Our Message Development Category
Since its adoption as part of the Rio Declaration in 1998, and its repeated use by the European Commission in various fields, the Precautionary Principle has quickly become lodged in the language of business and consumerism as one of those phrases that everybody pretends to understand but probably cannot precisely define.
The most common definition of the Precautionary Principle is as follows: “Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation”.
There is a principle in German environmental legislation known as the “Vorsorgeprinzip” (principle of prevention), which is applied to situations where there is a known cause-effect relationship and therefore a clearly defined risk. This is not the same thing. The Precautionary principle does not, as is sometimes implied, mean that industry must provide evidence that a product or process is “risk-free” for it to be accepted or licenced. Such a situation would mean an end to any innovation at all, and the European Commission is well aware of this. But it does suggest that reasonable doubt could be enough to justify the application of the approach. By the same token it should also follow that reasonable evidence should be enough to avoid it, though this happens far less often.
There is a continuing risk that the precautionary principle is becoming a victim of its own rather meticulous application. In this sense a considerable extension of the precautionary principle is happening simply because of instances in which the public demonstrates non-scientific concern about a controversial product.
In supporting the Precautionary Principle, we must be aware that the device should always be, as the European Commission proposes, proportionate, coherent, temporary, non-discriminatory and should always be based on as scientific a risk assessment as possible.
It is a fact of life that there will always be some scientists prepared to suggest that practically anything could constitute a risk to people, consumers or society as a whole. It is not a fact of life that regulators, politicians or other public officials have to believe them.
The Precautionary Principle is a good one and is of considerable benefit to society and consumers. The industry and those who regulate in good faith must continue to co-operate to ensure that the principle remains relevant and appropriate and that it is not used as an excuse for restriction or prohibition. There is certainly no shortage of official and authoritative channels for these options.
“What’s more dangerous, pesticides or horse manure?” The answer may surprise. Researchers await the first human death from pesticide residues, fifty years after DDT was introduced and thirty years after its use was banned in the United States, but horse manure is claiming lives daily through the bacterial contamination of organic food.
We take our health for granted and it is natural that we do. We do not examine the whys and wherefores of living longer, on average, than our grandparents and their grandparents, but with a current life expectation of between 75 and 80 for the average European, no less than 30 years have been added to this average total during the course of the 20th century. It’s a miracle of science, so they say.
If it is, then science has been regularly and consistently performing miracles on our behalf for several generations. Some might say even here that it has been playing God. What right have scientists to indulge in research that will result in people living longer using ‘artificial’ drugs and medicines? Modern pharmaceuticals, as well as processed food, have been stretching our life expectancy despite the fact that we did not directly ask for it.
What did people do before pasteurisation? What did people do before fluoride was added to water?, before the widespread use of food additives, pesticides, herbicides and insecticides? What did people do before penicillin, iodine, chlorine?
Well, to be completely and brutally accurate, they died, often wracked by a very painful disease such as TB, rickets, smallpox, polio or some other disease now extremely rare in the developed world. It’s an uncomfortable but telling fact, informing us that science has indeed made major strides on our behalf in this century and that virtually all of these have benefited humanity and especially human health, in one way or another.
There has been a reaction to many of these advances. Organic farming, in particular, is just such a reaction in the most precise sense. Before the introduction of pesticides and other synthetic additions to the crops, all farming was organic, in the sense that organic matter was used for crop protection and fertilizer.
There has been controversy about the degree of toxicity in organic crops. Organic farmers have been forced onto the defensive and have stated that organic produce is no more toxic that conventional produce. This may often be the case but I doubt it as a general rule. Many will be surprised to hear that organic farming can be toxic at all but therein lies one of the confusions that beset this debate and that makes new agricultural technology so easy to criticise. I have no objection to organic farming at all. But I would not insist upon feeding it to my children. Here is why.
Essentially, organic food is more dangerous than conventionally grown produce because organic farmers use animal manure as the major source of fertilizer for their food crops. Animal manure is the biggest reservoir of the bacteria that are making so many people ill.
