Media law wrangling in the New Wild West

The Internet is the new Wild West. Sure, there are huge expanses of uncharted territory left in the real world––Alaska, the deep sea, Antarctica––but charting something isn't the same as taming it, and the West was wild long after we'd mapped and criss-crossed it with railroads. The entrepreneurial spirit has always sought frontiers, and where there are frontiers, is the law ever far behind?

That's why I talked with Lisa McGrath, Boise NM law guru. She sees a lot of people treating new and social media like the traditional rules don't apply. Some of these rules, like copyrights, trademarks, and the general applicability of judiciously-drawn legal documents, seem intuitive; and yet she sees these rules being broken all the time.

But an unforeseen challenge to companies using NM may arise from an unexpected quarter: their own employees. The problem, she says, is pure common sense. Companies working with new media don't invite their legal departments to the table when drafting new and social media policies, or (worse) don't have policies at all.

What is a social media policy, you ask? It's a lot like a sexual misconduct or workplace discrimination policy, insofar as it informs the less-than-totally-formal functions of the workplace––a careful outline of the dos and don'ts for how a company's employees may use social media in their capacity as employees to A) protect that company's brand, and B) provide liability shielding. They also firmly establish access privileges and ownership of social media––something that can affect even small companies.

The failure to clearly establish ownership and access can play out like it did at The Bench Commission, where the employee responsible for updating the Commission's Facebook page left his job and took the Facebook password with him. Now, that local furniture store can't even update its page, and has to start from scratch––a tough thing to do when there's already a Commission Facebook presence.

I would have liked to include The Bench Commission in my article, but the owner, professing ignorance of social media, didn't feel he would be qualified to discuss the issue on record. This is unfortunate, because the article would have benefitted from the insights of someone licking his wounds over a SM misstep. 

McGrath also encourages social media training for employees, and I'm blown away that major users of social media like hospitals, airlines, and software companies don't train their employees to understand their media policies or how to use media effectively. What good are policies if you don't know they exist, or how they work?

The Idaho Democratic Caucus

I grew up in Portland, and my dad used to joke that Oregon liberals there were so tight-assed that there were permanent finger grooves in the steering wheels of their Volvo station wagons. Other adjectives he could have applied were "square," "ordnung," "straight-laced," "dour," and "prim." None of them are particularly positive adjectives.

For some reason, these Oregon-type liberals seemed to be the only ones in attendance at the Idaho Democratic caucus today at the Morrison Center. And since Boise is a pretty cool town, there were very few of them. I suppose it's the prim, ordnung ones who are procedure-oriented enough to actually vote to get the sitting President back on the ballot for the general election. 

I reported on the caucus for Boise Weekly with a motley crew of other reporters. Our job was to write stories on who was in attendance, and how attendees were keeping busy, since there was really only one candidate on the ballot. What surprised me––and what this blog post is about––is who wasn't there. 

Who wasn't there turned out to be practically everyone I know, even the most dyed-in-the-wool Democrats, from the dreadlocked guy who works at the Co-Op to the bartenders to the "Blue Women living in a Red State." The list of people who should have been at the Morrison Center is quite long, while the list of people who were actually there is quite short.

This isn't a new problem for Democrats. Voter turnout, in fact, is the Democrats' biggest problem. It's the fatal flaw that probably cost Al Gore the 2000 election, and is likely the secret weapon Mitt Romney is hiding under his coat for December, when he hopes to beat Obama in the general election.

I don't think Romney even has a fighting chance. For one thing, the cobwebs he's putting up aren't going to hold back the Sherman tank of Obama's war chest. For another, the two candidates are practically indistinguishable on many issues, and to court the socially conservative fringes of the Republican party, Romney's going to have to break from Obama in ways that are going to make him look utterly insane.

