[Foundation-l] advertising craigslist

Tue Dec 15 18:58:31 UTC 2009

geni wrote:
> 2009/12/15 Michael Snow <wikipedia at verizon.net>:
>   
>> That's a strangely limited notion of who has the capability to help -
>> only people who are quantitatively more famous than us? For a project
>> that's built around lots and lots of individual contributions (whether
>> we're talking content, finances, or publicity), none of them especially
>> huge in the overall scheme of things, it seems completely backwards to
>> suggest that such things are useless if they don't dwarf what has
>> already been achieved.
>>     
> The argument was that it was his fame that was helpful and that it
> rose to the level that we should overlook the obvious problem. If you
> wish to take my comments out of that context I can't stop you but you
> are attacking a strawman.
>   
I don't see why it would be out of context, or attacking a straw man, to 
challenge this understanding of what fame entails, or how much is needed 
for it to be helpful. As it's been said about this interconnected age, 
most of us end up being famous for perhaps 15 people, and sometimes to a 
wider audience for 15 minutes. Clearly less than the overall fame of 
Wikipedia, yet when it comes to endorsements or testimonials, that has 
been a big part of achieving it, something marketers would call 
word-of-mouth or buzz. Fame is highly context-dependent, so both the 
magnitude and the usefulness vary with the circumstances. (That's part 
of the reason to test different fundraising approaches against each other.)

The importance of context, and the existence of multiple contexts, also 
undermines the second half of the premise (whether it's yours or you're 
arguing against it, it's the wrong argument to have). It assumes this 
has a binary and zero-sum nature, and ignores the clear disagreement 
about whether there's a problem in the first place, let alone whether 
anything here is obvious enough to overlook. Yes, different kinds of 
fame interacting in a public setting will affect all the parties, it's a 
fundamental aspect of how society works. There will always be side 
effects and unintended consequences, because public attention is not 
something we can contain or control. Attempting to reduce it to an 
economic transaction is a very limited understanding of the dynamic, 
even if entire sectors of the web devote themselves to just that.

--Michael Snow