“I’d add that that face is almost always unexpected.” — Mark Pesce (in private conversation)

Clearly I’m not going to get anything else written until I respond to The Gnome Situation. I’ve been reading the comments and mulling possible responses for days. It’s getting in the way of actual, productive work. So here we go.

No. I will not be removing Gnaomi from my desk.

Discussing an issue as important as rape through the proxy of an anthropomorphised piece of clay seems, to me, a poor tactic. Nor will I compromise the actual or perceived independence of my media output, no matter how worthy the cause.

There’ll probably be people at ActionAid who won’t like or understand that outcome, so here’s the long explanation…

Certainly appalling sexual crimes are committed against women. Certainly such crimes include, at their core, the psychology of men viewing those women as mere objects for their gratification, or to smash to assert their power. Having been close to people who’ve experienced sexual abuse, some of it violent, I have a little understanding of the damage it causes.

A little.

I’m sure that ActionAid deals with people who’ve suffered even more horrific violations. I cannot imagine what those people have gone through, and still go through, and actually I do not wish to be able to imagine it.

Now there’s a conversation we can and should have about the way women are portrayed in our society.

Why do we have continuing allegations of sexual assault against footballers who are meant to be role models? That’s deeply problematic not because the sex happened in a group, but the power relationships and consent — or the lack thereof.

Why has almost all of the analysis of that debacle, like Annabel Crabb’s, been about how the men’s sexuality is framed, but not why young women become attracted to ignorant thugs? Not that that’s an excuse for those men’s behaviour, of course, but it is another layer to the complexity of the situation.

Why do early-evening TV game shows have a male host to lead the conversation, with women reduced to being decorative stands for the cases of cash — all dressed identically to further reduce their humanity?

Why does a nation like the United States go into paroxysms because a woman’s breast was exposed at a football match, and yet doesn’t bat an eyelid over nightly fictional slaughter on TV? Or over the actual, non-fictional slaughter by gunfire of 82 citizens every single day, many being suicides?

Why would a woman’s wardrobe malfunction hardly raise an eyebrow in France?

Why do trade shows like CeBIT still have booth babes who know nothing about the product? Why did NEWS.com.au describe Netregistry’s nurses as wearing “flashy outfits” when they were actually completely “covered up”? Why did I, for that matter, describe them as “naughty nurses” in the first place, referencing a popular cultural meme in a comment which probably triggered that whole discussion?

All these are important questions.

Complex questions.

Quite frankly, the equation “naked breasts = degradation and exploitation” is a dangerous over-simplification.

And it’s just plain wrong.

The logical gap has already been pointed out by vealmince. Yes, terrible things are done to women. But that connects back to this clay garden gnome how, exactly?

Why, as my friend and colleague Kate Carruthers asks, are naked breasts automatically “bad”, exactly?

As Joanna White (@mediamum) says, “Crap, Stil. Boobs celebrate the empowerment of women, not their degradation. Tell ‘em it’s a fertility symbol.”

As Kate points out, women in cultures such as Amazonian tribes, Australia’s own Aborigines or the patrons of Bondi Beach have their breasts exposed as part of their everyday tradition — or at least they did before interfering European busy-bodies told them it was “immoral”, somehow.

After all, it was Victorian society and its suppressed sexuality which got the ignorant natives to cover up. “Victorian prudery sometimes went so far as to deem it improper to say ‘leg’ in mixed company; instead, the preferred euphemism ‘limb’ was used,” says Wikipedia.

I reckon that simplistic equation says more about how Western societies have suppressed sexuality, made it all taboo and naughty, rather than including sexuality as one component of a healthy, properly-integrated human society.

And, as my esteemed colleague Guy Rundle pointed out in Crikey the other day in relation to the NRL scandal, the men’s bad behaviour is still somehow the women’s fault. The “naked breasts = exploitation” meme is still really that old chestnut that weak men become uncontrollable sex maniacs if they’re confronted with exposed mammaries. Cover them up, lest the women be raped! Did you see how she was dressed? She had it coming!

But back to the gnome…

That stupid gnome has been part of nearly every video I’ve done since His Benevolence Stilgherrrian’s Christmas Message, and it’s there precisely because it’s tasteless.

His Benevolence, as a character, is a self-indulgent despot. He therefore decorates his realm with symbols of his power. As with the Evil Genius of action-thriller fiction, powerfully sexy woman are always close at hand, reinforcing the villain’s own masculinity and self-control. But His Benevolence, laughably incompetent and barely coherent, is instead accompanied by a cheeky Benny Hill parody of those sexy women — and not even a real woman at that, but a mere garden gnome. It’s part of the shtick.

