Gamers, especially hardcore ones, are a very picky bunch. Everything has to be absolutely or at least near perfect. And that isn’t limited to graphics only. It also extends to the audio experience, something that Razer knows only too well. Now the gaming brand is bringing some of that audio expertise to mobile. With the new wireless Hammerhead BT and … Continue reading
By now most Americans know what happened to Dr. Dao on United Airlines. At this point, a good portion of the planet probably does. But every day the story gets a little worse. Seeing the video of the United passenger being dragged of the plane was bad enough, but United made it worse when the external response differed from its memo to employees.
Externally, United posted a standby statement attributed to its CEO, Oscar Munoz stating that, “This is an upsetting event to all of us here at United. I apologize for having to re-accommodate these customers. Our team is moving with a sense of urgency to work with the authorities and conduct our own detailed review of what happened. We are also reaching out to this passenger to talk directly to him and further address and resolve this situation.”
Internally, the message was quite different. Munoz blamed the victim, stating that the as yet unnamed Dr. Dao was “disruptive” and that as CEO he stood behind the actions of United employees. Naturally, the internal memo went external in a nanosecond.
Two days later, I opened a work-related travel and expense application to a bold message in red type that said “United, American, and Delta airlines have implemented Non-Refundable, No-Cancel, No Seating, No Upgrade type fares. It is extremely important that you read the fare carefully if you do not wish to purchase these types of fares.” Really? I can still see the video of Dr. Dao’s limp body being dragged through the cramped United airplane aisle. Not only do I feel solidarity with Dr. Dao but I begin to realize that I am actually afraid to fly United after what I have seen. And now United is now coming at me from a different angle, reinforcing their unrelenting dedication to beating up passengers, both literally and figuratively. Talk about brand consistency. Yikes.
A few days later, we found out that Dr. Dao suffered a concussion, lost his two front teeth, and got his nose broken during the fiasco that United described as an attempt to “re-accommodate” a passenger. And on that same day, on a flight to Calgary, in business class, a scorpion dropped out of the overhead compartment onto a passenger’s head and stung him…on United. OMG!
So, in case anyone was wondering, it’s official. This is a crisis! Some tips for the CEO on how to handle:
Start with your own humanity
Remember that you are human and so is your customer. Sit quietly and start there. Ask yourself what that implies about how you move forward. Do not start by consulting the General Counsel or a crisis specialist PR firm. Start by consulting yourself. Once you have grounded yourself in your own humanity you are ready to take the next step. If you do this, you will avoid having to think about the next tip.
Do not blame the victim
I am going to assume that you had not seen the video when you called Dr. Dao “disruptive.” Never blame the victim. You are in the service business. In the service business, the customer is always right – remember? The airline business is an empathy and trust business. Who can trust someone who is willing to blame a passenger for wanting to get to their destination unmolested while imbibing water and a few peanuts, all the while foregoing personal space? In this case, not only do you appear to be lacking in empathy and trustworthiness, you appear irrational in the context of the video of Dr. Dao being dragged off the plane.
Winning a legal argument does not win hearts and minds
Know that going into any crisis that in today’s social media world you can win the legal battle and still lose the war for the hearts and minds of your customers. No customers, no revenue. Communications is king/queen.
Trying to put lipstick on a pig is never a good way to go
As an animal lover, I think pigs are cute and smart. But as the saying goes, you can put lipstick on a pig but s/he will still be a pig. People like to talk about “spin” but “spin” does not exist, especially in the social-media-cellphone-camera world we live in today. No one can “spin” his/her way out of a PR crisis. In fact, most of the time a PR crisis is not a PR crisis. Most of the time, a PR crisis is a monumental failure in execution, judgement or ethics, an underlying business or personal lapse, having nothing to do with PR. That failure is then often compounded by a tone-deaf response. So if your organization is not nimble enough to avoid creating the problem in the first place, you have to fix the problem. There is no spin option. You must establish your empathy and allay fears, you must change systems, processes and people. ASAP.
Speak in plain English internally and externally
The public is going to figure it out what you mean anyway so say it in plain English. “Re-accommodating” just does not cut it. And for internal purposes, if you cannot face a problem, you cannot handle it effectively.
No daylight between internal and external communications
In this case, and in most cases, internal communications and external communications messages must be the same, especially in tone. Internal communications become external in seconds. Literally. Consistency between the two shows that you know what you mean, and you mean what you say, everywhere, all of the time.
