostonāand if anyone knows of others, give me a shout, I’d love to pass the info on).
Whether it’s stay-at-home moms or seniors, no doubt the impact of these kinds of tools is just as meaningful to any group that has been lacking the social structure and access to stay connected to both their interests, and to other people who share them. As the social media generation matures perhaps the very concept of what our “golden years” are all about will be altered.
And on that note, meet Ivy, at 102, the oldest person on Facebook. From The Daily Mail:
Ivy Bean is a great-grandmother with a difference. At 102 years old she has joined the social networking revolution and become the oldest person on Facebook.
The former mill worker, who was born in Bradford in 1905, showed an interest in the website, after hearing care workers at her home talk about the phenomenon.
Although Mrs Bean currently only has nine Facebook friends, she said she ‘loves being online’ and is hoping for many more.
The world has changed radically during Ivy’s lifetime. When she was born Henry Campbell-Bannerman was Prime Minister of Britain – the first to ever officially hold the title.
At that time telegrams were the fastest way of communicating and a national telephone network was still seven years away. Ivy would have to wait 46 years until the first computer was invented.
Ivy retired at 73, a few years after her husband passed away, aged 75. She is living at Hillside Manor care home in Bradford which she moved to at the grand age of 101 after her last care home closed down.
Care home manager Pat Wright said: ‘We try to keep all our residents independent by letting them use the computer.’
Ivy, second from left, competed in the Bradford Over 75s’ Olympics.
