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Fragile Virtue

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Author Archives: Marnina Norys

The story of a subverted subversive

28 Wednesday Dec 2011

Posted by Marnina Norys in Uncategorized

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Pitbull in Kodiak

I have a confession to make: I helped exile rap singer Pitbull to a Walmart in Kodiak, Alaska. In participating in the Internet prank that achieved this, however, I also became party a social media campaign that could have resulted in a PR disaster had Walmart handled the situation poorly. Instead, what we saw was a celebration based far more broadly than Walmart could ever have hoped had the corporation and performer not been trolled as hard as they were. The moral of the story I’m about to tell is that due to the highly complex and chaotic environment created by the use of social media, companies cannot reliably predict the impact of online promotions and when or how these might go viral. However, with quick thinking on the ground (and quite possibly a sense of humour) companies can respond quickly and appropriately when they lose control of Internet promotions and even end up appealing to unlikely market segments along the way.

The chain events that brought Pitbull to Kodiak, Alaska started in the Spring of 2012 when Walmart and Sheets Energy Strips launched a campaign that promised a visit from the rapper to any Walmart store that received the most ‘likes’ on Facebook. It is probably important to note that while Pitbull may have no small number of adoring fans, he, Justin Bieber and all the members of Nickleback taken together comprise most of the top-10 list of musicians people love to hate. David Thorpe, one such anti-fan as well as a writer for comedy website somethingawful.com, heard of Walmart’s campaign and decided to start one of his own. Thorpe decided to hijack the contest in order to send Pitbull to the remotest part the USA possible. Kodiak fit the bill nicely, and Thorpe went to announce his devious plan to followers on Twitter using the hashtag #exilepitbull.

Thorpe’s twitter fans were quick to re-tweet his mischievous idea and soon it spread like wildfire on other social media sites such as reddit, 4chan and Facebook. Somewhere along the way I myself jumped on the bandwagon to cast one of the 71,000 or so ‘likes’ for the Kodiak Walmart. This number, incidentally, is many times higher than the town’s estimated population of 6,256. I was also gratified by having done so a few weeks later when I opened Facebook only to be greeted by a photo of an enormous stuffed grizzly bear looming over Pitbull’s shoulder along with the announcement from the local Walmart that the performer was indeed in Kodiak, Alaska. Celebratory postings soon followed on all the social media sites used to publicize the prank.

Thorpe himself reportedly said he was aiming “to disrupt a corporate social media campaign, since they really set themselves up for it.” Meanwhile online media blog The Gawker announced the visit as a victory for the Internet. The real winners, however, are Pitbull and Walmart. At any point along the way, either the company or the rapper could panicked or responded poorly to a promotional campaign spiralling out of control. They could have shut down the contest, tampered with the rules, or responded angrily on Twitter. Instead, during the voting period staff at the Kodiak Walmart posed for a picture while holding a banner proclaiming “We would love to have Pitbull.” A spokesperson for Walmart also reassured reporters regarding the Alaskan store that “If they do win, he is definitely headed there.” Pitbull himself, meanwhile, was tweeting “I hear there’s bear repellent at Kodiak, Alaska” and added Thorpe’s own hashtag #exilepitbull. In other words, everyone involved rolled with the punches and responded to the Thorpe’s prank with grace and good humour.

Now it was likely the case that the companies involved were aiming to appeal to a younger audience by showcasing a seemingly hot and hip performer such as Pitbull. However, by playing along with the joke and carrying through with their promise, Walmart and Pitbull also gained a certain amount of credibility, no matter how grudging, from an unlikely demographic. The kind of person who will find it appealing to exploit a corporation’s own advertising campaign for her own nefarious purposes is likely someone, such as myself, who is already skeptical and suspicious of most marketing activity. For instance, these are the sorts of folks who are currently abandoning Instagram in droves after news went viral that the company was going to use customers’ photos in advertising. And yet it is just these hard-to-market-to people who gratuitously shared photos of an extremely commercialized performer such as Pitbull posing inside a Walmart, a chain that is itself the quintessential beacon of corporate America if ever there was one. You can’t predict when it’s going to happen, but if you’re smart, you can make sure an Internet wildfire serves you instead of letting it devour you.

Finally, I’ll close with a couple more confessions, which is that although I’m still not crazy about shopping at Walmart, you can bet I’d go into the Kodiak one just to see the bear that posed with Pitbull. Meanwhile, I’m also just a smidgen less embarrassed now by the one or two songs by the guy that just happen to be on the iPod I use for the gym.

A winning rooster is still just meat: UFC champs, cock-fights and beauty queens

04 Sunday Dec 2011

Posted by Marnina Norys in Education

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

cock-fights, Doug Ford, Marnina Norys, sexual stereotypes, spectacle, UFC

“I’m an old broken-down piece of meat and I deserve to be all alone” — Mickey Rourke in ‘The Wrestler.’