In truth, until the last few years the threat of food-borne bacteria was relatively mild in the U.S. It was prudent to refrigerate one’s food and to wash one’s hands before preparing food or eating, and those simple procedures kept food-borne illnesses to a minimum. On occasion, neglect of these rules would cause a family to suffer severe stomach aches. And every year a few weak individuals — the very young, the very old, or those who were already quite ill — would die from exposure to food-borne bacteria.
As these lethal new bacteria spread, organic foods have become a more risky food choice.
Organic and “natural” food consumers also face an increased risk of illness from toxins produced by fungi — and some of these toxins are carcinogenic. Refusing to use artificial pesticides, organic farmers allow their crop fields to suffer more damage from insects and rodents, which creates openings through which fungi can enter the fruits and seeds. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regularly tests samples of various foods for such dangers, and it routinely finds high levels of these natural toxins in organically grown produce. It found, for instance, that organic crops have higher rates of infestation by aflatoxin, one of the most virulent carcinogens know to man.
The organic-food sector stresses the natural production of foods and beverages — even to the point of refusing to pasteurize milk and fruit juices. As a result, many people become seriously ill after consuming products they mistakenly believe are purer than other foods. For instance, in 1996 E. coli 0157 sickened more than seventy people who contracted it from unpasteurized apple juice produced by the Odwalla Juice Company. One young girl in Colorado died because of this. Odwalla was fined more than $1 million in the case and now pasteurizes its juice. But more than 1,500 other companies still cater to the “natural means raw” idea by selling unpasteurized beverages that can prove deadly.
Even without pesticides and pasteurization, producers could render their organic and natural foods safe through irradiation. Irradiation uses low levels of gamma radiation to kill bacteria, and the process also preserves the freshness of foods such as strawberries and chicken. But when the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) recently proposed an organic-food standard that would have allowed irradiation, the plan drew more than 200,000 angry protests from organic farmers and caterers.
According to recent data compiled by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control CDC), people who eat organic and “natural” foods are eight times as likely as the rest of the population to be attacked by a deadly new strain of E. coli bacteria (0157: H7). This new E. coli is attacking tens of thousands of people per year, all over the world. It is causing permanent liver and kidney damage in many of its victims.
“Natural food” proponents claim that organic farming is “earth-friendly,” but it’s not. The ugly secret of organic farming is that its yields are only about half as high as those of mainstream farmers. Approximately one-third of the average organic farm is not planted to marketable crops at all; it is planted to green manure crops (such as clover) to build up the nitrogen fertility of the soil depleted by the previous crop. If the organic farmers gave up animal manure as a nitrogen source, the percentage of land they keep in green manure crops would have to become even higher. Mainstream farmers take their nitrogen from the air, through an industrial process that requires no land to be taken from nature. Also, the organic farmers suffer higher losses from destruction by pests. They expect it. Books on organic farming tell their readers to live with it.
For all these reasons, widespread organic farming is simply not a viable option at this time, unless you can afford it. The first consequence of a global shift to organic farming would be the plowdown of at least six-million square miles of wildlife habitat to make up for the lower yields of organic production. That is more than the total land area of the United States.
Agriculture already takes up 36 percent of the world’s land surface. (All the world’s cities cover only 1.5 percent.) A world with a peak population of 8.5 billion affluent people in 2050 will need at least 2.5 times as much farm output as we have today.
In fact, the worldwide trend is in the opposite direction. Countries such as China, India, and South Korea are leading the biggest surge in demand for meat and milk the world has ever seen. It is now probably too late to save wildlands by preventing people from acquiring a taste for meat and milk, and there is certainly no sign of mass conversions to vegetarianism around the globe. It is becoming uncomfortably likely that disasters will have to happen before the world wakes up to the realisation that organic farming takes us further away, not closer, to sustainability and feeding the world’s hungry millions.
If the world does not triple the yields on the high-quality land currently in farming, we will pay the price not in human famine but in forests and wild meadows cleared to produce more meat, milk, and produce.
