A gay girl in Damascus turns out to be a 40-year-old white male from Georgia. Do hoaxes like these harm authentic bloggers with something real to say?

As a blogger who aims for integrity, and views blogging as part of his spiritual practice, I have found myself drawn to the discussion around the blog “A Gay Girl in Damascus.” Obviously, things have gotten pretty awful over in Syria, and there’s no way to know if it will take a turn for the better anytime soon. “A Gay Girl in Damascus” became an overnight sensation, gaining a large following, as well as positive coverage in the mainstream,”Western” media. In fact, when the blogger was reported kidnapped a few weeks ago, thousands of GLBTQ folks and their allies hit Twitter, Facebook, and other social media outlets, creating petitions and writing impassioned pleas in hopes that it might lead to the woman’s safe return.

As the protests and Syrian government crackdown advanced, the blog seemingly offered a window, from the point of view of someone whose very existence is considered immoral by many in her society. There was only one problem. Last week, the Washington Post revealed that the blog was a fake, and that it’s author was a 40-year-old white male from Virginia.

Tom MacMaster admitted his blog "A Gay Girl in Damascus" was a hoax.

The man, Thomas MacMaster, wrote an apology on his blog which included the following: “While the narrative voice may have been fictional, the facts on this blog are true and not mısleading as to the situation on the ground,” he wrote. “I do not believe that I have harmed anyone — I feel that I have created an important voice for issues that I feel strongly about.”

When I first heard this, I thought, yeah, right buddy. Then I thought, but maybe he did open a space for dialogue on some of the issues brought up in the blog. And then I started reading some other reactions to the whole thing, as well as seeing more of what the guy has said about his blog, and all I have left now is a sick feeling in my stomach.

Consider this, from an article on the webjournal Colorlines:

Yesterday Salamishah Tillet, the anti-rape activist, Africana Studies professor and a friend whom I can say I’ve seen in person, texted me about how the MacMaster and Graber hoaxes remind her of the 1838 James Williams Slave Narrative most likely penned by a white abolitionist. “Like in the controversial and fake 1838 ‘Narrative of James Williams,’ these [modern] white men posing as oppressed people makes it even harder for people to take ‘real’ concerns, demands and freedom writing seriously,” she wrote. (Seriously, she texts this way!) “Now, actual Arab lesbian bloggers will have to go to greater lengths to prove that they are in fact Arab and lesbian, and they’ll have to prove why their radical to liberal politics should be taken seriously. Aaargh.”

Or this, from the magazine Just Out:

Nothing about the progression MacMaster describes in his apology letter seems accidental. While misrepresenting himself in online discussion forums may have begun as a relatively benign experiment, no one forced MacMaster to contribute columns to Lez Get Real as Arraf, to create a blog to support the false identity or to accept interview requests with major media outlets like CNN and The Guardian.

McMaster, who admitted he “enjoyed ‘puppeting’ this woman who never was,” even went so far as to establish involved online relationships with Sandra Baragria, a Canadian woman sometimes identified as Arraf’s girlfriend, and Israeli blogger Elizabeth Tsurkov.

The whole thing reeks, absolutely reeks of privilege. White privilege. Male privilege. Class privilege. And straight privilege.

Beyond that, however, it is incidents like this that make it even more difficult for a blogger who might have something vitally important to say to be taken seriously. For all the inroads bloggers have made in recent years, blogging is still commonly considered to be solely the stuff of vanity writers and nerdy hobbyists.

My own experiences have turned me from a curious dabbler into a spiritually-motivated blogger. Readers and fellow bloggers have reminded me in various ways of the value that patience, fact checking, and compassion have in creating material that supports the kind of world I wish to live in. Even though this blog is a fairly small pea in the huge pod of the blogosphere, I feel a compelling responsibility as a Zen practitioner, yogi, and writer to offer a blog with integrity, to avoid misrepresenting who I am, and to respond to comments with respect and honesty, even if the same hasn’t been given to me. It’s not always easy, and sometimes I flop a bit, but that’s all part of the process as I see it.

Perhaps MacMaster’s blog can be used as a tool for speaking up about the value of blogging with integrity, and as a demonstration of what can happen when integrity is tossed aside.

“A Gay Girl in Damascus” – A Blogger’s Response is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

Foreign correspondent Stephen Puddicombe has reported from some of the world’s most tragic places: Indonesia after the tsunami, Haiti after the earthquake, and the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan. He hasn’t slept properly in years.

The life of a foreign correspondent is one of repeated compression and decompression. Like a deep sea diver, a reporter like CBC’s Stephen Puddicombe descends into places of extreme mental and emotional pressure. For 24 years, Puddicombe has covered scenes of horrifying disaster, both natural and man made, most recently the earthquake in Haiti, the tsunami in Indonesia and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

When he returns to his wife and three daughters in Halifax, Nova Scotia, he comes home a different human being than the one who left. Over time, he’s found the tools to decompress without succumbing to the constant pressure shifts and the post-traumatic stress.

When Puddicombe was 13, his father died of multiple sclerosis, leaving his mother to raise him and his sister. “I don’t know how,” he says, “because I was a typical brat; thought I knew everything. I give my mother a lot of credit.”

Speaking of his father’s influence on him, Puddicombe says, “He sat me down in front of television when Kennedy was killed, when Martin Luther King was killed, when the first rocket went to the moon. He brought us to Europe. He always said travel was everything.”

And travel is one of the things that brought him to journalism. Puddicombe met a journalist who sold him on the job. “He got to cover history. What a cool job. They pay you to travel and learn about what’s really happening.”

