The problem with art and news is not that they should be centrally planned

Taken together, Alain de Botton’s two latest books, Art as Therapy (with John Armstrong) and The News position the writer and philosopher as a consumer advocate, lobbying the monolithic institutions of art and—if “art” wasn’t broad enough for you—the news media on behalf of underserved customers who are not nearly as articulate as de Botton, a thinker whose writes with a fluidity that, for better or worse, makes common sense seem fresh and the ridiculous seem appealingly obvious.

Both projects are worthwhile enterprises. The visual arts, on which Art as Therapy dwells, have a marginal role in contemporary western society, despite the rich archive of beauty and longing, and the talent of current practitioners. A few minutes with a piece of visual art can evoke many new feelings and ideas, so you could argue that there’s bigger bang for the buck in it than our current obsession with TV shows, which require dozens of hours to absorb. The huge auction bids that go towards top artist brands (Is Gerhard Richter the Prada of the art world? Is Jeff Koons the Dolce and Gabbana?) are a testament not to the relevance of visual art, but its lack of centrality; collectability shifts the value from the meaning and emotional effect of a work to the market surges it creates, that is, to buzz.

And the news? As the highly formalized formats of TV news and newspaper stories are shoved aside by the cacophony of free online content (articles and charticles, rants and puff pieces, tome-like critiques that would never have been read if not for Facebook, video responses to video responses to non-official music videos chronicling news events), established profit-oriented media are desperately flailing for something that would make it stand out from a crowd composed of every literate and semi-literate person with access to a data plan. With news in such a deeply existential crisis, any advice is worth listening to.

For de Botton, the purposes of both visual art and the news are remarkably similar. In fact you could imagine the two books combined into a single volume: How media (plus nice buildings and furniture) can make a better, happier world through happier and more introspective people.

“Alongside its usual focus on catastrophe and evil, the news should perform the critical function of sometimes distilling and concentrating a little of the hope a nation requires to chart a course through its difficulties,” de Botton writes in The News. “While helping society by uncovering its misdeeds and being honest about its pains, the news should not neglect the equally important task of constructing an imaginary community that seems sufficiently good, forgiving and sane that one might want to contribute to it.” In Art as Therapy, de Botton and Armstrong propose that “art (a category that includes works of design, architecture and craft) is a therapeutic medium that can help guide, exhort and console its viewers, enabling them to become better versions of themselves.” Media can make us better. And can make us feel better.

I can’t disagree. A way forward is badly needed. De Botton’s intentions are worthy. Yet these two books seem simultaneously condescending and naïve. You admire de Botton for getting his ideas out there—the Art Gallery of Ontario is currently offering a show built according to his principles—and still shake your head about this unhelpful rabbit hole he has led us down.

In the case of art, the singularity of expectations set out in Art of Therapy ignores what most people find most delightful about the visual arts—surprise, open-endedness, transmutability. It’s a domain where effect in the heart and brain of the observer can separate itself entirely from artistic intent and critical interpretation; unlike in literature, you can ignore the voice telling you what it’s all about. But de Botton and Armstrong argue that discourse about art should focus on its effects on the human spirit and psyche, providing a balm—or perhaps a cure—for our anxieties about love, nature, family, work and politics.

The authors are right in attacking the dry art-history text that accompanies most art displayed in galleries—birth dates, historical events, formal artistic influences. No one can deny the art world is full of bad writing. But at least these curatorial insights are, for the most part, based on facts, even if they’re not particularly helpful in letting a piece of art work its way into our psyches. What de Botton and Armstrong suggest in lieu of dry, impersonal analysis of art is to insert an interpretive voice directly between the work and the viewer. They want to tell you exactly why they think a piece of art is good for you.

For example, the current description of Christ Appearing to His Mother in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York reads, in part: “This picture is the right panel of [Queen] Isabella’s triptych and can tentatively be attributed to her court artist Juan de Flandes on the basis of documentary and technical evidence. The center and left panels remain at Isabella’s burial site, the Capilla Real, Granada, where she bequeathed the triptych upon her death in 1504.”

Art as Therapy would substitute this historical tracking with something more like this: “This is an image of a loving mother-son relationship. But it does not avoid conflict or grief: these are precisely what the picture says are central to love. It is a very restrained image. They do not embrace. He will soon leave. How often has this scene been re-enacted. The picture makes the claim that such moments of return (and of survival), though fleeting and rare, are crucially important in life. It wants men to understand—and call—their mothers.”