Giving up pesticides would mean the certain destruction of millions of square miles of wildlands, much of it in the species-rich tropics. Because much of the world’s biodiversity is in those lands, a move toward widespread organic farming would cost nature far more than the careful use of today’s safe, narrowly targeted pesticides, high-powered seeds, and factory-produced fertilizers.
To most of us agriculture is a deeply conservative sector, inspiring notions of constancy rather than progress, of stability and assurance in a shifting and uncertain world. That ploughman seems to have been plodding home wearily for generations before and since the image was so magnificently evoked by Thomas Gray.
For urban and sub-urban dwellers, agriculture can also present a confusing impression: of muck and machinery counterbalanced by laboratories, white coats and test tubes.
This dissonant impression makes the sector seem complicated. In turn, it produces misunderstandings in the media as with the general public. The impression needs to be challenged. We could start with the erroneous prevailing assumption that our food is generally of lower quality now than fifty years ago because much of it is grown with the help of synthetic chemicals.
The astonishing fact about agriculture in the developed world over the last few decades is the unprecedented increase that has taken place in both quality and quantity, increases that would have been impossible had we rejected the chance of using all currently available agricultural technologies.
With an area of farmland more or less unchanged, production per acre has trebled in most areas in the past couple of generations with the remarkable result globally that despite a doubling of the world’s population, the same acreage of land feeds double the amount of people. In 1950 the world’s 611 million hectares of cropland produced 692 million tons of grain. By 2000, the world planted 700 million hectares of cropland producing over 2,000 million tons of grain. In other words, in just 50 years, three times less land is required to produce 100 tonnes of wheat. Without crop protection, the production of the six most important crops in the world (rice, wheat, barley, corn, soya and potatoes) would be more than halved. (Enquete OMS)
The quality of fresh and processed foods has risen substantially in the same time. Dairy products more generally have benefited from various improvements including, in particular, pasteurisation, and diseases such as tuberculosis, caused by impurities in milk, or rickets, caused by vitamin deficiency, have now virtually disappeared from this country.
Staples such as corn, wheat, rice and barley are all stronger, healthier and more wholesome by several multiples than a few decades ago. Improvements in plant science have revolutionized the nutritional content and freshness of foods as well.
On top of all this the average price of fresh food has actually declined considerably in real terms in the past three generations, due to the lower prices paid for agricultural produce. These achievements are essentially due to hard work as well as to all that muck and machinery.
In addition to this, farmers are considered not only as food producers but also – just as importantly – as stewards and guardians of the land. Farmers’ knowledge and experience help to sustain the land and keep it fertile, using a mixture of experience generated and inputs bought in. This is the best guarantee of sustainable agriculture: unrestrained access to whichever inputs are the most appropriate for the continued assurance of quality and sustainability.
These changes and many others have amounted to a revolution, not just a change of scenery, possibly more spectacular in scope and significance than the first agricultural revolution in the eighteenth century.
In short, everything has changed about agriculture in two or three generations. In all these upheavals, farmers have quietly taken on the changes and continued to be as prodigious and as focussed as ever in the production of good quality food.
They need more support and better choices if they are to continue to be prodigious in the future.
The phrase “creating edge” made its debut in biz-speak at least around 40 years ago (although there is no certain origin). It had a longer history in real language and dialogue, as cliches must: the phrase first arose in theater criticism to describe acting that was so impressive it was ‘on the edge of reality’. How ironic that such overused words quietly wait so long before biting your legs.
It has now expired in polite society, barrack rooms, music notices, boat decks and theater reviews, and is treated largely as a ironic joke phrase in popular intercourse but it is still going strongly if blindly in that parallel universe of biz-speak, thanks probably to its multiple meanings, its promise of clarity and its actual delivery of doubt and ambiguity.
Someone who is creating edge should be proposing ideas, projects and programs that are imaginative and exciting and which rock the institutional, social or corporate boat. The description is intended to be a positive description and in biz-speak comes with an unspoken addition that such boat-rocking should not be in a capsizing way. As such, it is often explicitly included in large companies’ Mission Statements, Visions, Values, Dreams, Guidelines, Overall Objectives, Pathways, Roadmaps, Manifestos, Corporate Challenges, Global Challenges, Constellations and Star-maps. I am sure I saw it in my tea-leaves the other day.
