Category: Culture

In a previous post, I wrote:

AKMA has been writing about St. Patrick’s Church in Long Beach, Mississippi, ministered by a friend of his, Rev. David Knight. The church is gone, but the associated school is running as a clinic. If, in addition to your giving to national charities such as Red Cross, you want to make a targeted donation, sounds like the folks in the area could use a little help: manual or monetary.

(AKMA — are there facilities for people to stay in that region, for those wanting to go down and help the Reverend and other folks? Who should we contact? )

Rev. Knight left a comment I wanted to pull out and put into a post:

Hey. I am the David Knight you speak of. I can answer your question. Anyone can contact the Episcopal Diocese of Mississippi, www.dioms.org, and they will schedule in all volunteers. It is important to go that route so we can coordinate numbers. THey can give details on housing / feeding, although some degree of self-suffieciency is important. THANK YOU SO MUCH.

If you have a block of time and a means to head south, check with the Diocese to see where you can help with cleanup and repair.

I also wanted to point out that Habitat for Humanity, an organization that helps those who normally couldn’t afford it to buy their own home, has come up with an audacious plan to help rebuild homes lost to flooding, wind, or storm surge.

The plan is called Operation Home Delivery. How it will work is that Habitat associates will be recovered, and then incorporated into the second phase. This consists of Habitat units in other cities to build components of homes, which are then packaged up and sent to the south. The southern units, including new volunteers, will then use these modules to quickly build a home — in a week or less. The third phase will be homes built on the spot.

There’s been much discussion about what will happen with New Orleans in particular. I think that we can assume not all neighborhoods will be restored. Some will most likely be deemed too dangerous to recover, and probably should not have been built on in the first place. Hopefully these will be converted into parks for all the citizens to enjoy.

Other neighborhoods will be restored, particularly those less damaged, or of historic interest. Don’t knock historic interest: this is a key element to the city, and to lose the history is to lose much of the soul of New Orleans.

However, there will be entire neighborhoods that won’t be worth restoring, but will be OKed for rebuilding that can be rebuilt using the Habitat for Humanity three phase approach. The advantage to this is that it encourages diversity–because a New Orleans of nothing but wealthy people, is not New Orleans.

Tomorrow is the fourth anniversary of the Twin Tower destruction. Of 9/11. It’s memory is marred by the anger and incriminations that reflect our political debate. In particular, we bicker and squabble over memorials: this one is not grand enough, that one too grand, and the one over there looks Islamic.

A better memorial is to save the money from the memorials and put it into building neighborhoods in the south. Name each street, park, community center after the victims. Embed their memories in life, rather than cold granite, and ostentatious glass towers.

I don’t necessarily disagree as strongly as Dave Rogers does about the concept of markets are conversations. I do think his points are good, especially the most recent one about a salesperson using a situation to turn a supposed customer service interaction into a sales opportunity:

I have a fair amount of heartburn with a situation like this, because I think it’s fundamentally dishonest on its face. This sales person makes a call on a customer who has made a decision not to deal with the sales person’s company. The pretext is that the sales person wishes to understand how the customer arrived at his or her (negative) decision, with the intent that they will be able to use that information to improve their sales force. It seems to me that since about half of such calls are converted to sales, that’s a false pretext and one that is used, mainly, to reopen the “conversation.”
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Think about it, the sales person wants something from someone else, essentially “for free,” and at the same time is making an effort to sell them something. Sounds like a pretty asymmetric “conversation,” if you ask me.

I don’t particularly care if marketers want to have ‘conversations’ or not with their clients. If everyone benefits, more power to them. But I do want to know that when I’m talking to a person, whether directly or through writing, they view the discussion as a discussion, not as a marketing opportunity.

In the last year I’ve come to feel I can’t continue reading several of what used to be favorite sites because I no longer trust that what they’re writing isn’t related to some ‘business opportunity’. It’s not that the webloggers are writing about business per se; nothing wrong with that. I have a few friends who have businesses related in some way to weblogging, and I wish them nothing but success. It’s when I feel that the words are measured, calculated, even goal oriented and the goal is to get me to ‘buy’ into something. It seems that much of the writing lately is staged to lead to some “Aha!” moment, when the weblogger rolls out this new invention, or that new company, or new partnership. Like Dave’s customer, the only value I then add to the discussion is if I’m buying or not.

Some would say that writing to persuade is selling; when we write about politics or feminism or a certain kind of technology, we’re doing so as ‘marketers’. But there is a difference between writing about something you’re passionate about, solely because you are passionate about it, and doing so to create a ‘market’.

I have become distrustful and disillusioned–made more so by jumping on the bait, joining the discussion, and then ultimately finding out that what I took to be an open exchange, isn’t. Oh, I realize that not every discussion is capable of sustaining all threads at equal weight–that’s just noise. But any true conversation should be open to disagreement as much as agreement; new voices, as well as old. Most importantly, true conversation isn’t steered in calculated steps, to a pre-planned outcome. This latter is where markets are NOT conversations, because marketing is about selling no matter how you package it.

It’s difficult to refrain from responding when someone writes something interesting. Lately, I have come to care less about doing so, primarily because I think to myself, “What’s the use? The end result of the interaction will be the same regardless of my input.” It goes back to Dave’s salesman, and the only two possible outcomes from his interaction with the client: a new sale or not. I am disappointed, because I have really come to enjoy cross-weblog and cross-comment discussions.

There is nothing wrong with marketing. I happen to respect it as a field, and am impressed when I see excellent uses and campaigns. I see nothing wrong with being an evangelist for a company or product, or to write a weblog for a company. But I don’t want to innocently join in with others, only to find out I’m at the equivalent of an online Tupperware party; being thrown the verbal equivalent of a container full of water; being laughed at when I grab at it.

I’ve come closer to quitting this weblog for good this last month then I ever have in the past. Every day, I find myself pulling away from it–the marketing, the lists, the cliques, the games, the personal hurts when I’ve assumed a greater degree of friendship with those online then really exists–bumping nose against the reality. Even now, the only thing that’s kept me here, in this environment, are the people I know, know deep in my soul, write for the joy, the comradery, and a delight in the very act. Even if what they write about is marketing.

I am still feeling very tired today, so I imagine this comes across as maudlin, and I as a blogging equivalent to a luddite. Maybe today is a good day to just code.