So the Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras has ‘rebranded’. Apparently being specific about what you’re celebrating is exclusive to the things you are not celebrating, and as everyone knows, being exclusive is bad. We should celebrate diversity and inclusion instead!
And so we get this:
So now we’re celebrating something so bland and asinine, everyone can get behind it, i.e. LOVE.
Next Friday I’m taking three weeks off. Last year I used up all my leave for study, just to get myself graduated. The piece of paper, the black cape and the photo with the blue background, it’s all about making Mum happy, but it was a relief to finally get there. My last holiday was in 2009, and that was two-parts conference, one part leisure, so it was not that relaxing. This year I’m going to KL for three days, Bali for four, then Vietnam for a week. A busy itinerary but lots of interesting experiences I hope.
I’m flying Malaysian Airlines to KL and from Saigon back to Melbourne. Those flights are the backbone of my trip. The limbs are shorter flights, from KL to Denpasar, and Denpasar to Jakarta and onward to Saigon. I’ve been hoping to fly AirAsia for those flights. But for weeks, their site has repeatedly declined my Westpac Mastercard. It turns out I’m not alone. I’m a classic Gen Y – I will exhaust every other option before I get on the phone – so I tried their e-form, their online chat, Twitter accounts (@airasia, @askairasia, @tonyfernandes) – before finally calling.
The online information services all gave me unhelpful advice or canned lines.
In response to your email, we are extremely sorry to hear that you were experience difficulties while making online booking with us. We would like to inform that we currently having difficulty in verifying some card issued by certain bank. We recommend that you to use another credit card to make your purchase.
@airasia Hi, suggest you try to book with a different card
e-Chat: Try signing into ‘My Account’ on our website and registering your card as a 1-Click payment option, or use one of our Direct Debit services.
AirAsia claim that Paypal can be used for transactions from Australia, but they seem to determine your country of origin based on the currency you select or your destination, and AUD is no longer listed in their currencies list, so that left me with Indonesian and Vietnamese bank options.
Finally I called and the operator I spoke with confirmed that AirAsia has been having a problem with Westpac Mastercards. So this afternoon I hit up Australia Post, picked up a prepaid Visa debit card, loaded it and used it successfully to book my flights.
I used to like AirAsia. They’re quick and efficient with a friendly public image. Now, I’m not so sure. There are two possibilities:
But let’s look at this from the customer’s point of view: what is the value of having online contact methods if you get bad information from them? You’re just wasting my time inviting me to contact you online if you’re not going to be honest and upfront in that space. And you’re wasting my money; in the time I spent trying to fix this issue, three or four weeks, the price of the flights increased.
AirAsia got my money and my custom, but lost my respect in the process. Isn’t that what online engagement is meant to strengthen – the customer relationship?
If there’s one thing Australians hate, it’s companies who treat us like idiots. It was instructive when National Express – who operate large chunks of the train system in Britain – quit their contracts in Melbourne because the operating environment was just too difficult. We’re meaner than Britons, for god’s sake.
A few years later, Connex got the boot for essentially similar reasons – everyone knew they weren’t responsible for the rolling stock and track work that was causing the delays, but their inept public relations pissed us all off. I’m betting Tiger Airways is next – they’re mean, obsessed with rules, and their ‘lounge’ is little more than a cage on the tarmac. To date AirAsia has done a struck a good balance between friendliness and efficiency in the Australian setting – but this experience creates doubt about their ability to sustain it.
Postscript.
@AirAsia Hi, we will highlight your feedback to the relevant team for improvement. Thank you
Update:
Couple of intriguing developments in the referrer stats for this blog post. A number of visits came via http://standard.cotweet.com, which I’m guessing is the Twitter CRM platform used by AirAsia. Another visit came via a Google search for the blog title and my full name, which feels a little bit invasive – but then again I do put myself out there. Most intriguing is a visit via a Google search for “airasia”. My first thought was “Aha! Proof that blogging about bad customer experience can help create pressure for change.” Until I ran the search myself… I stopped looking after twenty pages of results. (My guess is that AirAsia has invested in a huge amount of SEO; for example, the Skytrax customer review page for AirAsia doesn’t appear until page 18 of the search results.) Some poor numpty has had to keep clicking until they found it, probably to ascertain where, and then (god bless ‘em) they clicked that link and let me know they were looking.
A new study suggests that long-term use of anti-depressants could actually cause chronic depression when you stop taking the drugs. But it’s yet more talk of “chemical imbalances”, nobody stopping to think hey, maybe depression has a purpose.