Puddicombe says of himself, “I’m just curious. I remember watching the Vietnam war on television. They talked about the numbers. Nobody ever talked about the people. The old lady with the two kids in the hut and how the bombing and napalm affected them.”

There is a measure of empathy that informs Puddicombe’s reporting, a quality not typical of hard news journalism and one that, when present, is very difficult to pull off without seeming condescending or opportunistic. Puddicombe’s empathetic journalism is always genuine, sometimes bordering on a kind of anger against tragic circumstances. “I try to do all my stories through someone’s eyes, how it affects them. I’m the luckiest person in the world. I get to tell stories about these absolutely outstanding people surviving in the most horrific circumstances. My heroes aren’t hockey players and politicians.”

It’s this empathic approach that’s so dangerous to a reporter like Puddicombe who receives counselling for post-traumatic stress disorder. “I see someone every time I come back,” he admits. “It weighs heavy on the mind. I haven’t slept properly in ten years because of some of the things I’ve seen. I always think ‘is there something else I could have done?’. You come out with survivor guilt. How come I’m allowed to come home to my house, three meals a day and my nice warm bed and they’re not?”

When asked to describe the work he has to do when coming home from a difficult assignment, Puddicombe said, “You come back and get your head into a different space. You realize people’s problems at home are important as well. It’s hard to get your head around things in terms of the scope. You go from an earthquake in Pakistan to a city council meeting in Halifax. Everything is important to its own degree.”

Besides the regular counselling, Puddicombe calls on his family to help with the decompression. “I talk to my family and my kids and show them pictures. I use them as a sounding board to talk about me and what I went through because the stories are never about me. A lot of people know where I’ve been so they understand why I might be off in the ether. It comes back really quick. It’s like riding a bicycle. You’re there one day and a week later you’re at home reporting about something totally different. That’s the beauty and the frustration of our job.”

Not only do his three daughters help him adjust to home life, they’re involved in the decision making process about leaving in the first place. “They have a veto on everywhere I go. Every time I’m called somewhere, I very quickly say, ‘This is what’s happening. What do you think?’”

The girls only turned him down once. “It was during a particularly nasty time in Jerusalem of suicide bombings. My eldest girls looked it up on the internet and asked me how I would know who’s got a bomb under their shirt. I said I didn’t. They told me, ‘We don’t want you to go.’ I told my boss I can’t go. I made this promise, and it’s the most important thing to me in the world.”

Ultimately, his kids keep him sane and after seeing so much horror and destruction, they also lend his work purpose. “I find young people very hopeful. They know so much more than when I was a kid. They’re so much smarter. I think they’re going to run the world a lot better than we’ve been doing.”

Photo Credits

“Desperation after the wave” by Stephen Puddicombe, CBC. All Rights Reserved.

“Muharram: Reflections of Religion” by Stephen Puddicombe, CBC. All Rights Reserved.

Surviving Decompression: The Foreign Correspondent Comes Home is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

For the past two years I’ve been waiting for Picard; not Godot, Picard. From the first time I saw a friend of ours running around with her very first Amazon Kindle e-reader, all I could think of were those moments in “Star Trek: the Next Generation” when Captain Jean-Luc Picard would stand around tapping on that piece of plastic the size of a notepad and getting a galaxy of information at his fingertips. It seems that Gene Roddenberry’s vision of how information would be accessed on the starships of the 23rd century was actually only three decades away and not hundreds of years at all.

It seems to me that technology builds one layer upon another and it isn’t until the time is right that a revolutionary innovation can get its wings and take flight.

I remember working for Microsoft during the late 1990s when they introduced the first “PocketPC” units for us to test in-house. They seemed an interesting enough device but for two big drawbacks. Here was a palm-sized computing device that had everything today’s “smart phones” have but without the actual PHONE. And while it had the capability to give us “information everywhere” access through wireless networking technology, the reach of those wireless networks was limited to locations that actually offered wifi connectivity through conventional hardware and that was a far more limited world than the one that we live in today.

While the obvious addition of the phone to these hand-held computers produced our “smart phones”, it was the advent of the ability to access data and the Internet through the now all-pervasive cellular networks that really set the stage for the coming revolution; the “Next Generation” of data and entertainment appliances.

Choices, Choices

The electronic readers ar e great for downloading and reading books. Many of these devices feature black text on a white background, just like real books, and have similar form factors to slightly oversized paperbacks. Amazon boasts that sales of their Kindle e-reader device have been brisk but will only say that “millions” of units have been sold.

The Kindle allows users to download and purchase books directly from Amazon via wireless networking (if available) or through a computer based app that can move books to the Kindle after purchase.

The Kindle interface is delightfully simple and intuitive, even for those who are not all that tech savvy. Sony and a handful of other manufacturers quickly followed suit with work-alike devices but these e-readers shared one thing in common — they all attempted to emulate the form and function of real books with the added facility of easily adding new content over networks or by attaching them to computers.

I’m sure when they released it, the good folks at Apple thought the iPad would be a novelty item that would sell modest quantities to affluent gadget seekers who didn’t want to stare at the tiny screen of their iPhone or take the time to boot up that big Mac Book. While there was a great deal of buzz over this “big brother” to the iPhone and iPod Touch, I’m sure that even Steve Jobs and the folks at Apple were surprised to see sales of the iPad pass three million units sold in just the first three months after it’s launch.

Unlike the Kindle and other e-reader devices, the iPad took the “reader” concept and broadened it significantly. People don’t just read books — they read the Internet these days. Everything from newspapers online to blogging websites to Facebook to “news and views” sites like Life As A Human have all become part of the daily fare of many people.