A person in a company who truly creates edge is, however, often and literally on it, and can find himself or herself on the wrong side of it, even when having, perhaps to much applause, created it.
When senior managers and their acolytes use the phrase they generally offer an example, normally from safely outside the company, of creative expression that can seem to get doves fluttering in their dovecots, the cat prancing among the pigeons, and various worms crawling out of half-opened cans. Not to mention the unthinkable: Pandora thinking outside her box.
A little instability is A Good Thing, the rolling stone will not gather moss unless it moves, and the comfort zone can lull you into inactivity. People who create edge are good for destabilizing those who are too comfortable, and for helping the idea along that companies are at their best when they remain in perpetual structural change.
Hmm… It is significant that none of this actually stands up to any proper scientific test, nor any academic assessment or review. This is a theory without an author, a movement without a prophet, a manifesto without manifest, a morality without commandments, a business case without any supporting evidence or even operating instructions.
No-one has ever proved that constant corporate structural upheaval is good for companies, people or society. But permanent upheaval definitely needs consultants and agencies to fill the research void by talking and repeating themselves about creating edge and getting uprooted from comfort zones.
However, the reality is that those creative people creating edge cannot be allowed just to create the edges that keep the workers and doers worried and over-working but squarely in their place. Unfortunately their habit also causes concerns and worries to the senior management. This is the creation of true edge. And this of course is unacceptable.
Perpetual structural change must of course exclude the senior management, who obviously need to be settled to do their job properly. Let’s face it, senior management never wanted to encourage people to worry them. It has quite enough to worry about already.
So creating edge in this direction cannot be allowed to happen. Most tough-talking CEOs can be heard saying that they hate surprises. This, more than any other phrase, is responsible for corporate intellectual sclerosis and constitutes copper-bottomed proof that creating that sort of edge is just not allowed.
So those truly involved in the creation of edges are deliberately and pointedly excluded from seniority by most companies, because thinking on the edge means knowing where the edge is, which means having a view of the outside perspective, which in turn means that you cannot be trusted.
In practice, contrary thinking is required to achieve geniune creativity. This becomes self-evident when we realize that thinking the way your leaders and bosses think results most often in mimicry, in the parroting and repetition of meaningless phrases, a clever skill and a sincere form of the much respected practice of flattery, but still requiring an absolute minimum of creative thought, as well as providing the spark that unfailingly gives birth to prejudice.
No, if someone senior tells you that you are creating edge, check your contract and employment conditions immediately, run a quick internal test on their “creative ambiguity” rating, review your messages and join Linked-In; you are about to be performance-assessed out of your job because you are a menace to many.
What is Public Relations? The PRSA’s recent proposal for a new definition of public relations seems simple and straightforward: “Public relations is a strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their publics.”
The definition from 1982 was more succinct: “Public relations helps an organization and its publics adapt mutually to each other.” The 1952 definition was: “Public relations is a management function that seeks to identify, build, and maintain mutually beneficial relationships between an organization and all of the publics on whom its success or failure depends.”
Conscious that many fine minds have come together to prepare and debate this definition, which is proposed as the start of a debate rather than the conclusion, I still find it extraordinary that these definitions are so close together across a total period of 60 years. But never mind 1952, in communications terms even 1982 is a several planets away from 2012..
The literal difference is in the use of the two new words ‘strategic’ and ‘process’. It is already significant that neither word is free of careless use within and around the profession.
‘Strategic’ signifies that PR is not just a press clippings and media coverage notification service for an organization but a valuable advisory function that contributes ideas, intelligence and direction to communications planning.
No organization can achieve its goals without developing good and effective relationships with those groups with which it needs to interact (its publics), hence PR must be considered as strategic advice. As such it is the cousin of public affairs practice. However, it is not good or realistic PR to insist that all such activities must be part of a strategy. This is because reactive, unplanned and spontaneous PR occupies much more of our time as practitioners and even more in-house than we all admit.
