Heresy comes in all forms. In the European Middle Ages, it meant one thing; in the secular 21st century, with its own set of political and social orthodoxies, it means another.
A new book by B.J. Mendelson aimed at business owners, is heretical, all right. The title, the last two words of which we’ve abbreviated, gets to the point: “Social Media is B.S.” (Note: This newspaper doesn’t print cuss words — another of those orthodoxies that seems to have gone the way of the buffalo hunter, but we cling to ours).
Mendelson, who has written for The Huffington Post, Forbes and CNN, is no blackthorn cane-waving Luddite: He’s young, hip and fed up with the prevailing notion that social media is the marketing panacea for 21st-century businesses.
Here’s his gist: “Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are just platforms. They’re not good or bad, useful or useless; however, we’ve allowed smug, greedy, well-fed, white people to create a myth around them that says otherwise. A myth that says all you need to do is use social media for your business and all your dreams will come true. All the while, these companies and the marketers pushing the myth are lining their pockets.”
It is far easier to make money telling people how to get rich using the Internet than for people to get rich using the Internet, Mendelson informs us. It is the secular religion of the age: Monetize me, and I’ll monetize you.
Mendelson cites plenty of case studies, from “Facebook’s reality distortion field” to Google to how “cyber-hipsters deal with their critics” (not very well). He wields an Orwellian crap detector when it comes to parsing language; he challenges us to do the same.
Someone wise once said the goal of education is to know the meaning of “to know” — that’s what Mendelson is really saying.
“Social Media is B.S.,” by B.J. Mendelson. St. Martin’s Press. Hardcover, 228 pages; $21.99.
In “Nisei Soldiers Break Their Silence: Coming Home to Hood River,” by Linda Tamura, we learn of the racist homecoming that followed the return of the Japanese Americans (Nisei) who fought for this country in World War II.
Sometimes, the book reads like “Bad Day at Black Rock:” How could that beautiful town on the Oregon side of the Columbia Gorge — its orchards once owned and worked by those of Japanese ancestry — have done that?
Tamura, professor of education at Willamette University, conducted oral histories with veterans and people in the community.
“My dad used to say you could shoot a cannonball down the main drag and never hit anybody,” one old-timer is quoted in the book. “Now, you have to be careful not to hit a boardhead” — meaning, wind and kite surfers and snowboarders who flood the town these days.
Another history lies not too far beneath the surface. Once, town leaders, including former GIs, tried to prevent the return of Japanese-American GIs after the war and even stripped their names from the local war memorial.
Tamura has done well to write this book, which strikes a blow at historical amnesia and resonates in Puget Sound country.
“Nisei Soldiers Break Their Silence: Coming Home to Hood River,” by Linda Tamura. 368 pages, 34 illustrations.