The Lair

Or, things not to do with your organization’s incursion into social media.

• People find out that you’re not very interesting. Or even worse, people tend to make judgments based on the content appearing in your social media profile.

  Bonus points: hashtag spam on selected high value keywords. Dear god. Please stop. Now.

• Once you establish that beachhead into the brave new world of Twitter, followers/fans become public information.
  Social media is, or so I am told by the experts, all about the networks of connections. Mining the followers of your organizational incursion into social media gives everyone a list of kool aid drinkers that it is probably best to avoid online in most shapes and forms. Win-win all round.

Bonus points: watch a follower count pissing contest develop, as the marketing drones frantically try to astroturf support.

All in all, this is a perfect example of situational irony.

Update: It might also help if said social media site is accessible from within the corporate network. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case.

It’s frightfully hard to write a blog without feeling that it must do something: even the most humble blogger is encouraged to create a unique selling point, target a ‘laser-focussed niche’, embrace social media, spawn viral content, track stats, and have a dedicated marketing drive; they must teach and inspire, build ‘authority’, start a ‘conversation’, and foster a ‘community’; they should seek out a purpose, a gameplan, a revenue stream, and an exit strategy.

This socially enforced framework creates problems, not least of which in changing Web writing from an expressive, emotive celebration of free speech to an electronic stocking filler: tabloggers aren’t writing; they’re creating content — content that hopes to satisfy self-inflicted quotas, boost traffic, and burn another post on the digital altar to appease the blods. Tabloggers write from a sense of obligation; a feeling that their content must be regular and — worst of all — useful. And I’m not alone in thinking that it’s a shame:

Yet tablogs publish the ugliest kind of useful information: vacuous lists, tutorials, and recycled how-tos that try so hard to be handy as to become meaningless, soulless, voiceless and occasionally dangerous

The Rise of the TabLog

Ain’t it the truth?

A small anecdotal, possibly unscientific experiment to record the checkpoint experience, as it were.

Experimental environment: reasonably modern (unfortunately coloured) car, four occupants. One occupant (namely, moi) can speak the native lingo. Everyone can speak English, albeit some with a strong accent. For reference, a couple of the occupants look unmistakably expat/foreign.

Duration: 1.5 days (essentially, a couple of nights and a day) worth of driving around from one Colombo nightspot to another.

Number of times stopped: 31 (yes, I counted. That’s the whole point of this post, right?).
Breakdown: 8 army only, 2 navy only, 4 airforce only, 1 police only, the remainder: mixed (one policeman and army, usually). This is just based on visibility, there could have been other guys hiding in the shadows for all I could see.

Number of times I showed someone my (tattered and faded) identity card: 24 (I was waved on without so much as a check of papers 7 times, just a brief stop and a peer into the window was all it took).

Number of times anyone had to get out of the car: 0. I usually never get out of the car unless asked specifically to do so. I have no idea about checkpoint etiquette or requirements, but I’ve seen people nipping out of the car as soon as they’re stopped.

Number of times I had to show the whole nine yards (ID, license, insurance etc): 1. Surprisingly, this wasn’t the police only checkpoint, but one of the mixed checkpoints leading to Temple Trees. The experience and tone of the cop doing the checking of documents was nasty enough that it invited comment from the other occupants of the car. Maybe the dude was having a bad day. Maybe it was because he is a cop and not the military (who were unfailingly polite, each and every single time).

Other numbers: 192.6km on the odometer for the entire trip, approximately 18 hours (I should have recorded time spent in the car for a more accurate statistic, I suppose).

Completely unscientific averages: a stop approximately every 40 minutes on average, or every 6 kilometres.

More interestingly, the people travelling with me were never ever asked for their papers or anything. There were 2-3 instances where I was asked where they were from (to which i replied with their current country of residence, not their respective countries of origin). Other than that, not much more than a quick glance in their direction.

Not entirely sure if this post is going to be interpreted as a damning indictment of the security theatre that is checkpoints or not. The number of stoppages certainly seem high, given the duration (but balanced by the fact that we were usually skirting a high security area or actually in it). The lone incident with the nasty cop would have, unfortunately, been the only thing I even remembered, had I not been recording information to write this post.