Grr Grr Grr, Another PR Guy Trying to Co-opt Feminism

As sick as I am of all the clearly biased anti-Hilary media coverage that wrote her off over and over, even as she won and won big (and now cheers with glee at her "downfall"), I am more upset at some PR guy writing an editorial that uses feminism as just another pawn in the political game.

The argument is not a new one - that if you are a feminist you must vote for Clinton. However, it's usually coming earnestly from the moths of our aunts and mothers, who lived through an age where feminism was defined as "The personal is political." Here, it's being cynically employed by a PR guy, and more strongly attacking Obama supporters than I have seen much of anywhere else.

There are a lot of arguments that support both sides of this issue. And I think that, for this older generation of feminists, the current election sits squarely in the center of their experience watching an entire generation subvert, co-opt (and also positively transform) what it means to be a feminist and how one expresses it. To them, not voting for Hilary is just as bad as saying The Pussycat Dolls are feminist icons.

In my opinion, these women are right and also very wrong. Viewed solely through the lens of the single cause of women's equality, they are dead on. Women today often do take the great advancements made by our foremothers for granted (isn't that part of the goal?) but here's one goal that has yet to be attained, so we should all work together to get there. However, that ignores both the wider historical and social forces at play in this election and the more detailed nuances of the specific players in the race.

Intelligent voters can't ignore the Clinton legacy - both positive and negative, or the fact that Obama is also a historical candidate from a minority group. Our standing in the world is greatly diminished, we are fighting losing wars on two fronts, we are at an ideological crossroads and in an economic downturn. It's up to each individual to weigh these factors, along with their personal ideals, and take advantage of their right to vote (thanks, Universal Suffrage!) to make their own choices. It's not up to some man to tell all women how to think and how to act, and invoke feminism while he's at it.

My Dream Media Configuration is Nigh

Not too long ago, I told some friends that I envisioned television of the future as being more directly consumer-driven. Networks & cable would continue on for two reasons, but would not be the main viewing medium. The first reason to keep old-school television going is that most people don't like change. I know many people who have purchased TiVos for their parents, only to watch them use the minimal feature set that would be mostly analogous to a VCR. The second reason for TV to stick around in its current form is to provide a good combination of randomness and authority. There's a lot of content already out on YouTube, Veoh, FunnyOrDie, iTunes and so on, but a lot of it is BAD. Or it's great, but it's not really a series with things like long term plotting or character development. So I want some kind of gating function, some source that says "Yeah, we thought this was good enough to throw our money and our name behind."

But I don't want to watch TV on cable anymore. Even lovely, beautify digital HD cable. I want to buy my shows directly. It eliminates commercials, it eliminates (or augments) inaccurate Nielsen ratings (well, once networks take downloading seriously), and it should allow for the same long-tail phenomenon seen on Netflix to give indie and critical hits a fighting chance of surviving.

Now, you may be saying "iTunes does that, already, silly" and this is true, but I am a) just generally opposed to iTunes for their stupid DRM and b) I want to veg on my couch while I watch TV, not sit at my desk. The answer to my prayers was inside my TiVo for a long time now - hello, Amazon Unbox!

I had only been using Unbox on my TiVo for the freebies and extras, since I was already paying Comcast to bring me TV and Netflix to bring me movies. But a series of events led me to use Unbox to watch the first season of "Heroes" and the last few episodes of "How I Met Your Mother" and I am sold. Even SD shows look great. It does feel weird to go through the fade out/fade in with no commercials (hey, maybe it's the beginning of modernist abstract TV!) and I do miss the approximately 10% of commercials that are actually good. But, hey, I can always go to my Mom's house for that.

Local Flavor?

Because I listen to the radio all morning while I get ready for work, I have been repeatedly subjected to a horrifying series of ads for Colombo Yogurt's Name Your Colombo contest. They are far worse than the generic "Hey We Know Your Market!" type ads that Citibank put out when they came to town (and which BoA quickly and shrewdly made fun of in their own campaign). Why? Well, because where Citi was bland and generic, Colombo is specific and insulting. The three I have heard so far are:

An annoying man who mentions signifiers of upper class standing, such as a house on the Cape and a sports car, yet has a decidedly down-market accent and is so gauche as to call all of his friends on the way down to say "Hey, we're going to the Cape." No mention of how long he got stuck on Rt 3 in that shiny little sports car.

An annoying woman, who has a stereotypical Southie accent, but tells us she's from Southie in case you missed it. She has to deal with that darn unpredictable spring weather in Boston, so she goes out in shorts and a parka, then calls her friend to say she's invented the "sharka" then repeats this made-up word over and over for full accented effect. I guess they had to come up with a made-up word to best highlight the accent because you can't say "wicked retahded."

Finally, an annoying woman who talks about how bad the other drivers are in the rotary on the Arborway in JP. Okay, yeah, that one's true.

But, seriously, did they hire an angry Yankees fan to write these spots? The best regionalized spots show knowledge and affection for the region they skewer - the Boston.com "This Isn't Boston" series or the Dunkin Donuts ad featuring Curt Schilling a few years back. All these ads show to me is a superficial understanding and a lot of contempt.

Even more perplexing? For the contest itself, you are supposed to suggest a new New England-themed name - relating to Connecticut, Massachusetts or New York! Last time I checked, there were six NE states and New York was not one.

Do I Want Evernote?

I often tell people I am waiting for Google Brain to come to the market. I want all my objects RFID-tagged so I can find them; I want to be able to scan the ISBN of every book I read and make it full-text searchable and tagged so I can go back and find that great point that was made... uh... somewhere while I was reading on the T on Tuesday; and well, I'd just like the real world to be as helpful and responsive as my digital life is.

One of only two products I have ever heard of coming close to this is Evernote. The other is some project by a guy at Microsoft, and since Google Brain does not yet exist, I can't seem to track the info down. But the last time I looked at Evernote, I wasn't sure it was what I was looking for (well, okay, nothing that exists is really what I am looking for). I think it was, in part, because I had yet to discover how comfortable I was relying on GPS to tell me the nearest Dunkin Donuts or letting Google Maps be my lazy addressbook. I was reminded of Evernote's existence again recently by Salon, but the review didn't really inspire technolust. I mean, woo hoo, pictures of wine lables, so?

And then, today, I needed Evernote. At work, I realized I needed to call in a perscription refill, but did not have the Rx number is on the label at my home. If only I had taken a snap of this with Evernote when I first got the perscription, I'd be all set now. Serendipidously, Marc Hustvedt posted a review of the new version of Evernote today, stamping it "up to snuff."

Of course, my specific example raises the obvious concern with any service of this nature - privacy. After all, what's more personal than a medication? It did give me pause, but I have generally surrendered willingly into the All Your Data Are Belong to Google world, as long as I see some ROI.