After a career in advertising (which continues as I freelance my way into life’s twilight), I’m a bit torn about my feelings about the business. As a kid in high school and college, I hated advertising, believing it got people to buy stuff they didn’t need or want. Of course, that’s sometimes true. But more often than not, advertising is just trying to persuade people to buy something whether they need it or not — and oftentimes they do. There’s no arm twisting of the sort one might experience on a used-car lot. There’s just a company with stuff to sell that needs some help selling it to people who need it or who might otherwise do without it. And ad agencies are there to help. Themselves and others. They helped earn me a living, raise a family, pay my mortgage, buy stuff the fam needed, and get by.
 
Advertising, actually branding, has been around ever since one human tribe encountered another human tribe who had goods or game they needed but didn’t have. When one tribe did have a surplus of grain or pelts and then found a way to trade and make up the difference, modern-day capitalism was born. And if that arrangement didn’t work out, they could always fight over what one had and the other didn’t — which, as we know, they did with some regularity. Over time, the clunky bartering in grain for pelts or whatever was replaced by money, which has taken all sorts of forms, everything from salt to cocoa beans to beer to gold. Gold, which to be honest, serves no real physical need, but which its status as a rarity (not to mention its sunny brilliance) allowed it to serve as common means of exchange. But I digress.
 
Advertising and branding are necessities in a world of competing items that bear no significant differences. Pepsi and Coke. Nike and Adidas. Infinity and Lexus. Lays and Ruffles. If we’re upfront about things, either of these alternate brands would fit the need they actually serve: something sweet to drink, something to cover one’s feet, something to get from point A to point B, something salty and greasy and fattening and therefore delightful. Naturally, their brand followers would insist on some difference, but marketers know better, seeing as how they readily jump from one marketing division or ad agency to another with some regularity in the interest of advancing their careers and increasing their salaries.
 
Advertising by itself lost its heft to communicate discernible value a while back. Nowadays, when it comes to mass-market products, advertising is nothing but the promotion of brands. The old tools of advertising — sales, couponing, today-only, two-for-one deals, no interest till the Pope marries — still have their place. But the real business of advertising (the advertising people talk about at Cannes and that fills award-show books) is the promotion of brands — products with comparable alternatives — brands that need to attach unknowable, indiscernible, and unquantifiable value to a company’s products or services.
 
Today we are enamored of brands. And for many, they have replaced longstanding attachment to church or party or country club. As a kid, I knew dudes as a Chevy or Ford guy and somewhat later as a Nike or Adidas or Columbia or North Face guy. And in these raucous times, I also know rightwing or leftwing nutjobs — Trumpeters and Berners or whatever — but those aren’t brands, just secular religions whose gods will, like all gods, eventually die. In some ways, the very idea of branding and how it works is, at best, a cataloging schema. It’s the sort of schema that Russian, Chinese, Facebook, and Instagram, and the world’s varied brand trollers rely on to influence your purchase or your vote. If we can put people in a brand box, it’s just fucking easier to get them to do shit, whatever that shit might be.
 
For descendants of Western Civilization — civilization being a generous description of the last several millennia seeing as civil is its root meaning — a long-running belief in a life hereafter has been replaced by a life right now. We want to be cool right now! We want to be envied right now! We want to be wearing the brand to die for right now! This is leading to all sorts of problems, not the least of which is the depletion of the ozone, ocean fisheries, fresh water, and landfill locations, along with the appearance of Pacific islands of floating plastic three times the size of France.
 
The lost love of the Cross and its replacement by the gauche idolatry of stuff — basically the replacement of a willingness to forego want for a better hereafter with I want shit now— doesn’t bode well humankind. None of this is to say that branding and buying and having stuff is evil. It’s just a plea for moderation. Once the race figures out how to live within its means, things will improve. But whether it will or not is something the current want-it-now crowd doesn’t give a fuck about. The secular crew I share faith with live in hope, hope being the only brand that gets me through the day.
 
© 2019 John Hofmeister. All rights reserved. 

​They’re not social networks. They’re tribal networks.
The advent of social networks began, as their name implies, as a great big hug among friends. Announce baptisms, birthdays, betrothals, graduations, and promotions! Pass along gift ideas! Share all that lovely bonhomie with all your pals everywhere! 
 
