quantas : hopalong on auto-pilot

Who is in control of this plane? Perhaps its all part of a subjective turn in cultural analysis. The conversation age. It’s a clash of knowledge culture meeting commodity culture, and the recent PR disaster at Qantas is showing that knowledge culture is overtaking and altering the ways in which commodity culture operates. The digital environment augments the speed, the velocity of fan communication, what Matthew Hills has termed Just In Time fandom that can quickly burnish or blemish a brand and is proving to be an effective tool in consumer activism. For the P.R. industry, managing, shaping and spinning the message is no longer possible.

The current argument posits that as technology expands, a greater degree of control is passed from brand and product message designers and crafters towards the consumer or target audience. Henry Jenkins has expounded on this transition where we think less of people as product users and consumers and more as participants, a complicity where they can even be co-creators. This is part of the larger issue of media convergence which has contributed to participatory culture. So, control is shifting as Qantas is finding out….

…Alan Joyce’s decision to wage industrial war with his own staff has had dire consequences for travellers, investors, workers and the Australian economy. Correspondence and notices from Qantas management show that this has been a planned campaign called ‘Project Other’ and that the Qantas board chose not to notify the government, the passengers or workers that it was going to strand over 80,000 passengers around the world. Not only has Alan Joyce trashed the reputation of Qantas and the onward bookings but he has also decided to hold the country to ransom…. Read More:http://www.twu.com.au/Home/Campaigns/-Home-Campaigns-Qantas/Bully-holds-country-to-ransom–We-will-force-them-/

…the airline launches a public relations Twitter campaign that asks people to enter a competition describing their “dream luxury in-flight experience” and possibly win a pair of Qantas first-class pyjamas and a toiletries kit. PR experts said the campaign was perhaps Australia’s greatest public relations failure and a classic example of the dangers of unpredictable social media, reports Reuters….( Corinne Grant )

ADDENDUM:

Corinne Grant:You have used me, Qantas, and I can never forgive you for that. I saved all my Frequent Flyer points for you, I hired cars and got out credit cards with your name on them, I chose the hotels and restaurants you wanted me to choose, all because you promised me a flight at the end of it….

…And what did I get for that loyalty? All of a sudden when I wanted to book that free overseas flight, you were too busy, or you didn’t have any room in your plane, or I had to give you a year’s notice or I had to fly via Uz

stan and I wasn’t allowed to use the toilet and I had to sit on somebody else’s lap.

…Please, don’t try to emotionally blackmail me with that crap about “You have to love me. I’m Australian.” I’ve fallen for that too many times and now, I read that you want to ditch Australian pilots because you can hire people cheaper overseas. Where’s your loyalty?…

…Why do I have to support you because you’re Australian but you can ditch us because you think we’re too expensive? You’re so selfish, Qantas. You never think of anyone but yourself. You’re always making promises you never keep: ‘Of course your luggage will turn up, of course Q tags work fine, of course the plane will take off on time and all the wings and engines will work.” What you actually mean when you say ‘I’m improving’ is “I’m improving things for myself and tricking you into thinking it’s for your benefit.”

You’re a bad boyfriend, Qantas. And you’re a bad cook. Don’t get me wrong, the grated carrot between two slices of still-frozen bread I was once served as a vegetarian lunch was memorable, but it was like you were saying “F%^* you, I’ve already got your money,” on a plate. (Not that you gave me a plate.)

More to the point, you’ve lost my respect. I was so embarrassed over the weekend when you threw a tantrum and shut down. All the other airlines were laughing at you. It was a total turn-off. It was like you were crying into your mummy’s skirt because someone nicked one of your lollies when you had a whole bag of them stuffed down your pants….

Richard Branson wants to take me to the moon and back, you can’t even be trusted to get me to Wagga Wagga.

… And just because my credit cards are still linked to your Frequent Flyer scheme doesn’t mean that I’m holding a candle for you. It’s just means that wading through the terms and conditions to swap over to another airline is more confusing than trying to figure out why you thought letting John Travolta fly your planes would turn me on. So, that’s it. Please don’t try to contact me, or offer me cheaper premium economy flights to London: we both know they’re still too expensive. You’ve had too many years of treating me like crap because you think I’m too scared to leave you. … I can go without free chardonnay for a whole year if I have to. And believe me, that is not a thing I say lightly.Read More:http://thehoopla.com.au/dear-qantas-me/?cpg=2
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Henry Jenkins:As writers like Jolie Jensen noted, this mixture of passion and knowledge was what qualified one to speak about classical music, serious literature, or high art, but because of the legacy of critical studies, being passionate about popular culture was seen as being duped by the culture Industries. Many of us felt that there were things we could not understand about popular culture from the outside looking in.

Tapping our lived experiences, we argued, returned cultural studies to its roots. Take a look, for example, at how Raymond Williams mobilizes his personal experiences as a scholarship student and his working class childhood in “Culture is Ordinary.” Think about what he has to say about his youthful embrace of libraries and museums as opposed to the way he got treated when he went to tea shops. Think about how his anger shaped his theories.

Or think about the ways Angela McRobbie shook up the Birmingham boys club working on subcultures, calling out Dick Hebdidge and others for not owning up to their own relationships to the groups they study, and asserting the importance of her own knowledge as a woman about what took place in adolescent girl’s bedrooms rather than in the streets.

And of course, the Birmingham tradition was only one place we could have turned for examples of the subjective turn in cultural analysis. “Writing from a standpoint” was a feminist issue, and Jane Tompkins was asserting the right to tap the language of affect and fantasy, to write in first person, arguing that what she knew about literary texts was being excluded from male-dominated critical practices and institutions. Within anthropology, Renato Rosaldo’s book, Culture and Truth, was asserting a potential link between academic distance and the colonialist project of earlier anthropologists. The only way forward, he argued, was for ethnographers to describe their own subjective experiences and to be more accountable to the communities they studied.

For me, perhaps the most important influence, though, was the emergence of queer studies as a theoretical paradigm closely linked to the experience of scholars making decisions about whether or not to come out of the closet in their professional lives. Read More:http://henryjenkins.org/2011/06/acafandom_and_beyond_week_two.html