The other word ‘process’ is also a reasonable addition. Connected to its advisory function, PR can be seen as a continuous series of related events, incorporating the creation and planning of activities that are inter-related and thematically aligned. But here again, beware of denying the often crucial roles of reaction, intuition and spontaneity in PR. These words are always unwelcome to process enthusiasts (but the elephants always stay for tea).
Some have expressed their fear in excellent discussions on these boards that the definition will become irrelevant in a few years since ‘strategic’ has unfortunately become a cliche and is steadily changing its meaning through overuse.
The phrase “mutually beneficial relationships” is where the heart of the ensuing debate has been located. And here lies the reason why the definition may soon need to be changed in a way that better reflects the astonishing changes now taking place in the media and communications.
Firstly, the conventional financial and market model of PR agencies, especially of the biggest ones, is no longer working properly. The myth of ‘mutully beneficial” has helped to sustain a legend that PR created its own function of career hoppers and marketing intellectuals. With the impending loss of a dependent media the word beneficial will probably be the first to go.
Changes are necessary to reflect what the more progressive PR practitioners have known for some time. The cleverer and more imaginative clients are demanding more focused and better quality work, and a realistic recognition of the new tools and platforms becoming available. Newer PR agencies that get this point are operating from a different and more effective business model.
The term PR itself is being made less relevant by the new media, in which the consumer-producer relation is changing: push is being replaced by pull, and consumers are revising company brands.
The place in which reputation and profile are primarily assessed and judged is no longer the business pages of the newspapers or the fashion pages of women’s journals, but the millions of opportunities for access and contact being provided by social media networks at all times of the day and in most parts of the world.
Networks incorporating news, views, comment, music, photos and videos are gradually but certainly becoming the main currency of modern public relations activity. And most important of all, they are being taken, not offered, just as brands are being mixed together with shapes, forms, profiles and impressions by the customer to create a public relations environment in which customers perform the mediation that is crucial to communications impact, sometimes without even knowing it.
Anyway, here is my suggestion. “Public Relations is advice that gives access, context and meaning to media, generating value from the resulting relationships and communications between companies and their stakeholders.”
In the USA and in Britain, as well as France, Spain and several other countries (except China) there are popular campaigns to try to get government to use ordinary or plain langauge, but this is a hopeless and misguided cause. Why? Because it’s the wrong target. Government is not where the problem starts.
Meaningless and convoluted English starts in the corporate world, with its mutually inconsistent need to appear creative and innovative at the same time as seeking ever higher impact for stories and descriptions that are listless, if not completely lifeless within their natural environment.
So it is that cliches are reheated (for they cannot be born) in corporate publications, web sites, texts and narratives, CEO speeches, reports, internal communications, training programs, with their granularity and their edge creation. Company communications, regrettably, have moved, in grammatical and literary terms, from defenders of the faith to purveyors of complete bullshit in less than two generations.
Words acquire and maintain their meaning through public consensus, not because companies decide what they mean, like Humpty Dumpty, that “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less”.
The whole point of language is that, like many other things, it must be free of artificial constraint in order to live and to closely express what people want to convey. Like a waterfall it must find its own way through using only the linguistic equivalent of gravity to help it, namely the need for comprehension.
The reason why English has become the modern lingua franca is precisely because it is allowed to find its own way, in some cases, to split into different derived langauges. It is free to live and multiply and certainly forces no words into meanings that are not popularly accepted by their users.
Received corporate-speak English, with its half-understood words, deliberate confusions, rigged culture, convenient ambiguities and general multilingual meaninglessness, should be knocked off the wall, broken into pieces and never put together again.
April 13th, 2012
Regressing in agriculture and technology: the new conservatives
For some people, agriculture has always had an uneasy relationship with technology. Not with farmers, but with the general public and politicians, especially those who live in urban and suburban areas.
Most farmers have had no trouble over many years understanding and trying new technologies, but all too often they have been prevented from applying them, surprisingly, by some of the most conservative force of public opinion.
Generations ago, many opposed and regretted the replacement of horses with mechanized tractors, and before then, the replacement of “night soil” with chemical and artificial fertilizers. Today’s anti-technologists are probably even more conservative than in the past, since a selectivity has developed in the modern conservative taste.
