Twitter is watching you.
................................................................................................................................
Although Animal Farm is one of my favorite novels, George Orwell really annoyed me with 1984. Well, just kidding, I really liked that book too. I was just bitter that he picked my birth year to predict a totalitarian world where privacy and civil rights didn’t exist anywhere. I mean, I thought 1984 was great year for a baby. Anyway, he might have been onto something, just a decade or two too early.
Though mainly non-partisan when it comes to politics, it was hard not to see the door to our liberties close slightly with the Patriot Act of 2001. A statue that allowed the government to selectively access telephone, email, medical and financial records to protect our “freedom”, it made everyone wonder … is anything private anymore? Well, not really. And with the crazy technological boom of the past decade, it’s made the line between what is private and what is public not only blurry, but pretty much invisible.
Insert the social media craze. Whether searching for a job, investigating a crime, or just trying to spread a plethora of fast knowledge, outlets such as Facebook and Twitter have become catalysts for studying human behavior and examining an individual’s thoughts. Now some of these thoughts are being filed into public record ... and studied.
Read more
A Branding Mission From Our Government
The branding mission, should you choose to accept, is to re-brand No Child Left Behind.
On February 4th, Arne Duncan, our new Secretary of Education, shared his vision with Michelle Block on All Things Considered. Mr. Duncan considers quality education to be “the civil rights issue of our generation.” With this rhetoric you can trust he is not kidding around when he challenged all of us in the branding industry to “repackage and rename” the education reform set to replace or improve upon “No Child Left Behind.” This is quite the linguistic challenge because not only does this name need to inspire the inclusion and betterment of all American children but it also needs to rebuild bipartisan consensus on education reform! Read more