Gnaomi was even named after Naomi Robson, a television presenter whose screen presence, some might argue, was all about ego and style over substance. Remember the lizard? Gnaomi is Naomi in clay and glossy paint: truly an empty media vessel.

That’s why on Stilgherrian Live she takes on the face of whoever I want to ridicule that week — usually a politician or media identity, of any gender.

Actually, that’s all a bullshit justification after the fact.

What really happened is that we were shooting the Christmas Message on a tight deadline. I asked ’Pong to grab some tasteless decorations from the $2 shop, and this stupid sexist gnome was one of them. Little thought went into it, beyond “OMFG that’s so tasteless!” Perhaps that does reveal something about our attitudes to women. Who knows.

But here’s the thing. That stupid goddam gnome has starred in a dozen videos, viewed by hundreds of people. And while my audience obviously isn’t representative of the full spectrum of Australian society — no need to call in the statisticians, I do know this — I find it interesting that it’s really only the staff of ActionAid who’ve complained.

I toyed with the idea of doing a vox pop to see what women thought of the gnome, but there’s no need. When intelligent and media-savvy women like Kate Carruthers and Joanna White wonder what the issue is here, when Avril Hodge and Demi Moore call themselves @mrsnickhodge and @mrskutcher online knowing it defines them in terms of their husbands as irony, I’m reminded that we do live in a post-feminist society — and, yes, that’s a term riddled with problems.

The original feminist stereotypes are now inadequate. We acknowledge that a woman’s sexuality can be a thing of power. Ask any burlesque performer. Ask any hooker whose business model isn’t focussed on supporting a smack habit. Gawd, if you called Adelaide übermadam Stormy Summers “exploited” she’d slap you!

Now whether our society’s norms are healthy or not, whether they’re contributing to the problem of sexual violence against women or not, is a whole ‘nuther question, and one I’m happy to discuss.

In fact, some of the discussion over at the original post is wonderful, even if it’s edging towards an aggressive tone in places. Provided it stays civil, or only mock-angry, I’d love that discussion to continue. It’ll help ActionAid find the right tone for talking about these vital issues.

But the gnome stays.

This website, stilgherrian.com, is my place. My home on the web. No-one walks into my home and tells me what to do — at least not without a warrant. Or perhaps a gun. Sorry, Archie, but “Bad news Stil the gnome has to go” and “you need to remove the gnome”, expressed as they are in the imperative voice — i.e. as an order — rub me up the wrong way, even if unintentionally.

I also don’t wish to damage my personal brand as a writer.

Part of the strength of my writing is that I call it how I see it — even if that causes a bit of shock-horror sometimes. I swear. I call for people to be killed. I tell off-colour jokes. Yeah, it’s over the top. But it’s me. And because of that, people trust what I write.

When I praised and (lightly) damned Telstra’s Next G network, for example, regular readers knew that’s because I really did like it, not because Telstra gave me a freebie. And it didn’t stop me being highly critical of Telstra’s broadband strategy, or of its outgoing CEO, or of their PR guy who played the man and not the ball.

I don’t want to lose that trust.

People don’t listen to Bono any more. Well, OK, that’s because Bono is a wanker. And because “strident” is a turn-off. But neither do they listen to the manicured celebrities who helicopter into disaster zones to deliver in earnest tones some carefully pre-packaged Message.

Now I did mention this in one of my video diaries, but I’ll put it here so everyone’s clear. As my original proposal said:

So that this is not, and is not perceived to be, “cash for comment”, we will need to make it clear that the main project is for me to set up ActionAid blogs. As a side effect, this provides the opportunity for me to produce my own content, over which Austcare/ActionAid has no editorial control.

I’m glad we’ve encountered the real-world impact of this issue while talking about a $3.50 garden gnome rather than, say, if I found an ActionAid worker drunk on duty. Or worse.

Now I won’t be carting a stupid lump of clay around Africa, so once I’m on the road Gnaomi will disappear from the screen. What happens after that remains to be seen. But whatever happens will happen because it was my honest, personal choice.

Project TOTO, this Grand Experiment, is truly a challenge, made more so because by definition it’s playing out in public.