There is one policy when shouting at regulators, politicians and scientific companies; there is another when pushing a cart or trolley around in the supermarket. At once deploring Monsanto, Bayer and agribusiness in general they will take care to buy themselves the cleanest and best looking vegetables in expensive supermarkets.
Some anti-technologists, of course, do not suffer from any hypocrisy on this score. They prefer fallen fruit and will pick out the most mis-shapen vegetables and the dirtiest greens from organic markets. They put the conserve into conservatism. Good luck to them.
Understanding and employing new technology has always proved crucial not only for some farmers to continue to meet growing food, feed and fuel demands but also for other less fortunate farmers to move from subsistency to profitability and this is no less true now that the world population is accelerating upwards.
But modern conservative anti-technologist opinion cannot bring itself to relate to the economic development arguments for the application of technologies in agriculture (the only safe path out of poverty). The anti-technologist claims that you have to sort out the unfairness of modern global food distribution flows before the short term and, in their view, the lesser problem of people starving right now in empty marketplaces.
If there is any genuine concern about current and future hunger in the world, then we must allow modern science and technology to help with food production, whether this be to breed improved varieties of food plants with higher and better yields, or to generate new and more cost-effective production methods, or develop yet more effective fertilizers and pesticides.
Genetic modification can be used to achieve disease resistance or herbicide tolerance or other traits in the future that may be of even more direct benefit to people. But biotechnology is not the only issue in the overall debate about technology in agriculture. It is one technology among many, but it attracts much of the opprobrium.
In many respects the most crucial debate in agricultural technology really concerns the threats to ban products that currently work well in assisting food production, not those that face innumerable obstacles to getting approved for sale and use for the first time.
For the conservative anti-technology activist it is all the same, but many developed countries, especially in Europe, having helped to ensure that GMOs will never be approved, have now turned their attention to an even more conservative task, that of rolling back the years and banning technologies that had already been approved, licensed and successfully used, sometimes for several generations, and which are still vital to farmers in countries with low levels of food security. How sustainable is that?
These are not just conservatives, these are the policies of reactionaries, hypocrites and bigots. The agricultural and rural communities know this, but lots of clever people don’t.
April 6th, 2012
Comparing reputations for the MOOT Award 2012: George Osborne, Mitt Romney, DSK
Calling politicians out of touch is a very old, even antiquated catcall. Politicians have been guilty of being out of touch from the beginning of politics and there is really nothing new in the criticism. It is always likely to hit the spot in any context and more or less any environment.
But there is more than a touch of irony in the recent international resurgence of this particular criticism. Politicians are being called out of touch everywhere and anywhere. But here’s one for the hardcore political heckler. Who is most out of touch: George Osborne, Mitt Romney, or Dominique Strauss Kahn?
These three gentlemen are the finalists in the Clement Reputation MOOT Award for 2012. MOOT stands for Most Out Of Touch. Please note that I have had no say in the choosing of the finalists. They are here because of a statistical result delivered by Clement Reputation’s brand new reputationometer, set up to count unfavorable reputation-based observations over the past few weeks. But before opening the envelope, let’s have a quick look at how each politician made it here.
George Osborne is being called out of touch because of his imposition of value added tax on hot take-away food bought from food retail establishments (rather than take-away establishments). The idea looks a bit old-fashioned in a class-conscious sense because hot take-away food means pies and pasties, mushy peas and, I presumed, fish and chips. Cold take-away food includes sushi, prawn sandwiches and avocado dip. Need I say more? Well yes, I should, because the way this debate went actually enforced the mistaken impression that this was the Chancellor’s own idea peremptorily picked out of his snooty upper-class satchel, whereas, to be fair, it was an attempt to close the 30 year old loophole that had been generating a 20 percent tax burden on food from hot takeaway food shops for example fish and chips, as at present, but had withheld it on food shops that sold hot food, such as Gregg’s, which is not officially a take-away food shop. Are you following so far?