In a meeting, recently, I asked about how a particular media story had come into being. Mostly out of curiosity, because I do a lot of work analysing stories and their impact after publication, but I don’t do much on how they come to be stories in the first place.
Media liaison in community organisations is invariably the exclusive responsibility of executive officers and Board presidents. Mid-range orgs might hire a PR company and the major orgs (like VicHealth) will have their own media team.
Everyone else is counselled not to engage with the media.
Media engagement, in other words, is seen as a matter of organisational risk management.
Yet gay community life has become radically intermediated (Hurley, 2003).
What does that mean?
As a network of personal and social relationships, gay community still exists — but those relationships are inter-mediated, i.e. the connection is made through communications media. And our engagement with gay identity and community increasingly takes the form of consuming entertainment and news media, e.g. watching Glee and True Blood, rather than turning up in real spaces like gay clubs.
Something similar is beginning to happen in ethnic communities, as well (O’Mara, 2010). In one refugee community in Melbourne, newly-arrived from one of the least developed countries on earth, I recently learned the best way to contact people is through word of mouth via Facebook and SMS. In another community, adult women bypass local health information altogether, and find information and entertainment in their own language via the Internet and cable television.
And all around Australia, agencies are earnestly trying to reach them with printed information, brochures and posters, in simple English and clunky translations.
In other words, if health promotion doesn’t engage with the media — news and entertainment, informative and social — that’s a recipe for irrelevance and ineffectiveness. But the suggestion I heard was, ‘there’s no point in a bunch of health workers sitting around talking about the media.’ We should leave that to the experts.
So I was very interested to read this speech by long-time Labor Senator John Faulkner, talking about the impact of ‘leaving it to the experts’ on Labor’s effectiveness and relevance. These words in particular:
Progressive, socially aware activists passionate about social and economic reform must never be outsiders to the Labor movement.
Labor cannot thrive as an association of political professionals focused on the machinery of electoral victory and forming, at best, contingent alliances with Australians motivated by and committed to ideals and policies.
A Party organisation staffed by experienced and competent strategists and managers is necessary to serve the campaign and organisational needs of Labor’s members and supporters, not to substitute for them.
The same is true for health promotion and community organisations. Risk management is important, but it’s not our purpose.
The Slutwalk movement has made it to Australia, and some people are finding the title a little hard to swallow. Someone has just called me a “chauvinistic cuntsack” on Facebook because I disputed her claim that “slut” is a “bad word” that can never be reclaimed.
To her, this was obvious, because “slut” refers to people having promiscuous sex and you could never call “a chick” or “your missus” a slut. Der. Guess she’s never met a gay man or a sex worker in her life. And no, I’d never call someone else that word, but I’ll happily support someone who uses it to make a point about a cop who blames women for ‘inviting’ rape.
I’m forced to reply here, because after sending me that misogynist little missive, she blocked me so I couldn’t reply. Good thing you’re pretty, lady, because otherwise, you’d be venal, dumb and ugly.
Project Info Literacy:
Why is search so difficult for college students, especially the first few steps of search?
Peter Morville:
This finding is emblematic of the intimate relationship between search, learning, and decision making, and it brings to mind the paradox of choice. After all, the search box offers unrivaled selection. You can ask it any question. Or at least it often feels that way. For a student, this freedom can be simultaneously exhilarating and totally paralyzing.
Also, most students lack a useful mental model of search. They don’t know how search works or what’s being searched, which may be fine for casual Googling but not for navigating dozens of research databases.
Finally, selecting a topic is inherently difficult. It’s like buying a house or finding a spouse. The process is fuzzy and uncomfortable because we’re not sure what we want. So, all too often, we procrastinate. We wait until the last minute to begin, which is a shame because getting started is half the battle.
The key is to recognize that search can be an iterative, interactive journey of discovery that not only helps us find what we need but also lets us learn what we want to find. When we embrace this more playful model of exploratory search, it’s not so hard to get started. (source)
My dad is a sociology lecturer. When I was a kid, he used to bring me and my brother to work quite often. So I’ve never had any illusions about how unglamorous an academic’s working life can be. But there’s one part of it that appeals to me, deeply — teaching.
A few years ago, when Dad started tutoring in a health sociology subject for first-year med students, he began inviting me along, once a year, to run a scenario or hypothetical for his classes.
Total nepotism, but not too dodgy, since I don’t get paid, apart from the enjoyment I get from doing ‘bring your kid to work day’ at 30 years of age.
This week, I presented a scenario on hep B, which is almost non-existent in Anglo-Australians but prevalent around 10-12% in South-East Asian migrants.
