How Pop Culture Puts Public Sector Work in Context
This past Sunday, January 13th, was a huge day of American television. From two NFL playoff games (both of them fairly close ones), the Golden Globe awards, and the season premieres of popular shows Girls, Californication, and House of Lies on Showtime, and Downton Abbey on PBS.
Twitter was on overload. According to the official Twitter blog, the Golden Globes alone netted about 4 million tweets.
I'm not much of a live-tweeter, but between the Patriots-Texans football game (I'm a lifelong Pats fan), the Golden Globes, and some TV shows I like, it was too much to resist. I tweeted a LOT.
I also monitored my Twitter feed more closely than usual, for a longer amount of time than usual. The huge majority of people in my feed were tweeting about the same live events, which is part of what makes the "network effects" of live tweeting work. It was fun to interact with people I know through other walks of life about the pleasurable pursuits of pro football or television and movie awards.
But one thing that stood out in the midst of all the commotion about NFL photo-finishes, how many awards Homeland received, and Jodie Foster's "coming out" speech were a few people who were aware of -- but seemingly had distain for -- the pop culture phenomenon happening around them.
Here are a couple of good ones:
Alex Howard (@digiphile): Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor is on @60Minutes right now. But please: continue with tweeting the #GoldenGlobes celebrathon, y'all.
Umair Haque (@umairh): My Twitter feed right now is pretty much the end of human civilization.
I recently culled the number of accounts I follow on Twitter from an unwieldy 5,000+ to just under 1,000 (another round of cuts to occur soon), to focus on people who are genuinely newsworthy, interesting, unique, or who have some other positive qualities that add value to my Twitter stream. And it should be known that these two people -- Alex Howard, a Washington, DC-based reporter for O'Reilly Media, and Umair Haque, a London-based academic and writer, make the cut. They're definitely on my personal interesting-unique-and-valuable list.
But should even intellectuals be so dismissive of pop culture? True, watching the helmet-to-helmet bone-crunching hits of NFL games may have no redeeming intellectual value. Tweeting about what J.Lo, Jennifer Lawrence, and Lea Michele are wearing may be completely frivolous. And watching House of Lies or Californication may genuinely rot my brain a little.
I don't care. I love it. I love it Hank Moody style.
This is for two simple reasons. One is really basic: Everyone takes downtime from their work, no matter if you're a professor, a pawn shop owner-slash-reality TV star, or a plumber. One man's hobby is another man's torture; is anyone truly fit to stand in judgement of another's leisure time?
But the second reason is more germane to Publicyte's readers. And that is, if you work in the public sector, the nonprofit sector, or have a career related to general civic progress, I think you should have a strong interest in pop culture. Pop culture is popular culture (in case you had forgotten), and that means that huge numbers of people like it, talk about it, buy it, share it, and aspire to it. And those people tend to be citizens who use the DMV and U.S. Post Office, send their children to public schools, get Medicaid, and vote for politicians.
Thus, our recent Presidents have been wise enough to enjoy pop culture. During a recent Twitter chat from the official White House account, President Obama not only discussed taxes and other issues, but also casually fielded a question about which Chicago sports team would win a championship next.
He wrote: .@Mica4Life da bears still gotta shot, despite sad loss this weekend! plus rose will return for playoffs!!! -bo
OMG, call the grammar police! #LOL
Former President George W. Bush, while he wasn't known for his social media savvy, is a big sports fan -- he used to co-own the Texas Rangers baseball team. And for good measure, former President Bill Clinton made a surprise appearance at last night's Golden Globes to discuss the Steven Spielberg film Lincoln.
(Side note: Numerous shows and films awarded last night were inspired from real-life events related to the public sector, including Lincoln, Zero Dark Thirty, and Argo.)
Obama, Bush and Clinton presumably know that being in touch with the average citizen to some degree means being in touch with pop culture and common interests and hobbies. Certainly, those three men go about it in different ways, and no method is perfect. But could you imagine President Obama refusing a Twitter question about sports as beneath his dignity? Hell no, our current President loves sports.
If our President, any President, were casually asked about Britney Spears or Kobe Bryant and replied, "Who?" or about American Idol and replied "I don't watch TV," wouldn't you be a just a little concerned that he or she was out of touch?
So when we, the relatively small group of people who care about using the principles of science & technology, entrepreneurship, and innovation for civic progress, discuss topics like large data sets, apps-for-good, government transparency, distance learning, health care innovation, and similar topics, it is critical that they be placed into the context of the common citizen. And pop culture is just about the best window into the mind of the common man available.
Long live close sports games, celebrity red carpets, and mindless television shows and the people that tweet about them. They keep us real.