The world wide web serves up a dazzling assortment of reading material from poetry and short fiction to the latest news and insightful editorializing on social issues and more. Apple’s iPad offered quick and easy access to the whole Internet, not just material available for download and purchase from vendors of electronic books. Catching up with your Facebook friends at breakfast got a WHOLE lot easier with the iPad. The iPad’s touch-screen technology means that you can sip your coffee and surf the web at the same time!

Enter the Android

In October of 2008, Google entered the mobile phone marked with its new operating system, Android, designed for a new generation of mobile phones.

Android promised to be open-source and offer a variety of functions natively in the operating system. It featured support for a variety of form factors and handsets, touch screen support including multi-touch capability (pinch-zoom, etc.), support for Java and other Internet technologies, support for a variety of audio and video media types including streaming media, and much more. In short, Google’s Android promised to bring all the power of the Internet to your cellular handset and the dawn of the 3G era (which brought broadband Internet over cellular signals) had begun.

Since it’s release less than two years ago, Android has now evolved into a 2.2 version that supports a greatly expanded set of features. Its growth and popularity in the cellular phone market has made it the fastest growing platform for phones as of April 2010. In fact, Android sales have surpassed those of Apple’s iPhone and are now taking aim at the traditional market leader, RIM’s Blackberry.

Thankfully, Google has built a framework for Android that is open enough and flexible enough to support a variety of different cell phone handset styles from different manufacturers. It is this same flexibility that will soon open up an explosive new market for this new operating system.

Today’s generation of “smart phones” that allow us to browse the Web, do our email, share with our friends on Facebook, play our favorite music and video, and much more on our cell phones are just the beginning of what Android can do. Much more is just around the corner.

It’s a Pad, Pad, Pad, Pad world!

So far, Apple has had this new iPad market all to itself. But having seen the potential for this new “tablet” market, literally dozens of companies are now poised to released new devices just in time for the holidays.

Everyone from cell phone manufacturers like HTC to more traditional electronic gizmo makers like Samsung and Motorola are working overtime to get their new offerings out in time for the holidays. The list even includes less familiar names like Orange, Pocketbook and Archos.  Computer makers are not to be left out either as traditional PC makers like Hewlett Packard (HP) and Acer have both announced plans for tablet releases.

In fact, this first wave of tablets coming from a host of new manufacturers and even some new models from Apple later this year looks like just the beginning of an explosion in this new form factor. ABI Research, a technology research firm, has predicted that the next five years will see the market for tablets grow from four to five million in 2010 to over 55 million by 2015.

It looks like these new devices will come in a variety of sizes and feature sets.  They will be priced to accommodate a wide range of budgets too with announcements coming about devices ranging in price from about $100 CDN to over $900 CDN based on the features and form factor you desire.

Old Things Made New Again

So what’s the driving force here? Why do we all need one of these new tablets? What is that “killer app” that will finally make the tablet form factor attractive to the consumer? Well, the answer is a little complicated and involves, as these things frequently do, a convergence of circumstances that make this the right time.

The last 10 years have seen an explosion in the use of the Internet by the average consumer. People are now using their home computers for everything from reading news on the Web, to communicating with each other via email and instant messaging, to watching video (television programs and movies) and listening to music, even streaming content from both free and paid sources are becoming more prevalent.

The reduced cost of wireless technology has made it so economical to install wireless networking that many homes now have at least one wireless network operating and many public spaces are offering wireless Internet access for free or a nominal fee. We can get at the Internet wirelessly from almost anywhere now. And 3G cellular networks are extending that reach even further allowing users to stream data through the cellular towers as well.  So the infrastructure for true portability is now in place.

Finally, advancements in both processing and display technology have made the form factor of the tablet or pad much more affordable. Naturally, the software market has dutifully kept up with these hardware improvements as Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android, and other mobile operating systems from RIM (Blackberry) and others are making their way onto tablet devices as you read this.

Star Trek on your Coffee Table

So for a couple hundred bucks you can get one of these new tablet gizmos. Why on earth would you bother? Well, consider the following scenario. Your mother-in-law drops by for tea. As you sit on the sofa chatting, you begin telling her about how terrific her granddaughter Sally was in last night’s school play. “Her costume was so cute!” you say as you reach for the tablet on your coffee table. A few taps on the touch-sensitive screen brings up the photos you took before you left for the play (these come to you wirelessly from the laptop in the den that you transferred the photos to from your camera). Your mother-in-law is delighted and says she wishes she could have seen the performance. Not to worry!

A few more taps on your tablet screen allows you to surf to the YouTube videos that other parents have uploaded of last night’s performance. Grandma raises a hand to her mouth but can’t quite cover the huge smile as she watches with tears of pride in her eyes. Just as she begins heaping praise on her oh-so-talented granddaughter, you’ve already surfed to Facebook to show her all the rave reviews by friends and family who have already seen the videos.

After a lovely visit, mother-in-law heads back home and you settle back on the couch. You pick up your tablet once more and review your subscriptions of the days online newspapers, make note of several magazine articles you bookmark to read later, make a quick check of email including one or two fast replies to friends, and download that new Michael Crichton novel you’ve been meaning to read.

You get up to get yourself a cold drink.  As you pass the couch, you grab your tablet and head to the bedroom to curl up and watch a good movie streaming to your tablet from your subscription to Netflix over the Internet. Maybe in the morning, you’ll do some shopping online or continue working on that website you’ve been designing. Oh, and you really do need to check in to see what new and interesting things have been posted to your favorite blog site, Life As A Human!

