Apple has been trying to address the ongoing Foxconn suicides with increased transparency. Articles are simultaneously appearing that attempt to explain the migration of manufacturing jobs as being rooted less in wages (and the accompanying “cheap” products that go with low cost labour) and more in government regulations that facilitate the industry.
I have an iPhone, among other Apple products. I’d pay more for the next one so that people don’t have to be woken up in the middle of the night, given a cup of tea, and sent to work on an assembly line. Or maybe Apple—who made $400,000 in profit per employee last year—could kick in a little.
@miguelcarrasco @darrenosadchuk How do we create demand for socially just production if we don't talk about about bad conditions?
It’s been damn cold on the prairies lately. Bloggers like Schmutzie & Alyson have written with dismay and defiance about it. #stayinside trended in Winnipeg.
Here’s my contribution to dealing with January—a photo series that’s been forming around smokestacks in the industrial parts of Winnipeg. When you wake up in the morning, you can tell how severe the cold is going to be by the way steam and smoke hang in the air. It’s terrible and beautiful.
Spotted in various locations outside the Walmart in St. Vital.
If you’re a gentle-hearted parent who spots the bear & thinks it’s lost—I know I get stressed about every sodden unclaimed mitten I see lying limp & alone in the snow—you feel pretty dumb when you read the sign.
If you’ve got a child with you & they discover it, you’re stuck explaining why you’re too mean to return a seemingly-wayward teddy to a calculating portrait studio for 10% off your family package or whatever.
All fired up by the SOPA drama yesterday, this piece of direct mail from ING Direct had my eyes saucerous with outrage. How could ING use the famous “Keep Calm & Carry On” slogan? Doesn’t somebody own that?
50 years later the Crown Copyright expired and the iconic (who knew?) poster passed into the public domain. It resurface in 2000 & has been widely t-shirtified since.
Just how did this iconic design bubble back into the stream of consciousness, & who’s profiting from it?
Well, here’s the story.
In 1997 Dr. Bex Lewis, taken with a youthful visit to a museum’s propaganda collection, wrote an authoritative dissertation on the poster. This research is oft-copied but rarely cited (boo).
Anyhoodle, around the same time San Francisco designer Victoria Smith put Keep Calm silkscreened posters on Etsy, which is where I naively thought they were born.
At first, thinking the design was a 6-year-old inside Etsy joke, I wasn’t sure who’d be the audience for this “played out” slogan.
Now with an understanding of the history, I appreciate what ING’s doing in terms of assuring investors that saving still makes sense, even at the low interest rates the bank is giving. It works because it makes you feel mildly foolish for doubting the banks. The message is “be resolute & continue sending in your money.”
In fact, the New York Times suggests the recessions of the late 2000′s were probably what made Keep Calm resonate.
The banking crisis brought a wave of orders from people working for American financial firms (and, more recently, advertising agencies). In fact, the travails of the global economy seem to have given the slogan fresh relevance to many. —Remixed Messages, New York Times
So ING’s message is one that financial planners worldwide embrace. It’s a chipper little piece of well-placed propaganda in a bleak financial winter.
January 18th (#J18) is a day of global blackouts for many websites in protest of SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act (& PIPA, the Protect Intellectual Property Act). Participating sites include Reddit & Wikipedia, and many people are avoiding social networks or taking down their own blogs in solidarity.
Social media folks are saying that Facebook’s news feed favours everything but brand page content, and even suggesting that brands bump up the prominence of staff’s personal profiles through subscribers.
Does it make sense that Facebook would deprecate page updates, when surely the bulk of these brands are, have been or potentially will be advertisers on the platform? The argument I could see for that is that people prefer updates from their friends over brands, but since when does Facebook favour usability over dollars?
If that’s the way things are gonna be, Facebook needs to throw page admins a fan engagement bone. One almost universal wish in the hearts of social media managers is the ability to tag fans in our status updates. We obsess over it.
Facebook did start allowing brands to tag people in comments when those users were already on the thread, but those people were notified of comments anyway. Small victory. Brands can also tag other brands (useful in the case of a nonprofit with corporate donors), but individuals would get a big charge out of being singled out, IMO, and benefit practically from potential new followers & rise in “influence”.
Facebook, show brand pages some love. Let us tag people. We promise not to abuse it & treat it like the privileged permission marketing it is!
@EricaGlasier @mikeduerksen *you* would, but think of all the assholes out there: Thanks for liking us-enter our contest, |Erica Glasier| !
The social web thrives on reciprocation & building other people’s social capital. Twitter bakes in the ability for brands to shine attention on their fans. Facebook, as a larger platform, needs to catch up. Fingers crossed this is in the works.
At a recent blogging roundtable—doesn’t that sound like we should be wearing gorgets & brandishing lances?—one of Kenton Larson‘s Cre Comm kids asked:
“Do you ever just want to take down your blog?”
Yes, sweet innocent. Like, every other day.
If you write a lot, you produce some mighty cringe-worthy stuff from time to time. You put opinions out there that people don’t agree with. You get caught with your fact-checking pants down. You typo. You get hysterical. You get googled.
But despite the blogging ups and downs that frankly had me almost in tears last night—my blog is so ugly/my focus is misplaced/if I start another blog, should I retire this one?/how do you even do that?—I’m astonished to find that I’m shortlisted in not one but t̶w̶o̶ [THREE!] categories in the Canadian Weblog Awards!
I somehow write one the 5 least-sucky blogs in Canada about Careers & Business, and it is one of the top 5 least-suckily written!
Thanks, CWAs, for this vote of confidence in a time of great blogular turmoil. I really needed your juried, text-based hug.
[EDIT: See? SEE?! I got the info wrong in a post about getting the info wrong! I'm also on the shortlist for 'Best Weblog about Science, Technology & the Internet'. Thanks, jurors. I will endeavour to blow your socks off in the next few weeks of judging.]