Few understood this distinction at the time or even now but everyone loved the opening question by a Labour MP to Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Select Committee meeting at the height of the political crisis that developed from the Budget. The question was “when was the last time you bought a (hot) pasty?” George replied that he could not remember. The Labour MP then said, wrongly, that this was exactly the problem. The media ruckus ended with the Chancellor looking foolish and apparently out of touch, whereas the truth was, in many respects, quite the reverse.
Let us move to Seamus the Dog. Er, I mean, to Mitt Romney, a prospective candidate for the Republican nomination for the US Presidential elections later this year. Mitt Romney cannot shake off a series of unflattering stories told about him, all of which in one way or another seem to point to his aloofness. His huge wealth is clearly making it difficult for him to get through this particular needle-eye. However, the best story (and it was ever thus) is one he told himself, that three decades ago when he was the governor of Massachusetts he once put his dog in a cage strapped to the roof of his car (a station wagon) presumably because of a lack of space in the car.
This story continues to dog the unfortunate candidate because Romney, a multimillionaire, has struggled to make clear to people that he understands and feels for the common man. While the dog incident has nothing to do with his wealth, it is taken as symbolic of the idea that he seems to live on a different planet, unconcerned about the impressions of others, including dogs.
(Note to Americans: In England this man would have had to resign and probably commit suicide within minutes of telling this story.)
And now the man many Frenchmen have taken to their heart, a sure sign being the ascription of an acronym to identify him: DSK.
Last year, while trailing his coat for the Socialist candidacy for the French Presidency election, he texted the following cheery message to his friend (my translation into English) “Do you want (can you?) come over to a magnificent hot totty club in Madrid with me (plus some action) on 4 July?”
It has since transpired that DSK did not think that the naked women wandering around at the parties (which he may have had a hand in organizing) could possibly have been prostitutes. The girls have said that the party featured scenes of violence and bestiality. DSK also says that his rights have been manifestly violated by his arrest on suspicion of being the party planner (or “pimp”).
Whatever the merits of the legal case against DSK, and the details of the case are already startling, the political and ethical case is even more challenging. Here is a man who saw nothing wrong with what he was doing, and the significance of this is not the careless amorality but the extraordinary assumption that he would not be condemned by the French public or by his peers, or apparently by his wife, if he was discovered, an attitude he also demonstrated after his unseemly exit from a Washington hotel room earlier last year.
“On reflection,” DSK said recently, “I think I have been naive.” Hey, DSK, that’s not even close..
All is not lost, however, his outrage at his treatment by ordinary people has been mollified by a rapturous welcome to the international speech circuit in Kiev, delivering a lecture organised by Ukrainian billionaire businessman Viktor Pinchuk.
In the circumstances the Clement Reputation MOOT (Most Out Of Touch) award is given to.. DSK!
The Anonymous hacking group claims to have defaced almost 500 websites in China. Targets hit in the mass defacement action included government sites, its official agencies, trade groups and many others.
A message available on the hacked sites said the attack was carried out to protest against the Chinese government’s strict control of its citizens. Wow, that must piss them off, big time.
It urged Chinese people to join Anonymous and stage their own protests against the regime/ Let’s hope that they do. The announcement awas made via an Anonymous China account that was established in March.
Sites defaced had the same message posted to them that scolded the nation’s government for its repressive policies.
It read: “Dear Chinese government, you are not infallible, today websites are hacked, tomorrow it will be your vile regime that will fall.”
China has one of the most comprehensive web control and surveillance systems in the world, known as the Great Firewall of China. It reinforces its political social controls and tries to restrict what Chinese people can talk about when they go online.
The Anonymous attackers have posted links to help people avoid official scrutiny of what they do and say online.
There has been no official confirmation of the action. News wires have reported that government officials have denied any action had taken place. No surprise there.
However, many of the sites listed are now offline and a few others displayed a hacked page for a long time rather than their own homepage.
Well done the Anon. On the evidence so far, you are better friends to ordinary people than any Government.
March 31st, 2012
From Intercourse to Onan: how the email has ruined communications
How often do you send someone an email asking a question or making an inquiry when you might better have phoned them and had a conclusive conversation?