The Future is Now

I remember shaking my head back in the 1980s when Captain Jean Luc Picard seemed to always be accessing everything from one of those little tablet thingies. Audio, video, text, photos, data, it all seemed to be right at his fingertips. Science fiction, to be sure.

Well, as has happened so many times in mankind’s past, the future has come upon us faster than we ever could have expected. That tablet on your coffee table can be a photo album, a television, an email station, a place to do instant messaging and Facebook networking, a place to play games, a place to find information, and a place to read books, magazines, and even newspapers.

It’s all coming very soon to a store near you. With all this new wireless stuff flying around, watch your head!

Photo Credits

Starfleet Pad – Paramount Pictures (Fair Use)
Amazon Kindle – Ericajoy from Flickr
Apple iPad –  John.Karakatsanis 2010 from Flickr
Android Tablets – Suroboy Website – 2010

Is the Age of the “Tablet” Upon Us? Make it So! is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

Life As A Human Likes is a weekly feature of fascinating, enlightening, fun or perhaps just odd blogs and websites that enliven the experience of being human. This week we feature a site devoted to evolving consciousness, a news venue that ‘huffs’ and puffs with big impact, and the site of a conservation society making a major splash in the fight to save the whales.

Consciousness

#1 Reality Sandwich

I love checking out sites with alternatives views of our world. Reality Sandwich is a fun site where you can explore everything from the 2010 Crop Circle Season to Zen Buddhism, Nature’s Pharmacy to the Goddess. The site was started by author Daniel Pinchbeck who has written extensively on alternative consciousness and 2012.

News

#2 Huffington Post

The Huffington Post is one of my daily haunts. I find its approach to online media refreshing and the wide range of voices enlightening. While it’s highly US-centric and definitely on the left-leaning side (though probably centrist from a Canadian perspective) it’s a very substantial take on what’s going on. Check out their branded browser as well. This browser plug-in changes your browser into a Huffington Post browser, giving you quick access to the site with special features. Check it out.

Whales

#3 Sea Shepherd Society

Paul Watson was a founding member of Greenpeace who broke away early in GP’s history to take a more dramatic role in the saving of our brothers and sisters in the oceans. The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society does not resort to violence, but there is direct confrontation — and I salute them as heroes of the seas. You cannot help but admire their tenacity and strength of character to risk their lives on the open oceans as they strive to protect the whales, dolphins and other sea life from the ever-present onslaught of a commercial industry that knows no morality or responsibility.

You can catch their exploits on Whale Wars, the most popular show on Discovery’s Animal Planet Network?

And here’s what they are fighting. Be warned — this is graphic.

Life As A Human Likes…5 is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

The thing with elliptical writing is that it makes writing a big fat book as easy as writing a small skinny one. Unfortunately, the opposite is also true: it’s just as hard to write a small skinny novel as it is to write a big fat one. Sucks.

Each section is treated discretely. It becomes a kind of mini story in itself. For a novel, just link them all together. Beauty.

I didn’t invent all of this, by the way. I learned it, back when I was writing short stories in the writing program at the University of Victoria. It happened because my mentor at the time, Jack Hodgins, was sly enough to see where I was at in the whole process, and guided me to the books on writing fiction written by John Gardner.

I still recall reading Gardner’s description of what he did with the opening paragraphs of his novel, Grendel. My jaw dropped to the floor and stayed there for about three months. Until then, I really had no idea just what was possible in writing.

Gardner didn’t talk about elliptical writing, and I don’t know if anyone has, apart from me. But what he showed me was how to use language itself, the precise weighting of word-choices, the way messing with rhythm can achieve particular effects. In short, he showed me just how thoroughly a writer can fuck with a reader’s head, mostly without them knowing it.

It’s diabolical and a little frightening. But you can easily look around, say, at the newspaper you daily peruse, to see how that power can be expressed to achieve what can only be called evil. So I don’t use the word ‘diabolical’ lightly.

The language of popular journalism invites intellectual laziness in the reader. The old adage about ‘just the facts’ is a whitewash. I can just state facts and still manipulate emotions — it’s easy, actually. Comes down to which facts one chooses to reveal, and in what order. The rest is all down to the reader.

In popular journalism, the whole process is cynical beyond belief, but it works (Fox news anyone?). Push buttons, trigger hatred, cold-heartedness, and fear. Easy peasy. Of course, what they’re really saying is: we think you’re a fucking idiot and you’ll believe anything, and then they smile sweetly and it’s time for our sponsors hallelujah amen.

I admit to being dismayed at how often it seems to work. I also admit that I hope there’s a special place in hell for those writers who reduced politics to sound bites, and for those on the tube who turn every tragic event into a television production, replete with billboard titles and juicy graphics. These days, we are all potential entertainment to an audience of millions. Who decided that was a good idea?

I’m reminded that I have actually met fans of the film Starship Troopers who didn’t know it was satire. Huh?

For this installment, as you may have noticed, I’m taking a break from deconstructing that excerpt, to see if there will be more commentary on whether I should resume the exercise, or not. So instead, this is mostly your average blog rant. Hey, I’m only human.

___

As I write this, I am about to head off to a conference in Orlando. The International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. I’ve been going for a few years now, but I still feel slightly out of place there. The conference is an academic one, with a few token writers invited to give readings and just sort’ve hang around beside the pool.

Apart from one scholar who happens to be a good friend of mine (and hanging out with him is one of the main reasons I still go, along with Steve Donaldson regularly attending), I’ve yet to see anyone tackle my writing.