Strive for consistency – and give your employees room to maneuver
When your tagline is “Fly the friendly skies” you and all employees should be, well, friendly. Everywhere, all the time, not matter their role or position in the pecking order.
Make sure you have the right people. Establish a principles-based, not a rules-based environment. Then trust your people to make the right decisions without a rulebook. Give them leeway to maneuver. If the ground crew had embraced the notion of being friendly and had been empowered to offer passengers, say, $15,000 and a trip to any destination where United flies to “re-accommodate” voluntarily before this incident occurred, they probably would have been fired. I bet that deal looks like a bargain now.
Linda Dunbar is a public affairs, PR and corporate communications executive with deep expertise leading a full spectrum of communications disciplines. Her multi-industry experience includes roles at Sterling Bancorp, Dow Jones, Ford Motor Company, the American Institute of CPAs, Philip Morris International, and JP Morgan. She can be contacted at linkedin.com/in/lindaedunbar.
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Following his 2015 divorce, far-right radio host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones is embroiled in an ugly and somewhat bizarre custody battle.
In response to his ex-wife’s claims that the InfoWars founder and Pizzagate controversy propagator is “not a stable person” ― and therefore should not receive custody of their children ― Jones is arguing that his publicly jacked-up, trumped-up, vitriolic rants are merely instances of “performance art.”
Jones’ lawyer Randall Wilhite outlined the novel defense, telling those present at a recent pretrial hearing that Jones’ InfoWars persona does not reflect who he is as a person. “He’s playing a character,” Wilhite said. “He is a performance artist.”
Jones himself made a similar claim in early April while facing criticism ― and potential criminal proceedings ― after calling Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) an “archetypal cocksucker” and threatening in an expletive-laden rant to “beat [his] goddamn ass.” Jones later posted a follow-up video describing the comments as “clearly tongue-in-cheek and basically art performance, as I do in my rants, which I admit I do, as a form of art.”
Jones’ most famed “performances” to date include calling the 9/11 attacks an inside job, claiming the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School was “completely fake with actors,” and suggesting that the American government is “encouraging homosexuality with chemicals so that people don’t have children.” Is it possible that Jones has been putting on some sort of persona to stir up controversy and garner public attention? Of course. It is unlikely, however, and ultimately dangerous, that Jones’ approximately 2 million listeners ― including his most famed fan, President Donald Trump ― were all aware that Jones’ red-faced tirades are for show.
In calling himself a performance artist, Jones is referencing a controversial live art tradition with roots in the 1950s and ‘60s, involving movements like Gutai and Fluxus and individuals like Marina Abramović and Vito Acconci. One of the earliest artists recognized for her performances is Carolee Schneemann, who was recently awarded the Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement. In one of her most iconic performances, 1975’s “Interior Scroll,” Schneemann stood nude on a table, painted her body with mud, and extracted a scroll from vagina, from which she proceeded to read.
When asked about Jones’ performance art defense, Schneemann responded swiftly: “I think it’s all a load of crap,” she told The Huffington Post. But ultimately, any attempts to strictly classify what is or is not performance art, she clarified, are futile.
“Anything can be considered performance art, even if it is not part of some recognizable set of conventions,” she added. “One time I fell down and got a concussion at a museum in LA. Afterwards people said, ‘Way to go Carolee, great work.’ The terminology is decrepit and imprecise and has no true relationship to the originating visions of early performance art that evolved from Happenings and Fluxus. Many things that are embarrassing or regrettable, people say, ‘Oh, it must be performance art.’”
This much seems to be true. In 2015, a man named Joe Gibbons was sentenced to one year in prison after pleading guilty to third-degree felony robbery for stealing $1,002 from a New York bank and filming it on a pocket-size video camera. Gibbons claimed the flubbed heist was “an act of performance art coupled with dire financial straits.”
Gibbons, unlike Jones, had a solid reputation in the performance art world prior to the event in question. He’d produced work featured in the Whitney Biennial and served as an art lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Though his bank robbery certainly smudged the line between critical performance and “real life,” that was precisely Gibbons’ schtick ― “blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction, self and persona.”
Another recent, calamitous attempt at purported performance art took place in August 2016 when a woman named Zaida Pugh feigned a mental breakdown on a New York subway car, wreaking havoc. Pugh spilled a box filled with 300 crickets and 300 worms onto the train, urinated on the floor, and threatened to defecate while screaming and hitting herself, as panicked passengers tried to calm her down.
“I did this to show how people react to situations with homeless people and people with mental health,” Pugh told Fusion after revealing the incident, which went viral, was all an elaborate act. “How they’re more likely to pull out their phone than help.”