Yet none of us live in a purely friendly, social collective. We all know — and are probably related to — perfect idiots whose understanding and intelligence is and has been forever suspect. Those folks who account for eyerolls at holiday gatherings when they say something found to be accountably, obviously, and refutably stupid with a basic Google search. You know, people who don’t read. People who rely on Facebook for news. People who watch and listen to one network to tell them what’s going on in the world. Forgivable offences would they not affect the future of our democracy.
 
Of course, calling social networks “social” grants them a kindness that they don’t deserve. There’s nothing social, a term that implies conviviality and friendship, about these networks. They are, as time has shown, nothing more than gossip mongering among like-minded lovers and haters of whatever we love and hate. The social sharing we seek is invariably subject to the heartfelt cares of Aunt Martha who thinks we need to know about the Second Coming, Donald Trump’s twitter feed, and the easily-refuted fictions barked by Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and Fox News. Martha means well but her sources are a bit suspect.
 
Imagine a network absolutely free of political discourse. An awful place to be sure, but one that doesn’t ask us to parade our politics or religion or sexuality for whatever reason people want to parade such things. It seems that the Internet has allowed us to return to our basest of instincts — to believe without facts, to accept without caution, to herd without thought, and to run off the cliff to our perdition and embrace the unwitting yet gleeful approach to the bottom of our worst selves.
 
Go Tribe!
(I know this expression too well and recognize that its only saving grace for me is its gut-wrenching hurrah for an unhappy baseball team in Cleveland whose fans have waited since 1948 for a World Series win. What can I say? It’s October and my Tribe is, as ever, in mourning.)

​©2018 John Hofmeister. All rights reserved. 

When Followers Are Fans or Sheep or Just Onlookers
 
The sheer numberof followers of Trump or Obama or Katy Perry has led me to wonder about the difference between sheep and followers. Trump’s Twitter account boasts some ridiculous number of “followers,” a number we are led to believe is an indication of his popularity. I wonder though. How many of those followers are just news junkies, reporters, pundits, and content aggregators searching for information or simply something to fill their content holes? And let's not forget all those foreign agents trying to worm they way into Trump's favor and always on the lookout for a juicy tweet to incite Trump's love. If nothing else, Trump has simplified news gathering. He’s a content gifting machine that never stops giving. Still, I imagine a fair number of Trump’s followers are the social equivalent of gawkers who slow down to see accidents or the crowds one invariably finds around dumpster fires and Confederate monument topplings. LikeChauncey Gardenerof Being There, some people just like to watch. And no one likes to watch more than Trump.
 
The number of Trump’s Twitter followers doesn’t necessarily indicate approval, and while some might be Trumpians, many are not. Twitter followers of politicians, unlike those of entertainers, might be politically aligned with the guy or gal they are “following” but a good number are just interested onlookers. People who follow Katy Perry actually like her for the mostpart, otherwise why bother? The same I suppose can be said of brand junkies, those crazy high school football players, for example, who come to believe that Nike or Adidas or Puma are the killer brand to wear and so veer towards college programs that sport the right logos. These are the tiny diehard band of brand followers one finds on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or Pinterest with whom their respective marketers are swooning to have brand conversations — about what I can only imagine. Arch support? Hi-top or low? Velcro or laces? Mitigating shoe stink? Etc. And I’m quite sure with the right scholarship offer those footballers (perhaps at the behest of mom and dad) would find a way to sport that other guy’s logo. Money talks. Brands walk.
 
It's certain that Trump has politicized social media with lots of help from industrious troll farms in Moscowand Beijing or that 400-pound guywho Donald talks about. Of course, Bernie and Hillary and Obama relied on social media to share their beliefs and amp up support, turnout, and donations. All’s fair in love, politics, and hacking. Yet as we turn our personal social media into echo chambers, our ability to think cogently will continue to wither. And with no shared public square, a place where truth is actually truth (no matter what Rudy Giuliani thinks), the ability to have meaningful conversations about how to govern ourselves will disappear. We will return to our most basic of instincts to tar the other, mistake our foolish prejudices for facts, and surrender our better angels to the demons of division. Like sheep to the slaughter, many will go happily while some small few will look on, hoping for better days.