It occurs to me that even within fantasy as a genre, there exist internal stigmas. As a writer of ‘epic’ or ‘heroic’ fantasy, well, unless one is a dead Englishman with J’s and R’s in his name, we don’t much rate as serious fare for serious discussion (of course, if I went in the opposite direction and wrote about adolescent virgin seduction fantasies and threw in a few moody vampires, well, I’d be fighting ‘em off!). Sometimes I think about all of that and I sigh. But mostly, I just sit at the pool bar and have a good time not worrying about anything.

So perhaps I have an ulterior motive in analyzing my own writing here, as if to say: ‘Hey you, no really, I know what I’m doing. Honest. I even think about it. And look at this excerpt — not a sword or busty bodice in sight!’ (Good thing I didn’t use that other excerpt.) But if that purpose is there, it’s not the main one. Apart from hoping to inspire beginning writers, I might also be providing a kind of primer to my readers — not that most of them need it, as they’ve already discovered the pay-off in re-reads. Right?

To close, I’ll return briefly to that diabolical matter, to assure my readers that while I am entirely and absolutely engaged in manipulating your emotions through the stories I write, I won’t do it to lie to you. Ever. I am a believer in Aristotle’s argument on the value of catharsis in tragedy. We need to feel to be reminded of what feeling is like. Now more than ever. My novels are an invitation to compassion, for what that’s worth. And finally, I can’t make you feel anything unless I feel it first.

For Malazan fans: ten chapters left…

Read Parts I to IV of Steven Erikson’s “Notes on a Crisis”. Visit his Life As A Human biography page for links.

Photo Credits

“Monster in the Sky”sakura_chilhaya+. Creative Commons. Some Rights Reserved.

“Sean Hamity and Karl Rove on FOX!” dutchlad @ flickr.com. Creative Commons. Some Rights Reserved.

“Puppet or Puppeteer” Jonathan @ Flickr.com. Creative Commons. Some Rights Reserved.

Steven Erikson’s Notes on a Crisis Part V — Diabolical Deceptions is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

In my ongoing personal quest as a photographer and a student of inner space, I’m always on the outlook for the next big idea. To find out what this life as a human is all about, you’ve got to be open to ideas.

Lucky for us that we can’t help but run into ideas everywhere these days, especially technological ones. In fact, being in North America, it is impossible to exist as a Luddite unless you are really, really crazy, seriously broke, or a monk, or Amish.

A few years ago the big wave wetting us all with electrons was the social media idea. It was fun to connect with your friends via the web. Let’s be friends everyone. Everyone will know what you are eating, where you are, what you’re wearing, thinking, seeing, feeling and touching. Let’s collectivize into one large amorphous blob of conversation. Twitter, Flickr, Friendster, LinkedIn, Myspace, Yahoo, Brightkite and of course Facebook (to drop a few URLs) invade our space everyday now with this weird synthetic idea of friendliness. You’d not be mistaken to think that the whole world is panting in desperation to be your friend.

Well, that may be sort of true, and I went to the F5 – Expo in Vancouver recently see all the promised new innovations in social media, to discover how we might all get a little closer together — and how we might be able to make money too. Surely now that we’re all friends we have to make some money with all this stuff somehow. After all, Twitter has evolved into an advertising conversation — gee, what an idea.

I travelled over there with my day-job buddies at Clover Point who can truly map anything. Had I gotten lost in the Vancouver Conference Centre, Clover Point would have found me, but no need, the show was just not that big.

The headliner for the day was Malcolm Gladwell, you know Mr. Outliers, The Tipping Point and Blink. He was scheduled to speak at the end of the day so we had to spend the intervening hours listening to a bunch of speakers talking about how it might be useful to use video to promote your business on YouTube (hint: just don’t be obvious and make sure you are funny) and how a search marketing structure might be an important element in your website. If you wanted to learn to podcast or use Twitter for your business, there were mini seminars for that.

They called the trade show the “Idea Zoo” as though a big ferocious idea might just bust out at any minute.

So I wandered around and looked for IT….

I looked under the booths of the ISP pushers (dust balls), behind the scary Revenue Canada booth (very dark), in the feathers of the Hootsuite mascot (stiches), in the coffee cup from the organic coffee company (good grounds). I had a moment with Heavy Lifters and thought I saw a glimmer of an idea in the electrons of Mingleverse. 

Microsoft, God bless them, had a wonderful black leather couch to rest on, which was the best idea of the day. I came up a big ZERO and with no ONE to attach it to. (Note the cute little play on digital there.)

I suppose the F5 group tried, but I wanted augmented reality, singularity thinking, consciousness-changing social revolution stuff, touch screens and virtual medical wireless communications. Where was the next idea? I expected technologies and services that would change the world, change my world, or at the very least make my business rich. I  expected them to live up to their slogan “Refreshing Business Strategies”. But it was old and felt so yesterday.

Here’s a video clip of the best of what I got:

OK, there was hope yet though…Malcolm Gladwell was there, but damn it, the media pass wouldn’t get me into the event. Think about the logic of that for a moment. Mr. Author, we’re inviting you to present to our conference, but we’re not letting in the media because they might promote you.

Thank you again Clover Point for getting me into the big event.

So Mr. Gladwell, who is a pretty smart thinker and does a wonderful job of stringing complex ideas together, talked about revolution. He even used Fidel Castro and Che Guevara as his prime examples. And that’s ok in Canada of course because we are friends with the Cubans, but if he were using these examples in Miami there would be more than ideas flying through the air in his direction pretty fast.

To summarize Gladwell’s talk: Fidel and Che didn’t use Facebook to change their world. They didn’t even have fax machines. They built strong trust ties, not loose networks like those that most people have with their Twitter  buddies.