That’s a fine approach for a newspaper column or a blog that is not official or definitive, text that does not claim to buttress the power of art in our lives. Critics can say what they want about art, no matter how wrongheaded or eccentric. But, as a comprehensive way of looking at art, de Botton and Armstrong’s approach makes not one but two wild assumptions. First, they assume what the artist’s intention was—did de Flandes explicitly try to paint that conflict and grief are central to love? Who knows?! I doubt he would have expressed it that way if he had expressed it at all. But worse, de Botton and Armstrong assume what’s going on—or what should go on—in the viewer’s own head. They have banished the viewer’s own imagination from the equation.

I have been a fan of de Botton for a couple of decades now. His early novels, especially, are brilliant at mapping the brain’s neuroses, the unique connections an individual’s experiences create. “Lucy lacked confidence in her intellectual capacities,” he writes in Kiss & Tell. “Afraid a conversation might grow beyond her comprehension, she had a habit of deflating matters to levels obviously below her. To discuss the politics of the Prime Minister would lead her to wonder how he combed his hair, consideration of a recent novel would elicit remarks on how the jacket cover matched the author’s eyes.” De Botton’s depictions of the idiosyncrasies of an individual’s emotional wiring is the opposite of universal. Lucy needs a counsellor for her problems, not a generic self-help guide. Yet in both Art as Therapy and The News, he plops his very specific expectations on us all.

There are times in Art as Therapy when I thought the authors were having me on, positing art as a propagandistic pharmaceutical: get the dosage right, take it with the right sort of criticism and you get a better life. I kept waiting for the joke to be unveiled: But of course art is not a drug! Of course our emotions are trickier than that! The punchline never came. They are dead serious.

The authors go so far as to commission an artwork according to an Art as Therapy-style brief: “Many couples have painful conflicts that break out over dinner. The spark often looks quite small, such as the way someone asked, ‘How was your day?’ which what feels like a sarcastic or sceptical intent….We would like an artwork to carry indications of an underlying but frustrated longing to be happy together. Perhaps the table is beautifully laid…. Can their suffering gain in dignity and be less catastrophic and lonely because of a work of art?”

Sounds like something Stalin might write if he cared more about matters of the heart than the grain harvest. But this is not satire, it’s sincere. As proof, there’s a photo by Jessica Todd Harper delivering on the brief’s dictates. Good for her, though you wonder if, while producing the piece, Harper wondered: Why don’t de Botton and Armstrong just go do this themselves? Besides, she didn’t quite get the RFP right: her table is not beautifully laid. Marshall McLuhan, who argued an artist’s power is discerning the environment we can not easily see—and seeing the future before others do—wouldn’t be impressed by this all-request-Friday approach to creativity.

The very appeal of visual art is that the space between the work and the observer is wide open. There are parameters, sure. But de Botton, more than anyone, should know how quirky human responses can be. Barnett Newman’s Voice of Fire is both a gateway to the indescribably sublime and a provider of ideas for a new paint colour for the living room walls. Henri Matisse’s Dance (II) may conjure hope for some, but, in a certain mindset, it can conjure futility and desperation. The effects differ not only from observer to observer, but from day to day in a given observer. History changes the meaning of a piece of art more than any piece of critical text accompanying it. “Art,” declare de Botton and Armstrong, “has a powerfully therapeutic effect. It can variously help to inspire, console, redeem, guide, comfort, expand and reawaken us.” So true. But having someone guess how it should do so hurts rather than helps the process. Some of the text accompanying the show at the Art Gallery of Ontario seemed literally random, as if the authors had concocted a compelling meditation—a bit of chicken soup for the soul—and then rapidly chosen a work that might fit. You could easily imagine the therapeutic advice applied to another painting—or another hundred paintings—if the one on display hadn’t been brought to their attention. The specificity of any given piece vanishes in a wash of generic self-help.

The assessments laid out in The News seem less ridiculous, in part because de Botton doesn’t adopt a newly patented one-of-a-kind, super-duper self-help strategy in order to fix the mainstream media’s many problems.

He picks apart the failures of foreign news, cultural news and financial news with great astuteness. Foreign news and financial news, especially, are often stripped of all humanity—body counts and share prices reported without any sense of who’s dying and what’s been manufactured. “The financial news organizations have journalists embedded in some of the world’s most remote economic outposts. There are correspondents monitoring the wheat harvest in Saskatchewan, Canada, the progress of oil exploration off the coast of Brazil, the extraction of niobium and zirconolite in Malawi, the development of the next generation of commuter trains in the Ruhr Valley, Germany, the weaving of carbon-fibre aerospace panels in Chubu, Central Japan—and yet in spite of their extraordinary and privileged vantage points, these journalists are required to maintain a pinpoint focus on only such information as will help investors to answer one lone question: ‘To which companies should we commit our money?’”