​©2018 John Hofmeister. All rights reserved. 
 
 
 
 
 

Few days pass that I don’t see a ridiculous post like this:

There is nothing epic about this. At best it’s little more than a typical martial arts fight scene that shows some cool Audi technology. But epic? A little visit to dictionary.com gives this meaning of the word:
 
epic
[ep-ik]
Adjective. Also epical.

1. noting or pertaining to a long poetic composition, usually centered upon a hero, in which a series of great achievements or events is narrated in elevated style: Homer's Iliad is an epic poem.
2. resembling or suggesting such poetry: an epic novel on the founding of the country.
3. heroic; majestic; impressively great: the epic events of the war.

 
Mediocre advertising and lazy writing in general has turned the term epic into a cheap expression that means “awesome shit” or whatever cliché one might dredge up to describe something that is generally ordinary. And when placed in a headline, it’s either a lie or what Huck Finn would call a “stretcher” at best. I wonder how many writers who seize on epic — struggling for that headline that will draw eyeballs and likes and reposts — even know who Homer was. If asked, the likely answer would be the dad in the Simpsons, not the blind poet who passed along Western literature’s greatest epic poem to humankind.
 
The Audi ad has no epic qualities. It will be forgotten by the end of the month. Maybe sooner. I am already having trouble recalling its particulars. And calling the martial arts mayhem in the ad epic isn’t even a stretcher, given the range of scenes that might compete for the title, Uma Thurman’s role in “Kill Bill” being an obvious example. And let’s not forget Bruce Lee.
 
Robbing the power of words to connote their true meaning makes all of us poorer.
 
When everything becomes epic or awesome or heroic, virtually nothing is. Awesome, like epic, in common use bears no relation to its meaning — that being, inspiring awe. Heroic long ago lost its heft from overuse.
 
The laundry of lazy writing and writers could fill a bajillion laundromats, which, if one knows the meaning of bajillion, is fairly likely since you can’t find laundromats as readily as we once could and whose steady disappearance from the landscape mirrors the likes of gas stations and phone booths. But bajillion is simply a term that denotes an extremely large number — and readers know that. Use it at your leisure to describe big numbers with some freedom, knowing that everyone knows you’re just talking about a lot of fucking stuff.
 
So, when might epic be used to reveal its true meaning? There might be some value in using it in writing about global warming or describing James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” Other than that, writers ought to give it a rest. An epic rest, that being an impressively great and epically long one.

©2018 John Hofmeister. All rights reserved. 

It takes a while and rooting around to figure out how to delete a Facebook account — which I have decided to do because I don't trust Mark Zuckerburg and Sheryl Sandberg farther than I can throw them. I will miss the simplicity of seeing what friends and family are up to, but they know where I live and what my street address, email address, and phone number are. Plus I have my own website where anyone can leave me notes — I'm at jhofmeister.com. So if it really matters, they can reach me (unlike knowing where my friends are having dinner tonight and at what restaurant — which they like sharing for reasons completely unknown to me, but hey, who am I to say what to share?).

Most interestingly, why does it take 14 days to permanently delete my account? It would take less time to have my house painted and my roof replaced. These are COMPUTER-BASED systems — you know, the kind where you press delete and shit goes away.

As to politics, Facebook is nothing more than an echo chamber for one's political beliefs. It doesn't invite thoughtfulness — only mindlessness. It exists mostly to let people sell me stuff. When I need things, I shop for them. If there's something I didn't realize I needed, how could this be a need in the first place? Businesses are forever trying to alert us to unknown needs. I'm happy to keep my unknown needs unknown, but thanks anyway.

In the end, deleting my account might actually foster my sending personal notes to real friends, that handful that I actually interact with on a regular basis. For all the extended circle of friends who won't see my posts or I theirs, accept my holiday, birthday, graduation, wedding, First Communion, Confirmation, and lost pet wishes and know that your LIKES in this regard would have been one larger had Mark Zuckerburg decided to let me opt-in as to whether I want to be sold stuff or have my data shared with anyone, anywhere. It's not that hard, Mark. There are algorithms and everything for stuff like that. Ask your coding team.