ActionAid is engaging in the naked conversations of social media for the first time. There’s doubtless a sense of fear. Many of my readers and Twitter followers are influential media people — journalists, editors, TV and radio presenters, performers, academics, students. And of course ActionAid has its own stakeholders, some of whom may not be at all familiar with this new world.

But the Grand Experiment is also being followed by some of the more clueful social media practitioners and commentators. This is such a worthy cause they’ll probably offer plenty of feedback, advice and support along the way. ActionAid has a honeymoon period here. That’s going to be a wonderful conversation.

Finally, just so everyone’s clear, perhaps my posts need a disclaimer, eh?

[Disclaimer: Stilgherrian's opinions are his own, and do not necessarily represent the views of ActionAid Australia or its international affiliates -- or anyone else for that matter.]

Here’s my 5-minute presentation from WebForward@CeBIT last week, on the importance of authenticity when using social media for business.

It’s recorded on a Nokia N80 phone by Mike Seyfang so it’s a bit rough, but you’ll get the content. You’ll also hear me swear a few times because, well, that’s apparently what I’m now expected to do.

One key theme is that if businesses try to micro-manage every aspect of the communication between their employees and the rest of the world — denying that there are mistakes, or that some people don’t like them — they’ll end up becoming paranoid psychotics. I hope to expand upon that in due course.

Mike also recorded the presentations from my co-panellists Hugo Ortega, Kate Carruthers and Nick Hodge, but not Laurel Papworth for some reason.

I did see a “proper” video camera on the day, so I think CeBIT will place higher-resolution video online in due course. I’ll let you know if and when that happens.

It being Thursday, and despite the heavy CeBIT-related workload, there will be an episode of Stilgherrian Live tonight. That means nominations are now open for “Cnut of the Week”.

We’re looking for people, organisations or other entities who are futilely trying to hold back the tide of change. It has to be something in the news in the last week, and you have to explain yourself. Nominees have to be not merely doing bad things, but failing to notice or adapt to the change around them.

Everyone who nominates and leaves a valid email address goes into the draw for a free t-shirt of their choice from our friends at King Cnut Ethical Clothing.

Nominations for “Cnut of the Week” are open until 8.30pm Sydney time, and you must nominate at the website for it to count. And also, when we draw the t-shirt winner, you must be watching the program and email us the code word within 5 minutes of your name being announced, otherwise we’ll pick someone else.

(Of course, neither they nor us are as lame and unethical as to share your email address with anyone else. I for one have site policies about this sort of thing, and so do they.)

At 8.30pm you should be watching Nick Hodge‘s program @NickHodge before Stilgherrian Live starts at 9.30pm.

Who do you nominate, and why?

Last year I told CeBIT to FOAD after I’d been underwhelmed in 2007. They said thank you, and issued me with a discount code and a media pass. This year they’ve invited me to participate in a panel at WebForward@CeBIT. That means I can offer two random scroungers deserving readers a cheap ticket.

CeBIT is the big IT trade show thingy running 12 to 14 May, with a bunch of conference streams attached. WebForward@CeBIT is one of them.

On 14 May I’ll be joining my colleagues Laurel Papworth, Kate Carruthers, Nick Hodge, Hugo Ortega (who I don’t think I’ve met) and chairman Jye Smith to discuss how you can “Capitalise on Social Media for Business”.

Because I’m a panellist, I get two tickets to the full 2-day conference at a discounted price of $178 + GST instead of the listed $1295 + GST.

If you’d like one of these discounted tickets, make your case by 9am Sydney time on Wednesday 6 May. Explain why you’re deserving, and I’ll pick the two scams reasons I like.

If you miss out, you can still save $160 off the on-site registration price by using the promotional code stilwebca09. You’ll need to insert the code when prompted during on-line registration at www.mycebit.com.au.