But in an effort to produce a critique that is technologically neutral—de Botton focuses strictly on content, not delivery systems—he seems to ignore the established media’s current upheaval (I say “established” rather than “mainstream” because The New York Times and alternative weeklies are equally affected). It’s as if he’s talking about a time (perhaps an imaginary time but one that stands as a sturdy stereotype) when a citizen primarily got his or her news from a single newspaper, some hourly reports on the radio and an evening TV newscast. Even then, it’s as if magazines, weeklies and other news sources don’t exist in de Botton’s world. Sure, the daily financial news focuses on the bottom line, but Bloomberg Businessweek, say, is full of kooky characters and compelling narratives on which we can draw inspiration. The Economist may also be obsessed with data, but its writers often give us a quick snapshot of the people and places in which these trends and supply chains exist. It is certainly piecemeal. An idealist might suggest that instead of hourly updates about, say, the kidnapping of school girls in Nigeria, a 4,000-word piece about the country, the terrorist group doing the kidnapping and the lives of women there would be much more engaging and enlightening. But the fact that such hourly updates exist do not preclude that long feature. There are many journalists who dedicate themselves to such work.

In the chapter on photography, de Botton demonstrates his failure to see the mechanics of how news is produced. As a cultural critic, he does a great job of pointing out that great images communicate reams of information about their subjects, while poor images merely break up the text on a page. But it’s not like news organizations don’t want great images. It’s about talent, resources, timing and access. News organizations could wait until they get a compelling image of President Barack Obama before they publish one—but that could be weeks or months. Meanwhile, the Twitterati and blogosphere continue to talk about him, citizens still wonder what he’s up to.

There are indeed publications that wait for the right photo, the right story, the right writer, that try to rise above the 24-hour news cycle. Again, magazines seem to be something that deliver just what de Botton is asking for, but seems never to have encountered one he could cite in this book (he does quote a particularly bad piece of writing from The Economist, which seemed a little unfair. How about this as a way to improve the media: write better!). He seems to call for news to have some sort of codified system—perhaps not unlike the education system—but he ignores that the marketplace has created a system. Visual cues, language, venue and reputation guide gossip-seekers toward Us magazine and TMZ, thoughtful types toward the New York Review of Books and local shoppers toward their weekly flyers. Online publications like Slate and Salon have been particularly adept at blurring the line between highbrow and low brow, thoughtful and sensational, topical and enduring. In the west, we don’t rely on a single or handful of news organizations to surprise us and tell us what we want to know. We navigate between trite and deep as we see fit. Could the offerings be better? Oh yes. But that’s often an economic problem, not one of a commitment to quality or lack of thoughtfulness on the part of editors and producers.

The thing about de Botton as a consumer advocate is that he seems to lack faith in consumers themselves to bring their own insight to what they read and see, to know their own needs when they seek out and consume media and art. Certainly there are some consumers that take in only the loudest voices. But they have been with us always. And they are sometimes the consumers who also want a refined experience. Centrally planned art and news worlds can’t anticipate who wants what when. There’s no one door in.

This piece originally appeared on Suite.io.

The Like-ification of journalism

Bert Archer has a point here as he decries the outrage over Rolling Stone magazine's Dzokhar Tsarnaev cover, which, in an earlier era, might have been lauded as audacious, not criticized as offensive.

But I think the problem is more specific than a general decline in media literacy. People's expectations of how a story should make them feel--of their range of possible reactions--has narrowed dramatically.

I blame Facebook and its Like button.

Social media is a great way to pass stories around--and a great way for publishers to build audience. But the main circulatory system is Facebook's Like. People tend to Like things they agree with, that they think are interesting, attractive or aspirational. But a well-written story about villain or social evil--or especially stories that are morally ambiguous, that leave the reader uncertain about who is right and who is wrong and how they feel about it--doesn't fit into the structure of Like. People don't know what to do with their reaction.

If a reader appreciates, say, the writing but not the subject of a profile, if they savour the way the issues are explored, but not the conclusions offered by the writer, if they admire the subject but not the tone in which the subject was covered, will their Facebook friends understand the nuance? Probably not. So they don't Like. The story stands outside acceptable conversation circles.

Smart web publications know this. A great social media story has a single clear idea that generates a purely positive (or sometimes purely negative) reaction: Isn't this great! Or, with the addition of a comment, Isn't this awful? (You can Like the petition link.)

