Just after lunch, on a day not long ago, I posted a blog using a pane of commemorative one-cent Yosemite stamps issued in 1934 found on eBay as the featured image. The blog was not about Yosemite or National Parks or the postal service or stamp collecting. It was about a book that happened to have that stamp on its cover.
When I logged back in after lunch, I had an email from eBay asking if I wanted to buy any with a selection of some clean, some cancelled, perhaps a pane, or maybe one still on the envelope. Look, you can read the Indianapolis postmark!
More likely this was a result of going to the eBay site since it was an eBay ad, but my blog also included an image of that book’s cover and a paragraph noting the significance of that stamp as opposed to one of the Grand Canyon, Glacier, or Zion–or the Washington Monument or George himself.
While I understand concerns others have for privacy on the internet, their reluctance to engage on social media, and their worry over insecure sites, I don’t share them.
For nearly fifty years, from the pages of a student newspaper to the opinion pages of daily and weekly newspapers and lately a relentless blog, I’ve spent most of my life wanting the world to know what I think.
Which means that I must hear any response, pro or con, constructive or mocking. So long as no threats are made, the debate can go back and forth indefinitely or end anytime. “Goes with the territory” is too understated a way to put it. In this business, you excel by topping the polls of best and worst. Simultaneously.
What never went with the territory before the internet were the targeted ads. Within a year of being online, I was simply ignoring them. It was new territory, after all.
But lately they happen so quickly that I wonder if someone is leaning on the windowsill behind me with a smartphone pointed at my laptop screen–someone who doesn’t care if I vote Democrat or Republican so long as they can sell me a shirt with any candidate’s name and a coffee mug that says how his or her opponent “sucks.”
First time I noticed this was eleven years ago when I wrote a column for the Newburyport Daily News about a Jethro Tull concert that had Procol Harum opening the show. This was not long after disastrous, embarrassing performances by the Rolling Stones and the Who in consecutive Super Bowls had many people demanding that old rockers hang it up and go away already.
Tull was as sizzling as they had been since 1970, so no surprise, but Harum blew us away, especially with a recent tune called “Wall Street Blues” that had everyone up and bouncing. Following a finale of their most memorable hits, “Conquistador” and “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” we long-time Tull-Skulls did something for an opening act that had been unthinkable for forty years: Encore!
As soon as my column appeared in print, I was sending the link in emails raving as much about Harum–new to the phantom on the windowsill–as about Tull–already well-known.
Started getting ads for Procol Harum merchandise right away. I still get them. Was it the column? The emails? A Facebook post? The PH site to learn what I could about “Wall Street Blues”? AZLyrics.com to see if “Shade of Pale” was lighter or whiter? An online dictionary for the spelling of Conquistador?
On the day that column ran, I awoke to an email from a collector of Tull memorabilia in London asking for a tearsheet. Daily News’ posts are always in wee hours, and I didn’t know it was scheduled for that day, so it was a welcome surprise for two reasons. Like many collectors–and like most all large companies, educational institutions, museums and all kinds of large enterprises–he subscribes to a “cyber-clip” service that sent him the link hours before I awoke.
Before the internet, there were companies–New England had two, both located in Keene, New Hampshire–whose business was to collect every newspaper and magazine they could and monitor them for any use of their clients’ names. They also reported copyright issues such as when anyone wrote kleenex rather than Kleenex or put a nonexistent S onto the end of Crackerjack. That took time. Even Keene State College waited a day or three for regional clips, and if someone wrote a fond reminiscence of life on the diverged road of Robert Frost for the Sacramento Bee, results would trickle in via Logan Airport and Concord Coach Lines.
Enter the algorithms, and now it is all in an instant. While the ads may be annoying, these occasional contacts via cyber-clippers make it worth it.
When the Screening Room ran a documentary titled Under Our Skin: The Untold Story of Lyme Disease (2008), a local support group took it upon themselves to make flyers to post all over town for us. Before long, one told me that they were being removed within a day from places where other postings remained, such as coffeeshops, even the public library.
Very day after I wrote about it, I was answering an email from one of the film’s producers in Los Angeles.
When a controversy emerged regarding Florida’s Democratic primary in 2008, I thought of the protracted, hanging-chad mess of 2000 and recalled that Florida was also one of the three states rigged for Rutherford Hayes in 1876. Ah, there’s a column, Always Florida!
Because the resulting column, “The bells toll for 1876,” mentioned should-have-been president Samuel Tilden, I soon had an email from Tilden’s biographer thanking me from Virginia for keeping his memory alive.
That was not one of my annual Presidents Day columns, the 13th of which will run next Monday (Feb. 15). The second one, the 2010 edition, soon followed the Supreme Court’s infamous Citizens United decision, and so I called it a “surgical strike” to wipe Teddy Roosevelt’s legacy from our politics–as well as his face from a national landmark. Headline: “Dumbing down Mount Rushmore.”
That night, a newspaper editor in Reno, Nevada, wrote to say that, while he agreed with my premise, he thought I gave TR way too much credit, much of which rightly belongs to his successor, William Howard Taft. He sent links to well-sourced and detailed essays to prove it, and so my 3rd Annual Presidents Day Address was to set the record straight. Headline: “Tiff for Taft.”
These notices can cause misunderstandings. While a strolling minstrel at King Richard’s Renaissance Faire, I wrote a handful of columns about what went on and, without giving too much away, how and why. All were upbeat and boisterous like the faire itself, save one which paid tribute to a fellow musician who passed away in an off-season.
But there were other columns, such as the one about Tull & Harum, with musical or Renaissance references for which I would mention the faire in my byline to serve as a credential. Since the cyber-clip makes no distinction for the byline, it simply added it all by itself to a link for a political column headlined “Putting Galileo on trial.”
The sight of it alarmed faire higher-ups who saw it in Minnesota, California, and who-knows-where-else when they mistakenly assumed that it was all about the faire. That was easily cleared up when I suggested that they click on the link and read the column.
Much like what happens more often than not on social media, it was a case of not reading beyond what the cyber-clip showed them. A headline, a photo, a caption, an intro, and perhaps one highlighted word or phrase.
No way any algorithms will ever cure that.
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Mouth of the River 