I once sat opposite someone at work who would regularly invite me to lunch with him that same day. By email. We were bleedin’ well opposite each other. But after a while I felt I was also too busy to talk so I too started replying by email.
But we seem to be starting to lose, not only the art of conversation, but the art of communications overall.
For all the world’s obsession with emails, one point is salient and striking (albeit a whopping generalization). Within the last 20 years people in the industrialized and developed countries have changed their principal mode of collective communication from audio telephony to email and text. From communal to solitary.
From two way to one way. From discussion to declamation. Video conferencing hasn’t caught on yet but tapping out text while walking along the pavement has.
And a steady stream of people are regularly dying as they tap out their texts while walking across roads, into walls, off cliffs, or while driving.
And yet the telephone is interactive – you can say ‘hello, what’s up?’, and you can hear the other person respond ‘hi!, I’ve got a bad headache, what are you doing?’ etc. And you dont have to wait for the answer to the question ‘Hey, shall we go for lunch later?’
The email/text can only ever be an unmoderated statement, encouraging people to get used to waiting for an answer when they ask, something they are not particularly used to in live conversation.
Of course they don’t have to wait nearly as long as they would have to if they had sent a letter through the post, but my basis for comparison is not the post but the telephone or live speech.
This extraordinary development from phone to email is an unprecedented technological example of people opting against a more advanced, more immediate and more available communication exchange to a primitive transmission; from an interactive form of intercourse to one way, onanistic comment into the void.
Aristotle would have rejoiced at this stunning confirmation of his transmission-reception dichotomy. It is as if our stone age ancestors took a look at two way radio and collectively decided to stick with ululation in order to communicate.
The advantages of email in the business context are many times more, but few of them reflect well on actual business use. And yet it’s obvious just why the email has caught on and stayed.
Email appeals to and encourages our worst instincts. It allows rest to the wicked and cover to the shy. It turns a conversation into a code, and it turns leadership into disembodied commands, suiting the tens of thousands of appalling bosses who prosper through opting not to communicate properly or clearly in business environments. Email is Pontius Pilate, it comes supplied with a bar of soap and hand towels.
Email is also perfect for the business vice of ambiguity. Are you one of those who do not reply at all if you find the response difficult or too sensitive to make? Do you pray that you do not meet them as this will expose you to that old fashioned face to face where, yes, you really do have to reply to a straight question? It’s the first and surest evidence of cowardice. Nothing enrages people more than the knowledge that someone has got the email that was sent to them and that needs an answer but has decided not to answer it at all.
This cowardice represents the purest expression of ambiguity because there is always that flickering possibility that the intended recipients have not read the email or that it has been ‘lost’ in the ether. Letters really did get lost in the post in the past but we continue to lie to each other about emails that somehow apparently never made it despite being properly addressed and sent.
Rather than reduce ambiguity by appearing to facilitate the yes/no conundrum, email actually increases ambiguity, as even if you do respond you can get away with lazy, gnomic and target-missing answers that would be picked up and corrected immediately by any interlocutor in a live conversation.
Email allows us to send an email saying we are too busy, and fail to understand the irony. Email has brought the practice of interactive meetings to a standstill, as all around the meeting table the small sounds of barely audible clicks and sidelong glances show that no-one is actually participating in the meeting. They are all there but barren in original thought; only their blackberries are fruitful.
Email makes cliches look reasonable and validates the worst excesses of business-speak, making it the favorite communication method of internal communications programs. But above all, it allows secrecy, pretense and pseudo-confidentiality to flourish and copiously rewards those who are engaged in these for a living.
For personal communications, the crimes are more innocent. It means you don’t have to move from your seat in order to conduct a conversation, stilted as it may become.
Because for many people it is less challenging to write on your own than to talk in company, email has the huge benefit of not betraying your feelings, so the recipient has to guess them without being able to look deep into your eyes.
No, despite its many obvious advantages, email has overall been an disaster for communications. It has turned us from social communicants to corner-loving losers with keyboards and RSI.
Let’s hope it is just a passing phase, otherwise companies and individuals will soon stop communicating meaningfully with each other altogether.