There are times when I think context (say, do nearby residents have problems with the otherwise admirable project? Will the prototype super-project ever be manufactured or be affordable?) is deliberately suppressed by some online publishers in order to fast-track the stories into celebratory social media. Ambivalence is the enemy.

That's how a story gets read nowadays--it get Liked.

But publish a cover featuring a handsome, "ordinary looking" young man who is an alleged bomber--a cover which doesn't use graphics or text to guide judgement--is to ask readers to react in a way that Facebook does not allow.... Isn't this great! No. Isn't this awful! .... Maybe?

To use a home improvement metaphor: The Dzokhar Tsarnaev cover story was a Philips screw, not a nail. But Facebook gives users only a hammer.

Of course, they get frustrated.

In Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan wrote about how technologies not only extend our capacity, they also amputate part of us. Automobiles allow us to travel long distances effortlessly, at a cost of restricting our bodily movements during the trip. Social media allows us to massively increase our ability to get a message out into the world, but it is amputating our range of possible emotional reactions.

Amazing Race Canada: Are we by nature hammier than Americans or do our TV shows just make us look that way?

You could complain that a trip across Canada is not even close to a trip around the world—no culture shock, no money-changing confusion, no unfamiliar signage and, for the most part, no language barriers (we'll see what happens if the race goes to rural Quebec). It should be easy sailing for the teams on Amazing Race Canada.

But what struck me most about the show’s debut was how the transition from US to Canada revealed the format’s cracks and crevices. And not just in the slightly less dynamic camera work and the slightly slower editing.

Firstly, there’s the over-the-top product placement. Air Canada, Interac and Chevrolet commercials interrupted scenes where Air Canada, Chevrolet and Interac were the main drivers of the action--we got a better look at their debit cards than the Blue Bear. Who says Canadians are more reluctant to sell their souls than our American neighbours?

Then then was the contestant selection: A Canadian Forces sniper who lost both his legs below the knee, a dad with Parkinson’s, twin sisters, gay cowboys, actress/model sisters, former PSA stars—each team seems to have been chosen for a larger-than-life signature attribute, a marker that sets them aside from an average Canadian, perhaps in the hopes of making the teams memorable in the muddle of bland niceness that was exhibited in the debut. CTV takes Amazing Race’s approach to diversity and turns it up to 11.

If the handy labels don’t work in differentiating the teams, then excessive coaching might. Many of the teams seem louder and cockier than I bet they are in real life. The one thing about the US Amazing Race is that the teams tend to be amazingly unguarded—they bicker and sabotage like no one is watching. Perhaps it’s the way contestants are selected, perhaps the exotic locations are suitable disorienting, perhaps it's pure American guilelessness. The way the American contestants talk seems exactly the way they might talk to their friends and co-workers.

The Canadians, by contrast, seemed almost theatrical. The expressions on their faces when they were being told about the prizes seem to have been drawn from some high school musical they once starred in. One gay cowboy clutched his pearls. The "dudes" high-fived in a staged manner. Many of the teams are behaving as if they’re doing impressions of reality show contestants, not participating in a reality show themselves. Oh, Canadian self-awareness. Our blessing and our curse.

Who will win?

Obviously the dating BC hippies. Not because of their paddling skills or eco-awareness. But rather: “We wear the same clothes all the time,” says hippie Darren.

The hippies seem more concerned about winning than making a good impression. How un-Canadian of them.

Bright young thing

I have also been doing work lately for Yonge Street Media, a weekly online magazine that spotlights innovation and creativity in Toronto. Having focussed so much on theatre lately, I often feel like I'm applying arts-style coverage to business and community-building projects, which is kinda fun.

If you didn't believe...

Peter Mansbridge's casual wear choices could get worse.

CBC rebranding

You have to applaud the effort to go for a younger, more contemporary look, but there's something about the relaunch of CBC's news departments that feels like old wine in new bottles. On radio, Peter Armstrong makes a much more relaxed, casual anchor, but the stories are still policy-wonky with a dose of recent death tolls. If the Corps is going to try to skew young, it's got to have a broader and more vibrant news agenda.

The National's facelift is even less successful. All you have to do is click a few times here, a few times there--nobody said it would be easy to find, baby--and you can watch a 10-minute web-only broadcast of the flagship show. That's where anchor Peter Mansbridge, not content to just walk around a studio reading the news, as he now does on TV, takes off his jacket, revealing his paunchy tummy, and stands in a hallway reading the news. You can see the direction they're headed. If they don't skew as young as they'd like this time around, Peter will be reading the news in his pajamas--or worse--perhaps while taking a leak or between rounds of flossing. That'll lure the tweens.