You’d be crazy to call them a chicken to their faces, but broadly speaking, a UFC champion is just the winning rooster in a cock-fight. This is why a recent call to bring UFC themed programs into public schools should give one pause. Doug Ford may not know who Margaret Atwood is, but I bet he knows all about Randy (the “Natural”) Couture and Chuck (the “Iceman”) Liddell. Toronto’s esteemed city councillor is recommending that Toronto Schools look at a program that creates links between UFC (ultimate fighting championship) and school kids (see link below).

I have to admit, I’m of 2 minds here. On the one hand, I am a strong supporter of martial arts for kids. When I’m at the YMCA, I love seeing kids running around in their little karate suits, practising their flying kicks and katas, and crushing on their senseis. I was one of those kids, and martial arts did a lot for my self-esteem. I was also kind of excited when MMA fighting came to Canada, and I’m quite prepared to shell out some cash to go see a fight for myself. On the other hand, I also see how UFC fetishizes male violence and a caveman-style struggle for dominance (or perhaps the jockeying for status evidenced among our primate cousins). It’s a cock-fight writ large in which macho men give it all they’ve got in order to establish their spot in the pecking order. In the same way that beauty pageants make a spectacle out of selecting for the “fittest” females, UFC glorifies the macho competition for alpha status by turning it into a major mass media event.

Moreover, just as we see beauty pageants over-emphasising the importance of women’s physical attractiveness, UFC reinforces a stereotypical and limiting conception of masculinity. Namely, manliness is depicted as consisting merely of physical prowess and aggression. However, like the winning rooster in a cock-fight, any sense of superiority that can be won in such fights is largely an illusion. Socially speaking, for the vast majority of people, traits such as beauty or fighting prowess only get one so far in life. I would hazard that even champion fighters are but pawns of much greater corporate interests, while they have a grossly underwhelming impact on the sorts of socially significant decision-making that goes on in modern industrialized societies. Spartacus aside, these guys, these UFC fighters, they don’t influence modern policy any more than your average gladiator influenced the Roman senate.

Is this really a conception of success that we would want to be emphasising in our public school system? For one thing, I would predict that such a program will largely alienate young women. Apart from this, it valorizes a social role that is in reality, fairly limited. Even the fact that UFC programs are currently directed at at-risk (aka “poor”) youth worries me. It seems to reinforce the notion that if you’re low in the hierarchy to begin with, the best you can hope for is celebrity status based on your physical traits, minus any real empowerment. Moreover, and here’s the clincher, if you stop winning, your bloodied and broken body goes into the trash while your masters go shopping for a new bird.

http://www.thestar.com/news/article/1096707–doug-ford-suggests-schools-explore-ufc-linked-program

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Are social conservatives psychopathic narcissists with Machiavellian tendencies?

13 Sunday Nov 2011

Posted by Marnina Norys in Ethics, Philosophy, Psychology

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Marcus Arvan, moral reasoning, personality traits, virtue ethics

I just came across an interesting study in which researchers found a correlation between socially conservative views* and psychopathic, narcissistic …

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Reconfiguring Milgram’s subjects as persons acting on principle.

02 Friday Sep 2011

Posted by Marnina Norys in Ethics, Marnina Norys, Psychology

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A recent article linked to below came out in the Guardian that caught my eye today. In it the writer …

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The banishment of ‘syrupy’ sentiment from serious discourse

29 Monday Aug 2011

Posted by Marnina Norys in Marnina Norys, Relationships

≈ 3 Comments

Given the fundamental importance of relatedness for our health, our wellbeing and as a factor that makes life worth living, …

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Taoism, moral flow and centipedes

29 Monday Aug 2011

Posted by Marnina Norys in Ethics, Marnina Norys, Philosophy, Taoism

≈ 3 Comments

There’s a passage in the book of Tao that reads: “Failing Tao, man resorts to virtue Failing Virtue, man resorts …

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The writer

Marnina Norys

Has a PhD in Social and Political Thought at York University. Her dissertation is about the impact of technological rationality on professional caregiving, with an eye to psychiatric care specifically. The content here is varied, ranging from philosophy to pedagogical strategies, with entries on relationships and relatedness along the way.

Above the title you will find links to Norys’ public talks and below are links to download some of her papers and a sample course outline.

1. PhD Thesis "Mere Sources of Error": Workers, Patients and the Reductive Logic of Rationalized Healthcare

  • 1. Abstract
  • 2. Introduction
  • 3. Complete thesis

Blogroll

  • Complete Dissertation
  • Introduction

Book reviews

  • A Hole in the Head
  • Happy Pills in America From Miltown to Prozac
  • Open Love, Sex and Life in an Open Marriage
  • Relative Stranger Piecing Together a Life Plagued by Madness

Course Outline

  • Sample course outline

Papers (Hover over titles for paper description)

  • Adolf Meyer and American Psychiatry
  • Beautiful Women Without Pity: An critical analysis of histrionic personality disorder
  • Deriving oughts from is's in psychiatry
  • Kathleen Wilkes on Thought Experiments in Philosophy
  • Nozick's take on the JTB conception of knowledge
  • Phronesis and Taoism
  • Psychopathy: Madness or Badness?
  • Welfare vs. Autonomy: The Scott Starson Case

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