But I digress. The only way I see Romney winning is if, on election day, Democrats simply don't show up to vote. I would be shocked––really, really shocked––if Barack Obama doesn't bury Mitt Romney in a landslide victory later this year. I suppose I'm disappointed that, with so many passionate liberals in Idaho, so few of them thought it was worth their time to at least check the event out.

The problem with Bill Maher

Yesterday, Boise Weekly announced that Bill Maher, a darling among cable television's politically-minded comedians, will be visiting Boise on August 18. This is what Idaho conservatives would call shooting fish in a barrel.

Maher's draw is obvious: His brand of comedy mixes a reasonable outlook on politics with biting scorn for stupidity and counterproductive thinking. Or so his fans think. Other people––the people who leave comments on my Facebook wall, for example––think he's an asshole.

That Maher can be combative and unfair isn't what worries me. What worries me is that so few of his fans see him for the pundit that he is. In a recent episode of The Colbert Report, anchor Stephen Colbert defines, with his usual grinning sarcasm, what that means. Pundits have to have an opinion on everything; they have to be be right, even when they're wrong; they have to be loud and quotable.

The problem is that the man fosters a combative consensus. Where Jon Stewart looks at through the news through a set of values we think of as common to the human race, frequently coming across as more compassionate and even-keel than his audience, and Stephen Colbert satirizes punditry by exaggerating the moves of men less aware of their ridiculousness than himself, Bill Maher casts himself as a smarter, funnier, liberal version of Bill O'Reilly.

I sometimes wonder what would happen if he were put into a room full of people who didn't necessarily agree with him. His show is full of canned, sycophantic laughter, and his guests are hand-picked to either agree with him and laugh at all his jokes, or be dumb enough to lose to him in an argument. He puts on a self-satisfied face after his one-liners, and pauses while his fans shower him with their agreement.

Just watch to see how insufferable he is.

Real Time with Bill Maher is political humor in a bubble, and I think Maher's smug sense of self-righteousness underscores the thickness and insularity of that bubble. What the man doesn't seem to realize is that good political humor isn't about being right, it's about following the conventional rules of humor, and that means giving the other side (those people he's so good at lampooning) a fairer shake than he does.

Take your smartphone into the bathroom

During an interview I conducted yesterday on the topic of companies using social media to promote branding, a local freelance social media coordinator who will remain nameless told me she takes her smartphone into the bathroom.

"Everybody knows it already," she said, adding that she didn't mind if that information found its way into the article. (It won't.)

What I'm learning is that social media are a lot like a yappy little dog that will literally follow you onto the shitter if you let it, and a lot of people do. It doesn't make for a good Tweet to observe that one's having a particularly satisfying bowel movement, but anymore, information is instantaneous, and passing information and insight along can take seconds. My nameless SM coordinator calls this being "plugged in."

I don't have a smartphone. I have a dumbphone that's mostly good for making phone calls and sending text messages. Doing the journalism thing, I realize that not only does everyone around me have a smartphone––everyone around me is using smartphones to tremendous effect, sending Tweets, updating Facebook, etc. I'm a little jealous, but I think I can hold out a little longer.

That isn't to say that I'm unconnected to SM. If you're reading this, you likely found a link to it on my Facebook page or on Twitter. What amazes me is that so many companies aren't plugged in. One friend called a company's failure to engage Facebook "amateur hour," and since speaking with him, I've been trying to tease out of my interviewees the notion that there's something lazy about not taking advantage of free advertising.

My SM coordinator tells me that's not necessarily the case, that you should engage SM iff you have the time and inclination. She also told me that any business can find some way to make being plugged in a valuable business strategy. For some, that strategy can be public communication, as it is with the Idaho vodka distillery 44 North; other companies use it to advertise, like The Bench Commission. Goody's candy shop "buys" its Facebook fans with the promise of a scoop of ice cream.

Social Media's wide applicability, low cost, and relatively low time investment have made them virtually inescapable. Writing my story, I realize the hard part is going to be finding someone who will argue against them.