• J-Startup News: Billing itself as the latest on journalism startups and new business models for news
• Twitter Nudes: “This art project is designed to reflect the diversity of Twitter through nude photos of users from around the world and is completely anonymous: even we won’t see who sent the picture.”
• The Week that Twitter Tipped | Fast Company: If 2009 is the year that Twitter becomes “mainstream”, then perhaps this is the week of that year.
• Pauline Hanson Today Tonight 01Mar09 | YouTube: From Monday night, the Today Tonight interview where independent political candidate Pauline Hanson, formerly of One Nation, spits the dummy when asked where her election funding went, exactly.
• Skittle Fisting: Memes spread in strange ways. This tasteless “Taste the Failbow” site appeared during the #skittlefisting event last weekend.
• Tell Me More About This Australian Thing Called Rooting | PodBlack Cat: Following the Twitter #fisting incident last weekend, someone ran it past a Doctor of Linguistics who specialises in taboo language.
• Infringement and Terrorism: Pfft! | Brendan Scott’s Weblog: Arguing against the logic in that RAND report about increasing penalties for copyright infringement. “Does anyone honestly believe that people who are actively planning to commit mass murder are going to be deterred by a jail sentence for copyright infringement?”
• Twitter Begins Rolling Out Search and Trends | ReadWriteWeb: The news story itself isn’t that exciting. It’s just that the random Twitter screenshot they used to illustrate the story contains a mention of me via @NickHodge. Yes, this is really low-grade ego surfing. Cope.
• Sky News appoints Twitter correspondent… | guardian.co.uk: Jemima Kiss' post makes a few excellent points about using Twitter in journalism, including the observation that a dedicated Twitter correspondent “rather misses the point, which is that Twitter should be a tool that any forward-thinking journalist tries out, learns and then incorporates into their news gathering.” Precisely.
• Robots | The Big Picture: 32 fine images of robots, from manufacturing, medicine and remote exploration to entertainment, security and personal assistance.
• Taking out the trash | ZDNet Australia: Fake Stephen Conroy pays tribute to Clive Hamilton, amongst other things.
• What Are You Doing? (#Skittles) | WSJ.com: The Wall Street Journal‘s rather staid blog post about the #skittlefisting phenomenon.
• Video: Jon Stewart explains Twitter (or tries to) | VentureBeat: Some Twitter users have criticised this as a lame attack, and it is. It confused some tweets being inane with all tweets being inane. But there’s a bittersweet moment towards the end where the “reporter” reminds Jon Stewart he’s not immune.
• Address to CeBIT Broadband Infrastructure Forum | Senator Stephen Conroy: The Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy is loose in Hannover.
• Social Marketing Bullshit Bingo | raena.net: Need buzzword bingo cards for the next Web 2.0 wankfest? Here you go…
• Organized Crime Is Increasingly Active in Film Piracy; Three Cases Link Terrorists to Piracy Profits | RAND: What the headline doesn’t say is that two of the three cases are well and truly in the past, and that the report was “supported by a grant from the Motion Picture Association” with the express aim of investigating the link. Naturally enough, they found one, and the media release provides the spin.
• Lily Allen talks Twitter on ROVE (Australia) | YouTube: Rove’s interview with Lily Allen which led to around 1600 Australians joining Twitter in a couple hours.

Did people really think I’d end up brawling with Jason Calacanis at CeBIT last week? Sure, I called him a prick and wrote about the evil cult of the Internet start-up. But he does actually have good points.

I met Mr Calacanis when I found myself recording the 2 Web Crew podcast on my borrowed video camera. Since I was concentrating on getting good audio, the vision’s a bit shaky, but at least you’ll see what it was like during those hectic 16 minutes.

I may disagree with Calacanis’ priorities in life, but that’s hardly unique to him. He does do business transparently, however. He makes sense and calls a spade a spade. And he’s certainly been a successful entrepreneur.

He’s also a tireless promoter — of himself. Now that’s not a bad thing when you’re trying to build hype around a new business. But it’s a character trait that Australians reckon is bad — which is perhaps why we so often fail to market our own innovations.

I was also amused to see the swarm of Calacanis fan-boys and girls buzzing around him “like flies to a dead sheep”, as I said on Twitter. Guys, a little less cult of personality and a little more independent thought will work wonders in your lives. Success is not achieved through frottage with the successful. Unless you’re a hooker.

So, Jason, here is the promised blog post saying that you’re not as much of a prick as I thought you were.

[Note: This is a slightly edited version of an article I wrote for Crikey this morning. The main difference is a bit more linkage. There's more CeBIT / Transaction 2.0 material to come.]

In 1980 futurist Alvin Toffler wrote The Third Wave. Following the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions, he said, we’re now experiencing the Third Wave, or what might be called post-industrial society. Australia’s surfing prowess means nothing here, though. We’re still pissing in the shallows, barely held up by leaking floaties.

Why is tech-literate, well-educated Australia so bad at marketing and profiting from its own innovation, from the fisheye lens to gene shears? We do innovate, you know.