So here’s the idea about social media — it’s a load of tripe that ain’t gonna change nothin’. You want to change the world? You need to spend time, build strong networks based on reputation and authenticity, and develop very close trusting relationships.

Gladwell wasn’t being glib — he was damned serious about us changing the world, and THAT is a good idea.

But huh? The thousand person crowd was a bit quiet. Who wanted a revolution? They thought this was about business strategy. This wasn’t really what they wanted to hear. How would this make us rich overnight? Use trust — change the world? What an idea.

And that was that.

Photo Credits

F5Mini, by Chris Holt, 2010

Video Hooter, by Chris Holt, 2010

Malcolm Gladwell, by Chris Holt, 2010

F5 Expo: What’s the Big Idea? (Malcolm Gladwell Knows) is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

This is the second installment of My Private Sudan from writer and helicopter pilot Allan Cram, in which his recollections of Sudan differ dramatically from reports in many Western newspapers. To read Part I, click here.

Shortly after the Western media ran with the story on scorched earth policy and bombing of villagers, the Globe and Mail sent a reporter to Sudan to set the record straight on the plight of the Sudanese people working near Talisman’s oil fields.

On December 9, 1999, a female reporter filed a story from Mayan Aboun, southern Sudan, and said: “In the last four days, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) has launched an offensive in the area around the oil fields where Calgary’s Talisman Energy Inc. has invested $735 million, and the SPLA may have captured key rail lines into the area.”

This reporter also described the rag-tag soldiers wearing plastic flip-flop sandals and carrying AK-47s who had killed 20 government soldiers and captured a dozen more.

We were astounded – normally we were informed of any activity in the oil fields by the Talisman Security department. So we consulted the maps to locate Mayan Aboun and could not find it anywhere. We asked the local workers if they had heard of it and they shook their heads.

The story suggested that the Nuer and Dinka people were “driven from the land where the oil is being drilled” and described “a sense of anticipation that this will be the year when the SPLA will bring Khartoum to its knees.”

The more we read, the more we understood that this reporter appeared to have another agenda. We joked that she was probably out there somewhere wading through chest-deep swamps holding her typewriter above her head, like some Hollywood war movie.

This brought many chuckles to the local Sudanese – both Nuer and Dinka –working at the Heglig camp. No one they knew would willingly walk through the swamp. “Too many crocodiles,” they said. “We use canoes.”

Of course, had the reporter come to Heglig and flown around the area before filing her story, she might have learned that there were no key rail lines within 100 km of the oil fields. And the SPLA were more than 100 km away from the oilfields. And no one from Talisman had heard of any “offensive” against their people or property.

This is the same SPLA described in a 1998 U.S. State Department Human Rights report, which stated: “The SPLA was responsible for extrajudicial killings, beatings, arbitrary detention, forced conscription, slavery and occasional arrests of foreign relief workers without charge.”

The Economist summed up the image of the SPLA when it stated that, “The SPLA has been little more than an armed gang of Dinkas, killing, looting and raping. Its indifference, almost animosity, towards the people it was supposed to be liberating was too clear.”

And this journalist apparently trusted the word of these rebels over Canadian oil workers?

Something about the news coverage from Canada and the US just didn’t make sense. I can accept the fact that reporters misquote, or take quotes out of context, all for the sake of the story they want to write. But this was different. No one saw this reporter in Heglig. We could find no evidence that she ever flew or drove around the oil fields. Or talked with any of the workers on site.

Instead, she and other media quoted disgruntled workers in Canada who had been let go by the drilling company due to the Sudanese training program — a program designed to help the Sudanese become self-sufficient and take over drilling operations and the management of the pipeline. Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do? Teach a man how to fish?

Based on the sheer number of inaccuracies by this “on site” reporter, one could easily imagine the stories being filed from some hotel in Nairobi rather than from the fetid Sudd.

Everyone I worked with felt powerless to do anything about it. When the President of Talisman made statements to the press, the media dismissed him as being naïve. The president of a successful international oil corporation — who actually did set foot on the oil fields of Heglig – portrayed as naïve? Go figure.

Of course this wasn’t the first time I had witnessed skewed news reports. When President Clinton ordered the bombing of the El Shifa pharmaceutical factory outside Khartoum, Sudan, in August 1998, the television images of frenzied mobs ripping up American flags and throwing rocks seemed a contradiction to what I knew of the Sudanese people.

My family and I watched in awe as the media reported that the Sudanese wanted a Holy War against the West. I was scheduled to return to Sudan in a few days – and news of a Holy War didn’t sit well.

When we arrived in Khartoum, our agent, Salah, said that maybe 10,000 people had protested outside the American Embassy. He shrugged it off, unconcerned – an insignificant number in a city of nine million. What the TV editors wanted us to see at home, however, was an entire city in chaos, anger seething, and placing all foreigners in danger. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

Outside the Khartoum Hilton, the bellhops greeted us like old friends. American TV news teams wandered about the lobby arranging taxis and meetings for the day. Hours later as they returned, one reporter exclaimed to me: “The people are so friendly. They filled plastic vials with the ‘contaminated’ soil at the El Shifa factory and handed them to us. ‘Go analyze it yourself,’ they said. ‘There are no chemical weapons here.’”

Welcome to my private Sudan, I wanted to say. Come with me to the Sudan I know, to the Sudan my family knows through my photos and stories. Come and visit the work barge moored to the papyrus reeds; listen to the chorus of frogs and crickets erupting from the dark and fetid swamp; see the fireflies swirling like sparks at night; hear the rumble of thunder and watch the spectacle of lightning set against the endless African sky.