About the new name for Newsworld, CBC News Network--this must have been decided solely on the basis of how it looked on the screen, not how it would roll off the tongue or abbreviate: CB...CNN. Or maybe they are that desperate and cheesy, like a donut shop calling itself Country Time to cash in on the confusion with Country Style/Coffee Time.

I realize the emphasis is on the brand "CBC News" but did they fail to notice that that phrase was contained in the old name?

Dressing for the ladies

I've been a reader of men's magazines (make that men's style magazines) for a long time. I was especially obsessed with the early 1990s incarnation of Esquire and then Details and more lately Men's Health, which shows you where my interest have gone as I have gotten older. Despite their differences, which show themselves mostly in their feature articles (art auctions or war? Mr. Mom or CIA conspiracies? toxic meat or George Clooney?), they all have the same kind of simultaneously snobby-chummy tone throughout their service sections.

The men's magazine snobby voice is the kind of know-it-all who would be insufferable if he wasn't so helpful. (I realize he's in a newspaper, not a magazine, but The Globe's Russell Smith is an current best-practices standard of this genre.) And then there's voice of the ordinary Joe who, like you, starts out knowing nothing about fragrances or high-end watches but through a process of discovery is, by the end of his 250-word blurb, able to make very specific recommendations for every reader. These two modes of conversation are quintessentially guy-magazine-y, and they're anchored in the two ways guys talk to other guys.

So when Men's Fashion (published by the equally generically titled women's fashion magazine Fashion, which is published by the slightly more specific Toronto Life) fell out of my Globe last week, I was intrigued. (Notice the ordinary-Joe lead-in to the topic at hand; perhaps I should have thrown in a "Gee whiz.") Here was a men's style magazine edited and written mostly by women, perhaps in their spare time while they were waiting for Fashion's proofs to come back from the printer. Of the four men shown on the contributor's page, two had worked on the magazine's sole photospread--shutterbug and stylist--one had written on grooming ("Men may prefer washing up just once a day..." starts the article but not on the page cited by the contributor's blurb) and one wrote a feature article on defective sperm.

The rest was pretty much written by women. As someone who believes that anybody can write about anything, the strange thing was--I could tell without looking at the bylines.

From the sexual connotations of the cover headline, "Playing Around With Justin Timberlake"--it would be hard to believe a straight man would have produced the same text--to the first-person lecture on sharing a bathroom--"Do men even want this space?"--there was something of a nagging wife/girlfriend throughout the magazine's pages. Even the cover line for the sperm article pointed an accusatory finger at the reader, "Actually It Is You." Hard to image a buddy, or even a know-it-all, speaking that way to a friend.

There were moments when long pent-up stereotypes about men seemed to have finally found a place to be joylessly unleashed: "For many men, shopping is a necessity rather than a hobby--something that needs to be done when old clothes no longer fit or look right." And moments when men were merely afterthoughts: "In the world of perfume, a great name is worth its weight in gold. So if women enjoy Pleasure and Joy, guys now have an outlet with Play and Play Intense."

It dawned on me that this wasn't a magazine for men but a magazine for women about men. They're the ones the editors are assuming are doing the clothes shopping, so the editors have merely cut out the middleman and gone straight to the decision maker. It makes sense. That's why the "That girl" pin-up is so modestly dressed; she's been styled threatless to the core readership.

But then there was advice about avoiding zits by showering regularly. And the spotlight on cars emphasized little other than power. Power, muscle, power. Wouldn't these female readers who are so eager to get their husbands to spend money on Ben Sherman coats and John Varvatos sweaters want to rip out these gasoline-fueled pages before their significant others saw them and were tempted to siphon of some of the disposable income slated for Harry Rosen?

That's when the light went on. There are no readers in mind for Men's Fashion. Only advertisers. Once the thing is sold by the sales team, it hardly makes a difference what fills the gap between the Audi ads and the Paco Rabanne, neither of which would be interested in buying into a catalogue that's just that, a catalogue.

Coasting through

The Toronto Star's continuing grudge match against cyclists raises some interesting questions.

Firstly, while their reporter was watching 138 cyclists fail to come to full stop at a Stop sign, how many accidents did they cause? Judging by the story, it seems they caused none. Secondly, while the experiment was being conducted, how many cyclists elsewhere in the city--say, along nearby College or Dundas--received an injury because a careless driver opened their car door into their path? That number is harder to guess at--the Star's experiment certainly required less effort--but I figure there were a few. A few weeks ago, I nearly missed being car-doored three times in the two-minute ride along Dundas between Dovercourt and Brock.

