Nelson Mandela is rolling over in his grave.
too soon?
Cite the research please.
Those decades of research were probably laid down before the advent of pervasive internet access. People don’t have to rely on their meat brains any more - it’s much harder now for the event to fall into obscurity and just leave a rosy vague memory of a name. Also, with the rise of social media, bad publicity can snowball into permanent damage much more quickly than before.
This is the part I don’t understand. About this story and about people’s perception of Twitter, Facebook, message boards, and the internet in general. People post stuff that, if they were in a restaurant, they wouldn’t say loudly enough for strangers at the next table to hear. But there’s this illusion/delusion that when you’re alone with your phone, iPad, or computer, you’re actually alone. In the cyber world there is no alone and invisible. This is the part I don’t understand.
If you’re drunk, that’s different. But still stupid.
Or it’s that idea that anything that occurs to you must be sent out there ASAP with no time to think about the consequences. You were internally amused by your train of thought so of course – must report it out!
I don’t have the time, so count it as a victory if you like. I assure you it’s not an arguable point and hasn’t been - not 50 years ago, not 30, not 5 and not now. it is not limited to what you may perceive as “marketing research” - it’s a cornerstone of both behavioral and cognitive psych research related to memory and past-event interpretation.
The interwebz did not change basic human perception and retention. While it might be easier to look up some fuckup by “Johanna Gooberfutz” now from your smartphone, most people do not go through life deep-drilling every name and brand association. People retain the recognition and familiarity long after they’ve forgotten the details.
It was a stupid post. But, not deserving of what she got.
Hereis her at the South African airport. Imagine what she must have felt when she switched on her electronic devices.
I’ve never figured out how a small twitter account can go viral in a few hours. I’d guess she had maybe a couple dozen friends and family following her?
Somehow this just exploded.
I’d be surprised if bad publicity in general is good. The Economist reports that it’s good for obscure companies, not good for established ones. I, too, would like to see some current literature on it. Just looking at studies on the subject, it does, indeed, seem to be a debated point.
Yeah, i’m never sure exactly how to feel about these internet crucifixions.
On the one hand, many of the people caught by them seem to be self-absorbed assholes or morons, and hard to feel sorry for. The Facebook photo of this woman, in her hoodie and stupid glasses, makes me dislike her immediately, and the fact that she works in a profession that attracts a disproportionate percentage of phonies and jerkoffs and fakers doesn’t exactly help.
On the other hand, the vigilante blood-lust that seems to drive so many people in these incidents seems, at times, to be even worse than the offense to which they are reacting. I’m certainly glad i didn’t have Twitter or Facebook when i was younger and less thoughtful. I hate to think that my whole life, my reputation, and my ability to keep a job might hinge on whether or not some dumb thing i said as a throwaway comment was picked up and distributed worldwide.
I believe that was a mistake. There is a South African mining billionaire with the same last name and it appears that someone suggested he was her father.
The thing is that while her post was stupid… I myself have posted stupider things. As I am sure that we all have. My FB timeline posts sometimes makes me cringe when I review them years later.
WHat gets my symphaty is the fact that…this could have happened to me if the chips had fallen wrongly. She is not a celebrity. She is young woman in a fairly regular, if high end job. Unknown before Friday.
She also has had her life splashed on the Daily Mail.
I admit there was a bit of a Twitter lynch mob mentality here, but, as mentioned before, people should know better than this. Anything I post to even hidden, secret Facebook groups I run by my editing standard of “pretend this is on the front page of the New York Times with your name on it. Is this something you want associated with your name?”
I almost feel like this is something that should be taught in schools.
My sympathy diminishes when it’s a person in PR who should understand how these things work.
I am a lawyer. I think through every thing I write. I am quite good at it. And I still have managed to make some howlers.
Plus, I doubt it was the only or most offensive tweet that day. Many many people who should have known better, tweeted much worse things…and life went on. They did not step into some bizarro world.
Y’know… it’s not just the Public Relations vs. saying stupid stuff thing… it’s also that even as an alt.tasteless “joke” it’s like from the 1990s.
Some of us very jealously guard our “real” social media identities so only trusted people may access them, or even keep segregated “professional”, “home” and “alternative” identities if we can. But others are looser (or even are encouraged to “befriend” clients). Even being followed by just a few friends and colleagues is no assurance, if some of those few followers/friends will have their feeds, including our brainfarts, out in full visibility of *their *followers/friends/guests, including other third parties who do not care for us and will then run with the ball.
There’s also the “but I’m doing this in my own time, at my own expense” syndrome. Well, yes, you may be. But for all intents and purposes you’re doing it in your own time at your own expense, in the middle of Penn Station while still wearing your employee ID tag and t-shirt. Most people will walk past without noticing; a few will notice but feel they have somewhere to go so they can’t stop to react; and you risk this being the day someone will not just notice but decide he’s the one called to put you in your place.
Once upon a time, if [the generic] you acted like a fuckup you’d face a few weeks or months of uncomfortable family reunions and church breakfasts, and you’d be called into the boss’s office where your ass would be reamed in both directions but if you had a prior clean slate and did not cost him much money you’d be told that fat, drunk and stupid [or whatever your combination of conditions] is no way to go through life, to get help, that we’re taking your good accounts from you and if this ever happens again you’re history. But it would not be known much beyond those environments, and the gossips who would seek to spread the dirt on you to outsiders whose business it wasn’t would be looked down upon.
Now, however, it’s people *themselves *spreading out TMI to the whole 'net. And social media *empowers *compulsive gossips and RO addicts who will demand zero tolerance from any entity that ever associated with you (WAG hypothesis: maybe many of these are people who have *themselves *been burned, or warned they will be subject to ZT. So they must share the pain.)
If you were a lawyer and posted something of that level of offensiveness publicly, I’d be concerned, to say the least. I assume your howlers don’t manage to reach this level.
Oh don’t be so weak, South Africa isn’t a visit to Venice.
There’s more at risk than being pick pocketed or mugged.
She was just stating a simple fact, not saying its right or wrong the fact is a fact…
Seriously?
You know what - never mind.
DNFTT.
I’m not interested in ‘victory’ What on earth made you think that?
That’s nice, and a little more informative, but the problem is that I’ve seen the “any publicity is good publicity” thing a lot, but only ever presented as unsupported assertion. What would you have me do?
Who said there has to be a lot of thought behind it? And who said it wasn’t / couldn’t have been a joke.
I’ve always believed that for things this stupidly offensive*, we have the wrong end of the stick - perhaps within her circle of friends they’d just been discussing the prevalence of aids in the black South African community, perhaps one of her friends had made an ignorant statement, and she was poking fun at that person’s expense.
What I think is that if it is one bad joke / ignorant statement / racist howler out of a whole ream of meaningless, or otherwise quite reasonable statements why hang her out to dry.
I know there have been one liners that I’ve thrown out there in sarcasm, a fit of annoyance or whatever that could be taken as pure nastiness should they be taken out of context
*absent a pattern of similar behaviour
I see how it is offensive I guess, well kinda. No, I see how it is stupid, really stupid, racist and stupid with a twist of moronic, but it was just funny to me. It just didn’t make any sense; white so you are going to use a condom, white so you will not have sex with a black guy, white so you think there is a secred medication, white so you don’t get raped…