Archive for category Culture

Astroturfing Online

Dec 1

One of the untold stories about the online world is how many comments on Web sites are not what they seem. No one can say how many exactly, but a large percentage of comments on news sites and blogs are not genuinely spontaneous outpourings; they are in fact what are called “astroturfing” – the artificial creation of popular support.

This little blog amazingly got caught in one of those astroturfing efforts last July. As we did for many of the cities we visited, we posted a few photos and general impressions of the places. We posted our impressions of Flint, Michigan after spending several hours driving around the city.

The next business day we noticed that visits to our blog tripled, with most of those hits coming from this URL: http://cbeachmail.com/t/w/DJELBYQ/. That URL is a copy of an e-mail sent out by the PR Manager of the Flint Area Convention and Visitors Bureau calling on his business associates to make comments on our blog demanding we show “the complete picture” of Flint. The director made our blog entry the Number One item on his report (apparently we were the most pressing issue in Flint that week). The speed with which the PR Manager send out a call to action–he found our blog entry almost as soon as the search engines indexed it–means he is actively searching the Web for any mention of Flint.

The PR Manager did not contact us and attempt to find out who we were or what we were about. He published his e-mail calling for expressions of outrage before he posted his comment on our blog entry. What he and the other three people who commented (not a big outpouring of support, no) said were versions of “don’t look at that look at this and forget that first thing you saw” with the implication that we shouldn’t be sharing our own experiences of Flint. The whole thing had a calculated and cynical edge to it. Especially when you consider that the effort was directed at an amateurish, silly, blog that almost no one reads.

When the U.S. Census Bureau announced three months later that Flint has one of the highest poverty rates in the United States, we posted a second blog entry mentioning that fact. I wondered if the PR Manager would react the same way. Almost immediately we started receiving hits from another e-mail sent out by the PR Manager. This time he attacked us as “a blogger who previously unfairly criticized Flint … who obviously has it out for Flint.”

Most revealing was the PR Manager’s comment in the second e-mail claiming that he had asked us to “why not also post a couple photos of Blackstone’s or the Wade Trim building.” First, he did not (though we did permit someone else to post links to photos of other places in Flint, so we did in fact do what he wanted). Second, even if he had, does he really think that us showing photos of one restaurant and one building would somehow negate the fact that Flint has a poverty rate of nearly 10% and dilapidated neighborhoods?

I am reminded of how the Corporate Media will define “balance” as, for example, presenting one person who believes in climate change and one who doesn’t even though the climate change deniers are an extremely small minority of scientists. The media thus presents a false notion that scientists are divided on the issue.The Corporate Media is, no doubt, being pressured by corporate interests to be so “balanced.”

If the Flint, MI Area Convention and Visitors Bureau is monitoring Web sites and pressuring them to revise their content to suit Flint’s preferred narrative about themselves, how much more are large corporations that have so many more resources engaging in pressuring Web sites to manufacture and influence public opinion?

Now when you think about how a worthless, meaningless blog like this can be astroturfed by corporate forces, just think of how much more major Web sites are being swamped with phony outrage. Next time you see a bunch of comments on news or social networking sites that seem to indicate “average people” are defending monied corporate interests, be a little suspicious.

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Vindication on Flint

Oct 21

Posted by Douglas in Culture

In my previous post about Flint, Michigan we documented some of the blighted communities we saw there. An employee of the city of Flint then sent out an e-mail to a Flint business owners e-mail list asking them to post comments on my blog entry to “set the record straight” about Flint. We received several comments, the general tone was that we were wrong and unfair to say that Flint was impoverished.

Well, a recent ABC News article on America’s Ten Poorest Cities includes Flint. I don’t want to single out the city for criticism but when the U.S. Census Bureau says a city has one of the highest poverty rates in the nation–approaching 10%–that’s a problem worth pointing out.

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Multiple Californias

Aug 13

Posted by Douglas in Culture, Nature, Travel

It was not our intention to spend 13 days in California but it happened. We had more friends and relatives offering us places to stay than we counted on or could do.

Our experiences of California are as varied as the state is itself. It is hard to really comprehend how vast and disparate California is. It is about 740 miles south to north; that’s about as far as New York City is from Atlanta or London is from Milan or Madrid; and 200 or more miles wide; more than the distance of New York City to Washington D.C. Given its size, California is really multiple states–something most Californians would readily affirm. We drove from just north of the Mexican border up into Oregon after we entered the state via Las Vegas. We saw multiple Californias. Here is my brief take on them.

1. The Desert – The southeast corner of the state is a desolate wasteland where nothing can live but scrub and a few people. Why anyone would want to live there is beyond me. Temperatures reach 120 Fahrenheit and rain is a distant myth. The Mojave Desert and Death Valley are out here–two of the most inhospitable places on Earth.

2. Sand Diego County – When people think “southern California” they think L.A. but the San Diego area has its own identity. Slightly less crowded than L.A. and much more relaxed, San Diego is one part surfer dude and one part U.S. Navy, but survives that seeming contradiction. Just north of San Diego are the best beaches along the Pacific Coast and lovely little seaside towns. Almost immediately from the coast there are high mountains that quickly give way to the desert to the east.

3. Los Angeles – Sprawling, smoggy, and under constant threat of wildfires and earthquakes, everyone in the world knows L.A. A country unto itself, this is the land of Hollywood, valley girls, Disneyland, slums, and suburban hell. The only thing wider than its freeways is the disparity between the ultra-rich and the very poor. Compton and Beverly Hills are only 15 miles apart but might as well be different planets. Los Angeles, like most of California, was Spanish for centuries before English-speaking Americans came; a fact lost on the “English-only” white xenophobes that live here.