Come see the elusive herd of elephants and water buffalo; the still, silent crocodiles laying in wait in shallow pools; the sleek shape of a lion in pursuit of an unwary antelope. Marvel at the huge clumps of papyrus drifting downstream, a makeshift shelter harbouring a family squatting before a smoldering cookfire, fishing nets dragging through the tea-coloured water — a journey that could last days or weeks.

This was the Sudan I knew: the hardworking Sudanese labourers who asked me to bring from Canada shirts and shoes, watches, radios and cameras, and spent hours looking at themselves, brushing their teeth in the convex mirrors attached to the helicopters. The colourful markets, the women with huge baskets balanced upon their heads, the children playing with a stick and an old rubber tire, the elders sitting around drinking tea and coffee — always gracious and hospitable.

In January 2000, my job took me away from Sudan to Yemen, Equatorial Guinea, Bosnia, East Timor and other places around the globe. The smear campaign against Talisman increased, the media now calling the company’s stock “slave stock” and eventually the debacle went political. In the spring of 2003, Talisman Energy sold their interest in the oilfields of Sudan to an Indian oil company.

And nothing changed for the Sudanese people. The civil war continued. People were still killed, maimed, and displaced. The nomads still ignited the grass each November and led their herds of cattle south through the oil fields to the plentiful food.

This strange agenda to force Canadians out of Sudan accomplished only one thing — to ensure that Western compassion and respect for human rights was no longer there. And I have worried for the last decade that the Nuer villagers no longer receive medicine and school supplies, food, water wells — and respect.

I worry about the innocent and gracious people from my private Sudan.

Photo Credits

“_MG_435″ sidelife @ flickr.com. Creative Commons. Some Rights Reserved.

“_MG_4827″ sidelife @ flickr.com. Creative Commons. Some Rights Reserved.

“South Sudan Landscape” sidelife @ flickr.com Creative Commons. Some Rights Reserved.

“Elephants in Sudan” International Conservation Caucus (ICCF)

My Private Sudan: Part II is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

The stars (and the gold medals) lined up for Vancouver. Even those who are most critical of the Olympics caught the fever, and most of the world now sees Vancouver as a gleaming mecca of culture, possibility, and hope. A feeling of unity and pride still permeates this historically progressive city, and citizens will continue to ride that high and tap its potential far into the future.

But what about Cincinnati?

What about Cincinnati? Possibility Journalism in America’s Touchstone is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

I remember the grass fires far off in the distance.

Baggara nomads would ignite the dense elephant grass before them to ease their seasonal journey between the arid north, the “Sahel,” to the “Sudd,” the largest swamp in the world, where succulent grasses would sustain their cattle herds for the next six months. It was a natural and timeless passage cast centuries ago, marking the transition from rainy to dry season.

After three years of thundering across vast tracts of neem and pepper trees (with the surprisingly resilient and flame resistant bark), I knew their leaves would remain green for a few more weeks, then slowly bake and crisp in the sun. No one really needed a calendar to know when the seasons changed.

As I approached the smoke and flames from above, snowy egrets, white-crowned shrikes and sharp-tailed hawks spiraled upward like ashes, enjoying a feast of insects fleeing the fire. Behind the arc of orange flames, the blackened ground still smoldered as a half-dozen men led camels by their halters. Behind followed an orderly file of cattle and goats.

These long-horned cattle strolled easily beside the flames, sometimes completely engulfed in the smoke—brief respites from the thick clouds of flies that bred and co-existed with the nomads. The goats, I imagined, bleeted their complaints, but stayed in line. The alternative was not pleasant.

Unquestionably the fires provided protection from the lions and hyenas lying in wait in the tall, undisturbed grass only metres away. I’ve seen these wondrous beasts from the air, patiently stalking the next meal. A domestic cow or goat would be easy prey, and burning a wide swath is wise in order to traverse the hundreds of miles through 10-foot tall grass.

When the fires were within sight of the major oil camp known as Heglig, where I was stationed, the local workers puzzled over management’s decision to bulldoze wide fire-breaks around the pumping stations and oil wells.

We launched our shiny helicopter daily to patrol the hundreds of miles of power lines. We watched as the flames shot up 30 or 40 feet and singed the wires, causing brownouts and, sometimes, complete power outages. Repair teams were dispatched in vehicles, and some pumping stations had to be shut down, temporarily suspending the flow of oil.

But no one ever intervened with the progress of the nomads. No one ever suggested changing the path they travelled. After all, it was their land.

When I first came to Sudan in 1997, I worked 120 km south of Heglig near the village of Bentui. We lived aboard renovated sea-containers stacked atop one another on four steel barges linked together and moored next to the papyrus shoreline of the Nile River. Two helicopters were under contract to a Chinese seismic company working in the Sudd.

The next year the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company (GNPOC) hired one of our helicopters to support the Heglig oil field, and we looked forward to an operation with senior management people from Canada. The local Sudanese were happy to have a Canadian company involved — Calgary-based Talisman Energy Inc.

We took great pride in being involved with Talisman’s numerous humanitarian projects. We frequently delivered medicine to outlying clinics built and maintained by the oil company. We delivered notebooks and pencils to village schools, flew in tons of food to an isolated and inaccessible small hamlet because of flooding. We supported a crew drilling water wells for small towns located near an exploratory oil rig. We transported the management team to villages to discuss with local officials payment for building roads through farmers’ fields. We delivered soccer balls to schoolchildren, and goodwill to each and every Sudanese we met. As a team of caring Canadians, we were achieving some small steps to improve the life of the local people.

