When he finally arrived in London, Backer told Billy Davis and Roger Cook what he had seen in the airport café. After he expressed his thoughts about buying everybody in the world a Coke, Backer noticed that Davis’s initial reaction was not at all what he’d expected and asked him, “Billy, do you have a problem with this idea?”
Davis slowly revealed his problem. “Well, if I could do something for everybody in the world, it would not be to buy them a Coke.”
Backer responded, “What would you do?”
“I’d buy everyone a home first and share with them in peace and love,” Davis said.
Backer said, “Okay, that sounds good. Let’s write that and I’ll show you how Coke fits right into the concept.”
.. The genius of Mad Men is that it’s as much about what’s invisible and what’s not said as what is. White male privilege is critiqued and dissected with fascinating scrutiny, because of the problem it creates in seeing the value in “others,” and the resulting self-destruction that comes from unchecked power and privilege. The catch is, those “others” have to be present to even begin to be neglected.
With this in mind, I decided to swear off modern men. No more Twitter games. No more Instagram dissections. No more Facebook predation. I wanted someone mature.
.. The modern-day equivalent of “shouting it from the rooftops” is adding a “Life Event” to Facebook, a proclamation of your undying love. Until your love dies and you have to painfully switch your status back to “single.”
Byron was not a life event; he was just sweetly in my life. For a while, as long as we lasted, I wanted, and got, something quieter. I wanted, and got, something more intimate. I wanted, and got, something too big to contain in 140 characters and that couldn’t be improved upon by filters.
.. Now Byron was really gone. Yet I thought about him every day. He had left no carefully chosen profile picture to hang over my screen, but he was all I longed for. I had wanted, and lost, something that could not be deleted.
Publishers have little choice but to cooperate with Facebook, said Vivian Schiller, a former executive at NBC, The New York Times and Twitter who now advises media companies and brands. “That’s where the audience is,” Ms. Schiller said. “It’s too massive to ignore.”
.. “We see ourselves as first helping people connect with friends and family,” Mr. Cox said. “And second, helping people be informed about the world around them.”
.. Facebook is offering publishers new tools to showcase their work, including interactive maps and the ability to post high-resolution photos that readers can zoom into and view from any angle.
He has said before that the confidence of the US press to challenge the US government collapsed post 9/11, but he is adamant that Obama is worse than Bush.
.. He says investigative journalism in the US is being killed by the crisis of confidence, lack of resources and a misguided notion of what the job entails.
.. “I would close down the news bureaus of the networks and let’s start all over, tabula rasa. The majors, NBCs, ABCs, they won’t like this – just do something different, do something that gets people mad at you, that’s what we’re supposed to be doing,” he says.