I gave students background information on hep B in Australia and asked students to imagine themselves as GPs from clinics with many culturally diverse patients, invited to present their perspective at a consultation forum intended to plan a collaborative multi-disciplinary response to the hep B epidemic in Victoria.
The scenario is pretty true to life — right now, there are working groups and committed practitioners in different disciplines, working to ‘agenda set’ hep B as a priority, or in other words, construct it as a problem in sector discourse.
Note for the positivists: in cultural analysis, ‘constructed’ does not mean ‘not real’; we argue all real things are constructed symbolically, since (to drop into biological essentialism for a moment) everything we know is only available to us through perceptual processes that are highly shaped by mental frameworks and past experience, including socialisation in ideologies like positivism.
One of the challenges in building that multi-disciplinary response is the fact that we speak in different professional languages.
And there’s another layer of our communication, i.e. affect, that seems (in some undefined way) to be really essential to the formation of consensus between players who are all on the same team with regard to getting shit done about hep B.
The idea that you might customise your argument and speak in the same language as the people you are trying to persuade is, to a counsellor or health promotion worker, kind of ‘well, der’.
But it’s less comfortable for some other professions, who see themselves as talking in the neutral, objective language of Science.
Recently I had a disagreement with a doctor — a hero of mine, someone who has done more than anybody else to build evidence and raise awareness around hep B — and it ended with him implying I wanted to ‘ignore people unnecessarily dying’.
Ouch.
People sometimes struggle to customise their arguments because they have an implicit expectation of emotional matching, i.e. that the language and imagery will express the intensity of how they feel about the subject matter.
You see this every time public health practitioners launch a hideously stigmatising fear campaign, despite all the evidence showing that fear campaigns backfire, and then seem all surprised and wounded when the community doesn’t appreciate their sincerity.
In my scenario with the med students, I asked five questions:
First-year med students are not representative of doctors, because the bulk and most intensive parts of their professional socialization are yet to come.
But it was striking how easily the students accepted the idea that hep B had been pretty much ignored just because it mainly affected an ethnic minority population.
For me, that realisation marked the point when I converted from being professionally interested in hep B to being personally outraged about it.
(The affective dimension, once again.)
But for the med students, it seemed the idea that minority status led to poor health outcomes had been thoroughly naturalised, and there was no outrage.
Maybe that’s an unintended consequence of teaching health sociology to first years? (Discuss.)
Out of ten small groups, one group (in the first class) did identify ‘frustration’ as part of their key message for the consultation (and I nearly cheered).
Others saw their role as representing the experiences and needs of marginalised communities, contributing practical wisdom from their clinical experience, and acting as intermediaries between public health and everyday people. (All sophisticated answers.)
In our whole-group discussion, they clearly understood the ethical and empirical difficulties inherent in ‘representing the other’.
As I expected, when it came to customising the message, personality had a strong influence on the communication approaches they preferred.
A couple of extremely bright analytical thinkers, two guys who had wanted all sorts of extra information about hep B before making up their minds, recommended we use statistics to persuade the rational-minded health workers. One suggested we persuade the higher-up decision-makers, ‘because then everyone else will have to follow’.
By contrast, another couple suggested figuring out what our hypothetical consultation participants’ underlying objectives were, and customising our arguments to those, as well as the policy level on which they worked.
The second class had quite a different group culture, dominated by the cool kids on the middle table, and despite their rebellious stylings, their answers were a lot more formulaic.
Message: community awareness. Our role: medical experts. Yawn.
Six weeks into first year, some were already beginning to feel aggrieved about ‘doctor-bashing’, and while they could easily imagine perverse incentives for drug companies (“there’s more profit in not finding a cure!”) they had a harder time imagining the same motives influencing medical specialists.
They nonetheless understood that different forms of knowledge are more or less persuasive for different professions and personalities, such as cost-benefit analyses for public health, real life stories for frontline workers, and emotional matching for change agents.
And they quickly understood how getting comfortable in a certain level of discursive power could prevent someone from acknowledging their ‘unknown unknowns’, along with the role of sociological analysis in helping them understand how medical socialization produces tacit but influential ‘unknown knowns’.
Then we briefly discussed the usefulness of different readings on access, equity and health needs for the hep B consultation.
My argument about sociology was fairly pragmatic. Being able to analyse your own and others’ disciplinary frameworks can make it easier to diagnose the sticking points in your communication attempts.
Choice of theory is heavily influenced by your personality, and as long as it works (and you check if it does) there is no need to get uptight or religious about it.
This is all very preliminary — more thoughts to follow as they organise themselves in my head! — but I’m really curious whether final year med students would have the same kind of responses to the scenario.