While Pugh was largely condemned for exploiting the epidemics of homelessness and mental illness for her project ― along with trapping innocent people in a crowded subway car filled with live bugs for half an hour ― few could argue against the fact that she did, in fact, organize a performance and execute it as planned.
It might not have been good performance art, but it was performance art.
According to multidisciplinary artist Kalup Linzy (a former James Franco collaborator) there are a few aspects one must consider when attempting to understand an event as performance art: the artist’s intention, the work’s “awareness factor” and its ability to raise questions or reveal a larger truth.
“Even if it is in the style of a prank or public intervention,” he told HuffPost, “you recognize the critique as it is happening, when it is over, or after the artist reveals [his or her] intentions.”
By Linzy’s definition, Jones barely qualifies as a performance artist. While he did eventually “reveal his intentions,” he only did so when he found himself up against the wall fighting for custody of his children. It was in 1995 when Jones accused the U.S. government of being involved in the Oklahoma City bombing, meaning “artist” Jones has failed to confront whether or not his audience was aware of his intentions for decades.
However, rather than simply shutting down Jones’ claim, most artists seem interested in his claim. If Jones is a performance artist, what would that mean? What is at stake? “I am interested in what his audience thinks,” Linzy said. “Were they duped? Even with the cruelest intentions, what universal truths have or will be revealed about his audience? About him? If he isn’t crazy, then that means his audience is.”
Emma Sulkowicz, the artist known for carrying her mattress around Columbia University’s campus to symbolize the weight she carried as a survivor of rape, believes that the art world should take Jones at his word.
“It would be terrible if a bunch of artists and academics said, ‘No, Alex Jones cannot claim to be a performance artist,’” she told HuffPost. “I would hate to see those with cultural capital acting as judges, picking who is/isn’t allowed to be a performance artist. Art-making should be open to anyone, no matter how dubious the circumstances.”
Sulkowicz emphasized, however, that accepting Jones as an artist does not mean letting him off the hook.
“In light of this, we must take performance art seriously; it has real effects,” she said. “So, if Jones claims to be a performance artist, he has not procured an excuse to do whatever he pleases. We must evaluate his actions through a critical lens. What cause does his work promote? Does it put people at risk? As a performance artist, Jones’ work is still harmful, and he should still be held responsible.”
Jones’ case is emblematic of our current age of “alternative facts,” echoing the surge of fake news that occurred around the time of the 2016 election. One of the most prominent disseminators of said fake news was a man named Paul Horner, whose past experiences include tricking the internet into thinking he was the famed anonymous street artist Banksy.
“There’s nothing you can’t write about now that people won’t believe,” Horner, who considered himself a satirical writer in the vein of The Onion, told The Washington Post. “I can write the craziest thing about Trump, and people will believe it. I wrote a lot of crazy anti-Muslim stuff — like about Trump wanting to put badges on Muslims, or not allowing them in the airport, or making them stand in their own line — and people went along with it!”
One of the last times performance art was a contentious topic of current events was when right-wing media outlets attacked the most well-known performance artist of all time, Abramović, mistaking her occult themed dinner party for a satanic ritual. Abramović’s connections to art collector Tony Podesta, brother of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, made her the target of a literal witch hunt, based off archival footage of her admittedly out-there ‘90s performance.
Jones is no Abramović. If anything, his antics more closely resemble satirical performers like Stephen Colbert, who discussed the parallels on his late-night show. While Colbert maintained a conservative persona on “The Colbert Report,” the program’s website made abundantly clear the fallacious nature of Colbert’s hijinks.
The inextricable overlap between comedy and gravity, reality and un-reality, has been a persistent theme in recent political events, which is perhaps what happens when a former reality TV star ― alleged by some to be a performance artist himself ― runs for, and eventually becomes, President. Though Trump has not yet ousted himself as an artist in disguise, he has mocked the media for taking him seriously and at his word. He retroactively described unsavory moments throughout his campaign ― including his imitation of a reporter with a disability and his declaration that political commentator Megyn Kelly had “blood coming out of her wherever” ― as jokes.
The New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum made a solid case for comedy’s pivotal role in the 2016 election, but the spirit of art at its most experimental and bizarre loomed over the surreal proceedings as well. Long before hoaxes, personas and semi-ironic jabs became commonplace in the political arena, artists have been navigating the tenuous line between authenticity and artifice. From Schneemann to Sulkowicz, Abramović to Linzy, artists have used their bodies and identities as canvasses, exploring the ways personality could be mutated, projected, altered and disseminated.