But our friends and families back in Canada were reading horror stories in the media about a Canadian oil corporation blinded by greed and directed by a rape and pillage mentality to boost its share prices. According to our nation’s finest media monopolies, Talisman’s involvement in Sudan — a country besieged by civil war since the 1980s — was directly responsible for every atrocity ever committed.

The Canadian oil workers were portrayed by a number of newspapers as jack-booted Nazis issuing orders to the government forces to drive women and children from their huts, allegedly sanctioning the destruction of villages and crops so bulldozers and trucks could bring in tons of heavy equipment needed to suck the wealth out of the land.

And the burning grass fires of the nomads became a “scorched-earth” policy.

This “fact” became headline news in the western media, and their “definitive” source was someone associated with the Crossroads Ministry — a marginal NGO in Sudan with a mission “to dismantle systemic racism and build anti-racist multicultural diversity within institutions and communities.” Yeah, right.

Flying overhead in a fixed-wing aircraft at 20,000 feet, this “expert” source told the Calgary Sun that on November 3, 1999 he “saw evidence of a ‘scorched-earth’ policy around the oil fields.”

That would have been the burned grassland that granted safe passage to thousands of nomads and cattle.

That same reliable source also told the newspaper that the village of Bentui had been bombed, so that oil exploration plans could proceed unimpeded by people.

I lived near Bentui for almost a year, a village of 20,000 Nuer — cattle herders and fishermen living in round mud and grass huts spread across the landscape like chocolate kisses. During particularly heavy rains, many displaced flood victims would come to the marginally higher ground of Bentui and build temporary dwellings, sometimes adding as many as 10,000 extra people to the village.

The dirt floors of the huts would become well worn and compacted. At the end of the rainy season, around November, they would dismantle the small sub-division and move back to their fields and fishing villages, leaving the landscape around Bentui appear pockmarked.

This was the “evidence” of bombing — not an eyewitness account of actual aircraft dropping bombs, but a quick, uneducated assumption.

Coincidentally, I flew to Bentui the day after that report and met with the local governor, the Red Cross representative, and enjoyed a sweet carkaday tea underneath the giant neem tree in the centre of town with Elizabeth, the tea lady.

All was well and not a bomb in sight.

Photo Credits

“Kurmuk Blue Nike Sudan: sidelife @ flickr.com. Creative Commons. Some rights reserved.

“Children Bor Jonglai Sudan” sidelife @ flickr.com. Creative Commons. Some rights reserved.

My Private Sudan: Part I is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

There’s a phenomena I like to call tragedy porn. It’s the questionable human need to share in other people’s tragedy via the media. It’s that same compulsion that leads us to gawk at traffic fatalities and read stories about celebrities having nervous breakdowns. The most recent and regrettable incident occurred on the night of Canadian Olympic figure skater Joannie Rochette’s short program, just three days after her mother’s death.

I watched in awe as this brave young woman took to the ice and skated a flawless program, a testament to her love and memory of her mother. As she finished her skate, Rochette bent down, hands covering her face. Skating off the ice, she fell into her coach’s arms and burst into heartbreaking tears.

My empathy for her quickly turned to fury as cameras surrounded her and the TV lens zoomed in for a full-frame closeup. What may have started as a public moment had become a private one. But thanks to the gift of technology, we could share her intimate emotions.

Later, as the next skater was waiting for her marks, the cameras closed in on Rochette, now sobbing inconsolably in the arms of two coaches. As they lingered, the commentators wondered aloud how she must be feeling. How do you think she was feeling? Maybe that she wished a few cameramen would be electrocuted by their live feeds?

Just a week before, we saw continual reruns of the 20-year-old Georgian athlete Nodar Kumaritashvili as he crashed and died on the sliding track. Newspapers ran a series of photos, depicting every final detail. Eventually, public outcry led to the videos and photos being removed from media websites. As one of my colleagues commented today, he was still someone’s child and they shouldn’t have their son’s tragedy displayed publicly.

During our conversation, I was suddenly struck by the hypocrisy of some members of the media. At Christmas I was participating in a Habitat for Humanity fundraiser. Lots of business people and media were in attendance and we all had fun building gingerbread houses to raise money for Habitat.

I introduced myself to a local CBC commentator, and mentioned that I work in PR. After a considerable pause, he asked me if I know what journalists call PR types. While I knew the answer, I decided to let him tell me. “Flacks,” he said, then turned his back on me to seek more interesting conversation.

I need to delve in a little shop talk here. See, some journalists would tell you that everyone in PR is the equivalent of a Wild West snake oil salesman. Flack is a disparaging name for publicity agents who sell products, usually regardless of ethics or discrimination.

Yet I have never worked with a company that harms the environment, uses child labour or takes advantage of other people’s losses. I certainly never work with companies that gloat over deaths of athletes or their personal losses. It is true, however, that some PR practitioners do. Hypocrisy exists in every profession.

So where does that leave us? I guess that if some PR folks are flacks, then some members of the media are tragedy pornographers. And how do we stop it? Are readers and viewers ready to rise up and complain?

One way would be to stop idolizing our athletes and performers. Another would be to respect that their personal lives are just that – personal.

Perhaps there always will be people who gloat at others’ misfortune. Is that what they are really doing, or are they just trying to escape their own miseries?

News update: Joannie Rochette just won the Bronze Medal in Women’s Figure Skating.

Photo Credit

“Joannie Rochette” by Jenelle Schneider / Canwest News Service

When Journalism Crosses into Tragedy Porn: Olympics Coverage of Joannie Rochette is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN