Social Kapital Joel Postman

I probably shouldn’t be sharing the secret of these cool t-shirts. A couple of weeks ago I went to see Was Not Was, and the keyboard player had a shirt on that said Dummy bomb falls from jet, lands on truck. I did a little research and found that CNN creates t-shirts with interesting headlines, and the network continues to retire headlines and add new ones. Today’s headline sounded like something out of the Weekly World News: Obama sees likeness in hieroglyphic.

Dummy bomb was no longer available, so I got Luggage cart sucked into jet’s engine.

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Earlier this month I was at Macworld, and I spotted the following quote from Martin Luther King, Jr. on a plaque at a fountain in San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center:

“We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

Dr. King spoke these words on April 4, 1967, in a speech titled “Beyond Vietnam,” delivered to the Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam, at Riverside Church, New York City. Ironic to read this 31 years later, within a few hundred feet of Moscone Center and Macworld, high temple of technology fetish.

I thought Dr. King’s words offered some good advice to those of us in social media, reminding us of the most powerful uses of this technology, and to not forget the social aspect, which is, of course, people.

It’s the end of the line for Bratz dolls with a major courtroom victory by Mattel this week. According to an AP report “Toy giant Mattel Inc., after a four-year legal dispute with MGA Entertainment Inc., touted its win in the case Wednesday after a federal judge banned MGA from making and selling its pouty-lipped and hugely popular Bratz dolls.”

This is the best gift of the season! I despise Bratz dolls. They are emblematic of everything we do to trivialize our girls (don’t recoil at the word, they are girls at this age) and to pimp them out by the time they are seven. I am sick of slutwear, the hip hugger jeans, trashy sequined clothes, belly shirts and other items sold to pre-teen girls in the major chain stores. Retailers are truly shameless.

And Bratz are the worst. They are inconic of the message we send to girls at the earliest possible opportunity: Popularity, appearance, clothes, makeup and money are all that matter. What is inside, the real you, is unimportant.

Marketers know these toys are inappropriate for the girls they are manufactured for and sold to. According to the New Yorker “Marketers now invoke a phenomenon called K.G.O.Y.-Kids Getting Older Younger. (One research report) discusses the challenge of marketing a product like Bratz dolls which many mothers disapprove of.”

Honestly, Barbie is almost as bad. Both products are banned from my house. I want my daughter to grow up being proud of who she is, not what she has.

I hate buzz words and cliches passionately, but one of the worst is “drinking the Kool-Ade.” This week marks the 30th anniversary of the event that spawned that idiotic expression, the Jonestown Massacre, in which as many as 900 followers of the cult leader Jim Jones died after being forced to consume Kool-Ade laced with poison.

The events were tragic enough. Let’s not commemorate them with a joke.

Udpate: Tim Reiterman, a journalist who flew to Jonestown, Guyana at the time, and saw Congressman Leo Ryan and several journalists shot dead by Jones’s gunmen, recently said during an interview on NPR that the Kool-Ade cliche was “thoughtless” and “disrespectful.”

The recent news that brand stalwart Procter and Gamble and ultra hipster Google have collaborated in a convergence of “old meets new” made me laugh. OK, sure, Google is known for, as the WSJ points out, company-provided scooters in the hallways and for giving engineers lots of room to create great things, like the recently shut down Lively.

But the problem with applied hipness is that once it becomes part of company culture, it ain’t hip anymore, no matter what company adopts it. As Bill Lumbergh said, “Next Friday… is Hawaiian shirt day. So, you know, if you want to, go ahead and wear a Hawaiian shirt and jeans.”

Google is a publicly held company with the same pressures and same behaviors as any other. Watch the movie The Corporation. The premise is that the publicly held company, if it were a person, would be a clinically diagnosed psychopath. Google has not been without its share of psychopathic behavior. (China?)

God love Google. They’ve introduced some killer technology that has changed the way people live and work. Credit due. But let’s not idolize them too much.

Once popular and beloved, “the death of” meme, known for driving site traffic and links, was laid to rest this afternoon in a pauper’s grave at My Lady of Perpetual Annoyance Memorial Park. Star of such classics as Die! Press release! Die! Die! Die!,  The Death of the Press Release (in wide syndication), and, more recently, the critical hit/box office flop, Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004, “the death of” meme had a long and useful life, though, some say, it held on far too long, one of the inevitable byproducts of our ability to prolong living without consideration for the quality of life.

According to a piece in today’s Sporting News, “Buck Burnette is your latest example of how not to use Facebook. The backup center for the Texas Longhorns is no longer on the team due to ‘unspecified violations of team rules,’ according to Texas. The real story of how he managed to Facebook his way off the team, however, may be far more specific and interesting than that bland statement. Sometime after the election results were announced, Burnette posted something very, very nasty under his ‘status’ line on Facebook that allegedly involved a racial slur in reference to Obama.”

No wonder MSNBC kept referring to “the Confederacy” on election night. Apparently there are those who think it still exists.

For too long, the so-called A-List has been dominated by bloggers who nominated themselves for inclusion by getting into the game early and subsequently promoting themselves at every opportunity. But people aren’t buying it anymore. They’ve come to realize they can’t form their worldview by confining themselves to the opinions of the same 10 people who have been dominating social media and web 2.0 for three years.

It doesn’t wash to say, “People are voting for the A-list. Look at the number of subscribers, site visits, followers, etc. they have.” It’s a momentum play, and numerically, the A-List may dominate for some time to come but people who want a diverse, more useful, and more informed point-of-view are learning to look outside the handful of P.T. Barnums controlling access to the main tent.

The latest evidence of the rebellion is Sarah Evans’s Unofficial 2008 Top 50 Tweeples to Follow list. I have not written about this list before, because I’m on it, and I didn’t want to appear self serving. There’s also a bit of the Groucho effect (who wants to belong to a club that would have me as a member?).

A friend sent me a link yesterday to Robert Scoble’s 10 Favorite Tech Experts on FriendFeed. The subject line of her email was “congrats,” which caused me to do a double take. Of course I wasn’t on Robert’s Top 10, but it turns out Josh Carrico posted the entire Sarah Evans list as a comment on Robert’s. I’m not sure whether he meant it as a gesture of defiance (I hope so) or just a pointer to some useful information.

I remember when the Evans survey was the topic of conversation on Twitter and Guy Kawasaki responded that the survey was probably “flawed,” which is a riot, since Evans was clear from day one that hers was an informal survey conducted for entertainment purposes as a social networking experiment. By definition, it cannot be “flawed,” because it makes no claims against which it can be deficient.

It’s encouraging that people are beginning to realize, and publicly admit, that there are some very interesting and influential people out there who don’t have half a million Feedburner subscribers. The concept of a handful of people controlling the discussion is a little ironic in the era of democratized communications.

The November 3 Wired features a piece titled Five Useless Gadgets You Should Throw in the Trash Right Now.

Predticably, the piece slams our old friend the fax machine: “Still sending faxes? Hi grandad! The fax was useful when it was the only way to move documents around faster than mailing them. Now it’s pointless.”

I’ll say it’s pointless! And the next time a client/customer says, “fax me a proposal and I’ll get you a P.O.,” just respond, “Screw you, grandpa! Get with the modern age!”