Poetry: Tom Paine's submarine

Republican friends! Worried about how you'll get through the next few days? Well, we have our own heroes too. Learn from them.

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Tom Paine's submarine

At some point in the fatuous flotilla, I dream I see
a periscope pop up, by King's Reach; and Thomas Paine
surface in a one-man submarine, having come back to
check on us, semaphore out this common sense hymn:
Boys and girls, I gave you the playbook
and you give me this? River traffic jams and
sycophancy disguised as red, white and blue treacle?
I wanted fanfares for all of you, not for one
uncommon persistence, but I fear you have been
seduced by the inertia, the dazzle and the bunting.
Break those jubilee lines! Unpick her ermine corset!
Burn those empire-tipped spears! And when you
dance around the bonfire, tell yourselves:
we are all the wearers of crowns.

Poetry: Dog Ear

Following on from telling you about the fab new publication Dog Ear, I've only gone and managed to get meself in the hard copy version of issue 2.

Good times &c. Find out where to get yours from the site. They're free, dontcha know?

Commercial: Wolff on advertising and social media

You might have missed this piece by Michael Wolff yesterday. Do go back to it; it's well worth your time. Mainly because it poses the real question about the relationship between advertising and social media that most of us in the industry have been dancing around, to whit:

Right now, the indisputable point is that plain old media, even as it steadily loses its claim on people's time, continues to attract a larger, and increasingly disproportionate share, of advertising dollars, just as social media becomes increasingly dependent on them. Eighty-two per cent of Facebook's revenues come from advertising – a much higher percentage even than that of plain old media.

Before drawing out the what should be obvious point that social media as it stands isn't necessarily going to deliver the type of advertising - that is to say, TV advertising - that might start to justify some of the more absurd social media valuations going around.


Plus it has this wonderful definition:

Giving power to your audience certainly seems to have a historical imperative behind it. But awkwardly, social media still depends on advertising which, fundamentally, depends in turn on a set of top-down manipulations that control what your audience thinks and feels at a given moment.