This obsession with the letter of the law rather than general traffic safety made me think of harm-reduction strategies when it comes to drug use. Sure, you could arrest every junkie in Vancouver's downtown Eastside for possession, but who does that help? The junkie's illegal behaviour creates a situation where she's the primary victim. As a society, we've parsed out a drug-use strategy that, while it could bear improvements, at least acknowledges that treating everybody by the same standard to the exact letter of the law does nothing to achieve the goals that the standards and laws were created to achieve.

Good traffic policy and good policing should be about results, not making jealous Star-reading motorists feel vindicated in their contempt for cyclists.

If I thought that encouraging all cyclists to come to a full stop at all Stop signs would reduce accidents and create a situation where drivers were not so careless about opening their doors without looking, I'd be on that bandwagon in a second. But it is not cause and effect. The most lawful cyclist in a city full of lawful cyclists still takes her life into her hands every time she passes a parked car.

Cities need to stop treating cyclists like thin, slow cars and come up with policies and infrastructure that reduce harm. By that I mean, saves lives and prevents accidents and more broadly, reduces gridlock, toxic emissions and the urban-heat-island effect. Because I think you could stand at the corner of Beverly and Baldwin for weeks, counting rolling-stop cyclists and never see an accident. So what's the point?

Never trust anyone who works for a phone company

As we all suspected--cell phone companies won't hesitate to play consumer ignorance to their own advantage.

Broke planet

When This American Life, broadcast on NPR in the U.S. but I listen to it via podcast, announced its series on the global financial crisis, I was a little skeptical. The show's quirky existentialism seemed better suited to stories about a guy who couldn't commit to buying a sofa or a mother who had lied to her daughter about being swapped with another child at birth. They shouldn't be doing... business stories.

Boy, was I wrong. Their coverage of what went bang on Wall Street has been fascinating and devastating. This week's edition (you can listen to online or download it free for a week, then it goes pay), The Watchmen, had me swearing aloud while I listened at the gym. What other show would call financial regulators all over the world looking for the one that was responsible for the AIG collapse?

Who speaks for Pride?

I was mildly distressed when I read this piece in the Jewish Tribune in which a lawyer equates the critique of Israel's treatment of Palestinians as "Anti-Israel" and "Anti-Semitic." But the fact that he describes Pride's traditional freedom-of-expression stance--a stance that should come as no surprise since it comes from a group that has been silenced for centuries and has been labelled obscene and offensive too many times to count--as having "very eerie parallels to Nazi Germany" struck me as so outlandish to be laughable. Who could take this complaint seriously?

Well, the National Post could, headlining its story "Toronto Pride organizers ban anti-Zionist group." The story freaked me out because it goes against so much of what Pride is all about.

I would be the first to say I don't like a Pride parade to be a series of political and commercial messages. Entrants should concentrate on being fabulous and celebrating their sexuality. But the overlap between sexual politics and all kinds of other politics is tremendous. Politicians, the most political and partisan species known to earth, clamour to be in the thing. Queer vegans shout their message. So do queer pagans. Some political causes may seem like a stretch, but I don't think anybody has any right to start drawing a line. Pride restricts groups that participate in hate speech and discriminatory behaviour, but that, traditionally, has to be clear on the face of it. If it's a matter of debate--and you'd have to be deluded to think that the relationship of Israel and the Palestinian people is not a valid debate--Pride should step back and let it happen.

(And, with Israel's boasting about its LGBT track record, it is inviting criticism from queers on other aspects of its domestic policy. There's no obligation for gay and lesbian people to shut up and play the part of window-dressing when there are other serious issues to address.)

No individual or group "speaks" for Pride in the parade or outside of it. There are occasions when I don't think Pride organizers themselves actually "speak" for Pride. Pride is a spirit or, if that's too flaky for you, a social movement that manifests itself in a formal organization, but it is not a formal organization itself. The organization creates a platform for "Pride" but it is the participants who mount it, creating the content upon that platform. There is no finely tuned message that comes out of it. Lawyerly niggling about liability and not-for-profit tax status misses the point. Take away the sponsorships and the street closure permits and there will still be Pride.

Pride organizers have struggled with this role. I remember in 2004 the Raelians being told to cover up signs that said nasty things about the Pope--"Official sponsor of AIDS... The homophobic religion that kills!"--but they were not kicked out of the parade. (B'nai Brith Canada take note.) Organizers have not always performed as valiantly as they could, for example, not kicking up a stink when police arrested a small group of men for going naked in the parade in 2002. But they have mostly stuck up for the anarchy of voices that are at the heart of Pride.

