Category Archives: Uncategorized
The “Avatar” Blues: Not Buying It
The critics love it. The fannies are sitting in the movie seats. It cost half a billion dollars. So what’s wrong with me? (Don’t answer, please.) The day it opened, I purchased a ticket to “Avatar.” But I’m just not … Continue reading
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Zappos: Low Brow Genius
Here’s the longitude/latitude of PR now: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/29/business/media/29zappos.html?_r=1&ref=technology Zappos: Naked runner guy viral video marketing PR social media campaign. (1) Convergence of PR/marketing and social media. (2) Demotic (downward and out-there) cultural styling: (a) sexual (b) snarky (c) adolescent (d) slapstick … Continue reading
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Death and Life of Advertising III
In the first of my most recent three rants, I speculated that the free web, combined with the nonpaid freedom of public relations, may have sounded the death knell to that old hidden persuader, advertising. In the wake of social … Continue reading
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Digital Immigrant/Intolerance
I am not a digital native. I’ve come from the world of books. Charles Dickens. William Faulkner. You know what I mean. There it is: the “you”.Who are you? Almost 50 years ago, I began writing in a diary. I … Continue reading
Filed under interpersonal communication, Uncategorized, writing
From Crisis to Poetry
Lead piece in this week’s New York Review of Books — crisis in the financial markets. a review of a book called A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of ’08 and the Descent into Depression. Failure: the father of crisis. … Continue reading
Making It Up
It may not be truthiness, but when we write about ourselves we’re making it up. Put another way, we’re making more of something and less of something else. At least, that’s what I do. I don’t invent facts like the … Continue reading
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What’s Behind Public Diplomacy’s Uncritical Dismissal of Public Relations?
It’s hard to think of a more despised social institution than public relations. So it’s not at all surprising to see the explicit rejection of public relations by some prominent public diplomats. Joseph Duffey, the director of the USIA (United … Continue reading
Filed under Political Communication, Public Relations, Uncategorized
Top 40
As a digital immigrant (“What a country!”), the vast space of the blogosphere can also be sliced and diced into the Top 40, or Top 10. The fastest growing blogs run the gamut from cool cartoons and random rants (aided … Continue reading
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Welcome to the Light
Once upon a time in the Seventies, I wrote a long poem called Gathering the Light. Now, thanks to digital technology, I can use the title of that book as the name of a new blog. Back in the proverbial … Continue reading
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