4. The Central Valley – Chances are you ate something today that grew here. This vast agricultural region stretching from Bakersfield to Redding is warm year-round –it’s how you can get lettuce in January. Though it has a few medium-size cities it is mostly farms and usually very large factory farms. It almost gets as hot as the desert here but has irrigation mostly through diverting much of the water from multiple rivers like the Colorado, Sacramento, and others, often with serious environmental effects.

5. The Bay Area – Right-wingers love to hate this place, but the talk of “San Francisco morality” is exaggerated. Sure, there is more tolerance for homosexuals and alternative lifestyles in general, but this is not the hippie mecca it is made out to be. Like L.A. it is expensive, crowded, difficult to navigate, and about to be destroyed by an earthquake. The fakey-glamor of L.A. is not here, though the yuppiedom of wine country is, and the wreckage of the dot-com bubble are.

6. The North – The almost forgotten part of California, north of wine country and east of the central valley is a land of few people but tremendous scenic beauty. This is the land of sequoias and redwoods (many of the world’s oldest and tallest trees), Yosemite, Lake Tahoe, Mount Shasta, and wilderness galore. Shared by hikers, climbers, hippies, and loggers it is independent and isolated and parts of it actually threatened to succeed from California.

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Southern California

Aug 3

Posted by Douglas in Culture

I can understand why people want to move to Southern California – the climate. It never snows down here, which is important to many. However, along the coast it is not exactly warm. It can get into the 70s Fahrenheit and maybe even the 80s, but the nights are frequently down into the 60′s or even 50′s. For example, in three days we spent in Santa Barbara, it never got above 75 during the day but got below 55 each night. It cools off quickly too, by sunset it is 65 or less. Up the coast this morning in Morro Bay, it is 53 degrees with a breeze blowing in from a cold ocean, making the wind chill under 50. Who needs April in Chicago when you have August in California?

Southern California is fun to visit, but near Los Angeles, there is a constant haze of smog in the sky. It is dry here. You can’t easily grow many trees, bushes, or grass – although there are so many amazingly cool plants that can only grow here. Wildfires are almost a season unto themselves alongside summer. Some of the most virulent and openly racist right-wing talk radio we’ve ever heard is on Los Angeles radio. We heard four different stations of this swill the other night, worse than anything we heard in the Jim Crow deep south. Outside of Los Angeles and its cancerous urban sprawl and class-race warfare, Southern California is nice for a few days.

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More Desert Adventures

Jul 30

Posted by Paula in Culture, Food, Nature, Self, Travel, Work

Flagstaff is a really cute little town. The Grand Canyon is not cute. The road there also is not. Everything is impossibly huge. Seems a lot of European tourists visit the Grand Canyon—heard French, Italian, and German frequently—and I really wonder how Wild West the experience is or is not for them. We went along the South Rim and got to see rain from afar and up close and the shifting of the light over the course of the afternoon—it sometimes appears almost a solid thing, and I’m sure there’s a bad quantum physics pun in there somewhere, but I prefer watching it to quantifying it. I felt a great sense of peace at Navajo Point, as if I could lay my whole self out over the entire canyon and feel the immensity of it. I wished I could stay there for a long time.

Instead, we drove late into the night to Las Vegas. We drove through the Hoover Dam, since they are repairing the bridge that would normally go over it. It was like driving through a Dr. Who set in the dark (current Dr., not the old ones). It was a bit creepy, actually, despite being intriguing, probably because we couldn’t entirely see what was going on in the dark. By the time we got to Vegas, it was quite late, and we were quite tired, but we drove the Strip and attempted photography anyway. We stayed at a casino hotel a bit on the edge of the whole shebang; we got a room for $18, but they added an $11 “resort fee” when we got there. We did not appreciate the misinformation, but still—not an expensive room. And it was a big suite with lots of space, which we thoroughly took advantage of for yoga in the morning.

Today we went to one of those giant lunch buffets and felt a bit shamefacedly like delighted greedy little piggies. I don’t think I’ve had sushi and enchiladas at the same sitting before. We perhaps overstayed our welcome slightly, since we picked a quiet corner for me to do some editing, but we had so much fun laughing at everything, and we didn’t think we were keeping anyone from a table or our waitress from her tips, so we indulged our guilty pleasure. Afterwards, we wandered around and looked at the slot machines for awhile before picking one to put a dollar in. They are so complicated looking. How weird! We did not win.

Things got interesting after we left. We were heading west again, out across the Mojave Desert, but did not get too far before being rear-ended on the expressway in Vegas. I was driving, but it was not my fault. Really. Nevadans drive like maniacs. I suspect someone was trying to merge onto the expressway, but things did not go well, and everybody in front of me slammed on their brakes. I did, too. The young woman behind me, unfortunately, did not. She mentioned something about “looking up”—I suspect a cell phone may have been involved. Nevertheless, the Rabbit has a bit of a dent and the trunk is a little sticky to open, but everybody and everything else is fine (shaken, not stirred?).

After the requisite calls and forms and conversation with the police, we did indeed cross the Mojave and go through Barstow and all and are in a slightly stuffy little room in San Bernardino. Can’t say I’m too happy with the drivers on the freeways in California, but I suppose that’s to be expected.

The highest temperature the Rabbit registered was 109 in Las Vegas.