Anyway, I found the Post story a little troubling. This morning, I was interviewing Pride executive director Tracey Sandilands for a feature story about Pride for the Toronto Star. I couldn't resist asking her about the Post story. She did not claim the Post misquoted her--thank goodness or we'd be veering close to boy-who-cried-wolf territory--but said the story was wrong.

"We have never said we weren't allowing political viewpoints," Sandilands told me. She said the group Queers Against Israeli Apartheid has not been banned from this year's parade. Or at least, not yet because they have not yet applied to be in the parade. When and if they apply, it's the declared message and intent that would be evaluated for possible hate speech and discrimination that would see their application denied. Otherwise, they would be welcome.

"There so much pressure on us to take a side," Sandilands told me. "But it's not our mandate or our purpose. We don't intend to be bullied into taking a side....We are not going to take a stand on any rights or causes other than global queer rights."

If hate speech occurs in the parade without warning, Sandilands says it's up to the police to deal with it.

"We won't make that determination," she says.

I'm sure some people will find any participation of Queers Against Israeli Apartheid uncomfortable and provocative. But those two words should be considered synonymous with any bone fide Pride parade.

Search culture

I can't imagine who these people are who use Microsoft's Live search. I don't advocate for anybody's monopoly, not even Google's, but I've never gotten any satisfaction from Live. Is Google, or even Yahoo, blocked from their computers? Or do people really follow the cues of their Microsoft desktop and Microsoft browser with such cow-like deference?

The politics of cleaning the bathroom

I suspect that the care workers hired by Canada's most glamorous MP, Ruby Dhalla, and/or her family were underpaid for the hours of work they put in, which is of ethical and perhaps legal concern. People should get a fair hourly wage. But I have a problem with the class warfare spin on the story. Newspaper readers are supposed to be shocked by revelations that the two women hired to care for Dhalla's mother were expected to shovel snow and clean the bathroom. And they had to live in the basement! Can you imagine!

Well, lots of Canadians clean bathrooms for a living and lots live in basement apartments. This may not be their dream situation, but I don't think we should assume its a horrific freak show of a life either. I once had a part-time job as a residential care worker in a house occupied by two mentally challenged people. I got paid about $20 an hour. I did have to clean the bathroom and kitchen each shift and I will say that I would have needed a lot more than $20 an hour if those two activities made up the bulk of my work. But most of the time I just hung out, drank coffee, watched television and made sure small problems--meat past its expiry date, undone laundry--didn't turn into big ones. Averaging the unpleasant tasks with the pleasant tasks, I don't think $20 an hour was a bad wage. How do you take care of someone if you're not willing to do the the everday things that person is unable or, in the case of someone with behavioural problems, unwilling to do. Exploitation is about not properly compensating someone for their labour. It is not about expecting someone to do labour that middle-class newspaper readers find distasteful.

Bacterial coincidence?

I was doing my semi-annual viewing of the CTV National News last night and noticed something strange--and it wasn't that Lloyd Robertson looked disoriented and a little constipated.

The kicker item was about how probiotics might help people with depression and chronic fatigue. Those are good bacteria that are now being pressed into service in supplements and some kinds of yogurt and other packaged food. The story was totally oversold--researchers studied only people with chronic fatigue, so any claims about depression or "other mental disorders" were purely speculative. As well, they only studied 39 people, a pretty small sample. They also failed to do much of a job explaining why having good bacteria in your gut would have any effect on your brain chemistry. And, hey, speaking of your gut: in the commercial break between the teaser and the item was an ad for Danone Activia yogurt, the one where a--how to describe it?--floating projection of a slim bare midriff floats over the stomach of a woman eating yogurt. It's good for you because it's... probiotic.

An eerily well-timed ad. It was also strange that in the examples of products that contain probiotics, Danone wasn't seen or mentioned, although it's the industry leader in shilling the stuff. You would have had to make a special effort to take them out. Was it possible that Danone knew the story was running and asked to be placed just before it? And that the editorial team knew the ad was running and made sure the product wasn't in the story? It seems like a big coincidence.

The other interesting twist is that in January 2008, many media outlets including CTV ran a story about the launch of a class action lawsuit in the U.S. against Danone, that claims the company's health claims for Activia are unproven. Ad Week just reported this week that the company is in settlement talks about the suit. So while Danone tries to make a deal about its dubious health claims, out comes a piece of research demonstrating that probiotics do improve your health--but in your brain, not your gut. So now they'll be able to run ads with Einstein's head floating over your head as you're eating yogurt.

Either way, Lloyd Robertson could use some yogurt.