Someone out there is getting ready to launch a really low-cost subscription site that does what we want Facebook for and nothing more. I'd pay a buck or so a month for that. What about you? Multiply that by how many people use Facebook. Some savvy entrepreneur is waiting to make a ton of money. If you're the person who's ready to do this, please contact me so I can help with the marketing and advertising. Or at the very least, give me an in for your IPO. You're welcome!
​
©2018 John Hofmeister. All rights reserved.

There are lots of reasons to worry about the internet. The invasion of privacy. The trolling by Putin to influence elections. The echo chambers it builds for partisan politics.

But one thing's for sure, it's made it easier to comparison shop in all sorts of ways.
​
Recently during a snow storm, I was driving down an unplowed street, and hit something, whether a pothole or some debris (a brick or whatever). And bang! My tire pressure gauge came on immediately. Long story shortened: I would need to get a new rim for one of my wheels.
 
I had my car towed to a Goodyear shop to assess the damage. I was told I would need a new rim. The dealer price for a new rim was $489. The rim the Goodyear shop found was a "reconditioned" one that cost $360 something. So I go online and searched by car, year, model, rim and found one for $104. Holy smokes I thought. Could this rim be as good as the rims the dealer and repair guy have found?
 
All the reviews (it was an Amazon store) said the rims were just as good as the OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) product. Several different companies offered knock-offs. I went for the one with free shipping. Rims are kind of heavy.
 
So I ordered the knock-off. It shows up in two days. I take it to the repair shop. They were nice about my wanting to supply my own parts (some aren't, since they make money on this stuff). I got my car back with new, virtually identical rim and drove home, having saved over $300.
 
So next time your repair shop tells you the replacement part will cost X, divide X by 4.
 
Thanks, Internet!

©2017 John Hofmeister. All rights reserved. So there!

Not a day goes by that I don’t see it’s or its used incorrectly. Usually, it’s is the culprit. Having fallen victim to the error myself, I began thinking about why it happens so often even among generally careful writers despite all the grammar checkers and proofing tools available to help us catch mistakes.
 
I’ve always been bedeviled by homonyms, mostly because I sound out things in my head as I read, so there, their, and they’re all sound alike. It’s the same with its and it’s. I take one for the other occasionally in drafts, but when I do my proofing, I think on pronouns and their curious pitfalls.
 
Take these two pronouns for example — she and he. To show possession, she becomes her and he becomes his. But then we have hers when we say something belongs to her: It’s hers. Yet, his doesn’t change at all — it’s his. We also have yours, ours, and its — all three indicate possession but don’t have the usual apostrophe S as regular nouns do: John’s, Ed’s, Nancy’s, etc. But depending on how they appear in a sentence, John’s or Ed’s or Nancy’s, might be contractions: John’s = John is, Ed’s = Ed is, and Nancy’s = Nancy is. But with pronouns, an apostrophe S is always a contraction and never indicates possession: he’s = he is, it’s = it is, she’s = she is.
 
Pronouns are outliers because several of them show possession by simply adding an S without the apostrophe like other nouns do: hers, ours, theirs, yours. So, we write it’s hers, it’s ours, it’s theirs — but with regular nouns we have it’s John’s, it’s Ed’s, it’s Nancy’s (it — whatever it is — belongs to John, Ed, or Nancy, respectively). But some pronouns do take an apostrophe S: one’s, anyone’s, and someone’s — as in One’s fingerprint is unique, It must be someone’s, It could be anyone’s. Yet, they can be contractions, too: Someone's got to do it = Someone has to do it. It’s the same for somebody and anybody. Frankly, it’s a pretty maddening bit of grammar.
 
So back to its and it’s. It is a pronoun, and when it wants to indicate possession, it doesn’t have an apostrophe S, it’s just its. It’s is always a contraction.
 
It’s easy to see why a non-native speaker trying to learn English would find this pronoun business random and nonsensical — and why native speakers fall for its when it should be it’s. The simple test when proofing is to sound out it’s as it is and see if your sentence makes sense. If it doesn’t, you want its.
 
©2017 John Hofmeister. Originally published at jhofmeister.com/musings. ​