“Australians expect the government to do everything for them — but the government’s clueless,” explained journalist and evangelist Duncan Riley at yesterday’s Transaction 2.0 conference. “The Australia 2020 Summit is a classic example. The Internet was seen as an ‘emerging’ industry. Emerging? We’ve had it for 20 years! In the US alone it employs 7 million people.”

Riley, a one-time Howard government staffer, has successfully created his own internet start-ups. Until recently he wrote for Web 2.0 bible TechCrunch. Now he runs The Inquisitr.

“Why would you invest in some Internet business when there’s no tax advantage?” he asks. “If you want to make a movie you get tax benefits. If I had a farm I’d be a millionaire by now, there’s so many special benefits.”

Riley isn’t impressed with Australia’s broadband plans: a 12Mb/sec network by 2012 when, as Crikey has reported, others already do 100Mb/sec. “We’re still stuck in the dark ages,” he says. “Once we get this always-on culture, once we get the iPhone next month we’ll finally, hopefully, get unlimited data plans, Dear God!”

Compare Australia to Israel…

With a third of the population, Israel generates 10 times as many start-ups. “Israel is the second largest contributor of companies to NASDAQ after the US,” says Israeli-born Gilad Greenbaum, Director of IT for conference organisers Hannover Fairs Australia. “In the Tel Aviv – Herzelya – Natalia triangle alone [with a population the same as Adelaide] there are 3000 technology companies.” They’re not supporting the boom. They’re 3000 businesses with their own tech to sell.

Riley is frustrated at Australian businesses’ ignorance — even those attending Sydney’s massive CeBIT trade show. “I walked out there today and said ‘Web 2.0′ and ‘Google Docs’ and people just stared at me blankly.”

Meanwhile watch out for GoodBarry and their everything-for-business-online service. Winning “Best Aussie Business 2.0 Start-Up” yesterday, they’ve just opened an office in San Fran and were last seen talking to venture capitalist Jason Calacanis. An American.

[Disclosure: I attended CeBIT and Transaction 2.0 as a guest of Hannover Fairs Australia.]

CeBIT was always on my agenda. Despite being disappointing last year and despite annoying me with a flood of email, it’s still the biggest IT trade show in Australia. It’s worth going just to see who’s confidently spending money on promotion, if nothing else.

I’ll be touring the trade show floor on Wednesday 21 May. If you want to meet up, let me know. Maybe I should even do a Stilgherrian Live Alpha from the bloggers media room? Whaddyathink?

If you still haven’t organised your free pass, you can register online using my promotion code: stilcs08.

On Thursday 22 May I’ll be at Transaction 2.0, with an interesting set of speakers. Again, it’s a matter of choosing the priorities. Who should I talk to? Should I pick a fight with Jason Calacanis?

But I kick off the Geek Week on Tuesday 20 May with ReMIX 08, where Microsoft says I’ll “experience all that is new in Silverlight 2, Expression 2, IE8, Live and a host of other great web technologies… You will also see how local Australian innovators are creating the next generation of engaging websites and unprecedented user experiences for the web.”

Provided they build it with Microsoft’s tools, of course.

That’s unfair. Microsoft is changing. It’ll be interesting to hear what they’re up to.

Now my only challenge is working out how all this fits into one week, while still leaving room to do some billable hours for clients.

The irony about the CeBIT email flood is that it makes them look desperate — yet their PR person told me yesterday that at this point, three weeks out from the start, they’ve already got more registrations than they did on opening day last year. So why do the emails keep coming? My guess is that at some point weeks ago, some executive somewhere signed off on a marketing plan, and now everyone’s dutifully following it. How… old-fashioned.

Hannover Fairs, the organisers of the CeBIT Australia IT trade show, must be shitting themselves about poor ticket sales or something. They certainly seem desperate.

These guys are spammy at the best of times, sending at least one email a week every week. But this year I’ve received three “Exclusive Limited Offer: Free Exhibition Entry” emails this month alone, plus today another one via the Australian Computer Society — yeah, that’s fuckin’ exclusive, eh? They’ve emailed a “Dear Bloggers” media release and phoned. Gawd!

I was underwhelmed last year and annoyed with the marketing wank-words.

Do these shows actually achieve anything any more? I mean, if you’ve got a new IT product you just tell TechCrunch and the geek world’s blogosphere of feral goldfish do the rest, right? Why herd everyone into a room, except to fuel an industry of hangers-on who make t-shirts and lame promotional giveaways?

[P.S. I am actually going. If nothing else I can collect some high-grade sarcasm for my podcast. But enough with the spam already, Hannover!]