Panic in the Facebook corral

I always find it strange when Facebook users are referred to as customers (see here, here and here). Amidst all the bells and whistles of Web 2.0's interactiveness--not to be confused with collaboration--it's like people have forgotten one of the main rules of the media business. As Noam Chomsky reminded us years ago: the product of a newspaper company is not a newspaper, it's an audience which it then sells to advertisers. A newspaper generates its audience by providing a mix of news, features, analysis, comic strips and recipes that will bring in the largest number of readers. It takes that number, goes to advertisers and sells it.

The business of social media is exactly the same. Yes, Facebook and other social networking websites are more interactive, they are more flexible and they are more customizeable than newspapers. They have the appeareance of collaboration. But they're built on the old-media business model: user satisfaction only matters up to the point that people abandon ship. You just have to make them satisfied enough to keep your numbers up. And, since social networking systems know more about their users than newspapers know about their readers, it also becomes a question of the right kind of numbers--the right kind of people doing the right kind of things. To make a profit, the system needs to be tinkered with to achieve that balance; user enjoyment is a tool, not an end result that needs to be sought.

I like social networking sites; they let me communicate in a way that's fun and in a way I couldn't without them. But I don't and wouldn't pay for them. I accept they have limits and strategies that won't suit me--I accept it because they're free. At a certain point, their obligation to make a buck through partners and advertising might make their limits and other machinations untenable for me. Just as a newspaper might pull a favourite comicstrip, if Facebook were to invade my privacy a bit too much or take away too much control over my information flow or make the thing too ugly, I might give it up, cancel my subscription so to speak. Unlike a chicken in a factory farm--and the chicken does see some benefits in regular meal times--I can leave when I want.

The darkest hour

I hate to sound like an enviro-grinch, but I'm finding that the more well-known Earth Hour becomes, the more devoid of substance it becomes. I was brought up to turn off the lights, keep the door closed when the furnace was running and generally avoid needless electricity consumption. But the campaign does little to connect an hour of darkness with the desired outcomes. The campaign posters certainly dedicate more space to the sponsors than the intentions. It seems to have something to do with saving polar bears and Coca Cola--is it all polar bears or just the ones in the Coke commercials?

The World Wildlife Federation's website declares that the event "sends a very powerful message to government and world leaders that people want policies and regulations put in place that can achieve meaningful emission reduction to help fight climate change." How so? Does turning off the lights for an hour signal a desire for (considerably) electricity rates that reflect the real cost of power generation? A desire for rolling blackouts? Smart meters? For laws demanding more energy efficient appliances? For nuclear energy? For more wind mills? Who knows.

You can argue that any awareness of energy conservation is a good thing, but when you look at how many sponsorship dollars are being funnelled into this project, a feel-good hour of symbolism isn't a great return on investment. Organizers need to dump so more content into the event to help people connect the dots between one hour of conservation to a lifetime of eco-friendly consumption... make that sustainable consumption...er, make that less-destructive consumption. Any way you cut it, that's a lot of dots to connect.

Sign 'O the Times

I clicked a link to read a story on the National Post web page which did not load and rather than my usual first impulse--restart my tricky router--I had another, gloomier one: "I guess they finally pulled the plug."

Mexico's media bigwig

Having just returned from Mexico where everybody was talking about Carlos Slim Helu, I returned to the upper two-thirds of North America to find that everybody here is talking about him, too. Sanborns, his chain of restaurants/stores, with its selection of food, prescription drugs, magazines, books, eletronics and other gifty items, is an iconic Mexican institution, a weird mix I haven't seen attempted in any other country (the Western Canadian London Drugs, featuring shampoo and computers, comes a distant second). Mexican friends of mine travel in Mexico with a particular friend who refuses to eat anywhere else.

Favicon-con-con

I spend so much time on Google real estate, I find all the colours a little distracting.

Tweet-to-whoo

One of the strange things about communication technology as a field of consumer trends is how tightly woven together commerce and culture are. In, say, music and fashion, early adapters search and discover new trends when they're in the rough--an unsigned band or an unheard-of designer. If the early adapters were right, the band will get a record deal, the designer will set up a fashion house and eventually get copied by the likes of H&M. By that time the early adapters will have jumped ship, with counter cultural types rolling their eyes at the commercialization (watering down, corporatization, consolidation, suburbanization, cheapening) of the trend.

But with communication technology, the marketing and the trend are often the same thing--using Twitter to tell your friends about a product or to further your business interests comes as early in the trend as telling them about your hangover. Commercial applications and "style statements" are meant to go hand-in-hand. The early adapter is not counter cultural; they're just first in line at the cashier.