If Alex Jones is the most recent performer to lay claim to this tradition, perhaps Sulkowicz is right: The responsibility of the public is not to shut him down, but to question his work in light of these new admissions. The label “artwork” does not make Jones’ statements any less dangerous or vitriolic. And as Linzy noted, the next question we should probably ask is: What does this teach us about Jones’ audience — including our president?
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When she was in college, Kristen Radtke’s uncle died suddenly, from what she describes as an “inscrutable heart defect that threaded though [her] family.”
Her relatives moved on, reminiscing about her Uncle Dan at holidays. But Radtke found herself fixating on her own health, on the particularities of the gene mutation that ran in her family, on the heart palpitations she sometimes got, and on death more generally ― the way it’s acknowledged, celebrated or ignored in different societies.
The resulting story ― part travelogue, part memoir ― is told in Radtke’s book Imagine Wanting Only This, out this month. In turns personal and expansive, it’s a visual and written exploration of loss, and how it resonates through our public and private lives.
“The first pieces of Imagine Wanting Only This began as a handful of disparate prose essays,” Radtke told The Huffington Post. “It took me a long time to realize that they were a part of the same project, and longer still to realize that the project would be graphic.”
But she’s long been a fan of the medium; she says her book wouldn’t have been written if it weren’t for Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and cites a slew of other recent favorites in the genre, including Tom Hart’s Rosalie Lightning, Amy Kurzweil’s Flying Couch, Ellen Forney’s Marbles, and Mira Jacob’s forthcoming Good Talk: Conversations I’m Still Confused About.
The author also loves superhero comics, which introduced her to certain graphic storytelling conventions.
“There is a different set of rules for a graphic memoir or literary graphic novel,” Radtke said. “Visual literature offers an immediate grounding that can be helpful for a narrative that may jump around in time and space. We can convey certain things to the reader very quickly — the age of a character, the way she may change through time, the particular and specific elements of place.”
“Plotting and structure is the hardest part of any project for me,” she continued. “In the end it all feels like magic that it comes together at all.”
Magic or not, Radtke’s book is enchanting. Read a chapter-long excerpt below:
You can buy the book on Amazon or at your local indie bookstore.
— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
Nintendo’s decision to retire the NES Classic left many fans disgruntled. The system, a reimagined version of the iconic 80s console, was a hit last Christmas — for those that could find one, that is. Stock problems meant it was notoriously difficul…
Throughout the 90s, a late night stop in the WKRC studios with Stretch and Bobbito was a requirement for many up-and-coming rappers. Now, in 2017 the pair are returning, but because it’s 2017 they’re doing it with a podcast on NPR. The rise and fade…
Facebook is bloated. It’s slowly morphing into the iTunes of the social media world. At F8, the company’s annual developer’s conference, the company added features to its core apps and announced many more are on the way. But, there was one partnershi…
You gotta hand it to the North Koreans. They know how to pull off a finale. In a video performance posted to YouTube by state media, you can watch the rousing concert that capped off celebrations in the isolated country this past weekend. And one song ended with a not-so-subtle warning to the US.
Yesterday, we shared that Belkin’s WeMo Mini Smart Switch was on sale for $30, but TP-Link has blown that deal out of the water with a pair of discounts.
One of the more anticipated games that will be released for the Nintendo Switch is Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. At its core this is still Mario Kart 8 that was originally released for the Nintendo Wii U several years ago, but it is expected to feature updated graphics, new game modes, new characters, and more.
For those wondering how the games compare against each other, the folks at Direct-Feed Games on YouTube have uploaded a comparison in the graphics which you can check out for yourself in the video above. From what we can tell, the lighting on the Switch version seems to be better and more dynamic, whereas the Wii U version appears to be slightly flat/muted.
The textures of the Switch version also appear to be more high-resolution and sharper, although we wouldn’t exactly call the differences night and day, but it is more pronounced due to the difference in lighting. However one of the main and more obvious differences would be the overall resolution and frame rate.
Nintendo has promised that the game will play in 1080p and at 60fps for the Switch, which is an improvement over the Wii U version which played at 720p. In any case regardless of graphics, the Mario Kart franchise has always been a fun series and it doesn’t look like that will change with the Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. Alternatively if you want a more in-depth look at the differences, Nintendo Life has also published a video of their own that you can check out below.
Video: Mario Kart 8 Deluxe (Switch) VS Mario Kart 8 (Wii U) , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.
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