Selfie Election
Facing a Selfie Election, Presidential Hopefuls Grin and Bear It. July 4, 2015. Jeremy Peters and Ashley Parker. New York Times.
“Press that white button! This right here,” the former secretary of state instructed a technologically deficient fan in New Hampshire who was fumbling to work an iPhone camera. Her patience thinning, Hillary Rodham Clinton took matters into her own hands and jabbed the button herself.
Who wants their babies kissed or their yard signs autographed anymore? This is the Selfie Election. And if you are running for president, you have no choice but to submit.
Candidates can now spend an hour exhausting a line of eager selfie seekers. Jeb Bush has perfected a technique suited to his 6-foot-3 frame: For his shorter fans, he will take the picture with his own outstretched selfie stick of an arm.
“They just have to put up with it, because how do you decipher who is a fan and who wants to fill their profile with pictures of them with candidates?” said Mr. Robinson, editor of The Iowa Republican, a political publication.
Senator Marco Rubio will indulge people who want selfies. But he often travels with a professional photographer who takes photos of him with voters as an aide trails behind, handing out index cards listing a website where supporters can go to download their pictures.
The benefit? Not only does the photographer speed the process and produce higher-quality images, but voters are asked to provide personal information on Mr. Rubio’s website. Before they can view their photos, Rubio supporters have told the campaign their name, their home and email addresses, which issues matter most to them and if they are willing to volunteer.
Self-help
Americans pride themselves on being able to work through adversity, solve problems, have a positive and optimistic attitude. Americans believe in the power of motivation and self-motivation.
Self-help is deeply rooted in the American experience. Americans persuade by proposing how things can be done. “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.”
Coined by Elbert Green Hubbard, an American writer, publisher, artist and philosopher who was one of the most influential forces in American business in the early 20th century.
Trajectory
Germans view the past and the present as two points along a continuum. They establish a Weichen or course, path, trajectory. But not unchangeable. Neither automatic nor preordained.
Although people can affect real, even radical change, the Germans are realistic about the possible range of change. Every path has its past, where it came from. Seldom can people suddenly move in a totally different direction. Seldom do the Germans want to. Seldom are they persuaded when it is proposed.
When car salesmen lie
An older video, but very clever.
“No problem“
Cultures which work closely together, at some point, come up with insider jokes about each other. An insider joke is one which just about everyone in the one culture immediately understands. Hopefully, the spirit of these jokes is friendly and good-natured. The Americans have theirs about the Germans. And the Germans have theirs about the Americans.
“No problem” isn’t even a joke, it’s a phrase. More is not necessary, for every German who has experience working with Americans knows what another German means when they speak it: That Americans are often quite naive about a problem, about its seriousness, impact, complexity (from the German perspective).
So when Americans substitute the term ‘opportunity’ for the word ‘problem’, Germans can become a bit nervous. For many problems offer little to no opportunities. They are simply problems. And they need to be dealt with.
Buyer‘s Market
The United States has been growing since its birth. Growing in territory, in population, in economic output. For the most part the U.S. has striven for open markets, domestically and internationally. Americans also believe in meritocracy. People should benefit directly from their hard work.
Americans believe in competition. And America has always been a buyer‘s market, with supply outpacing demand. In such an environment, success cannot be attained without active effort to win customers. In America, sales and marketing are critical to success. Simply „building the better mousetrap“ is not enough.
An Amazon.com search on “Buyer’s Market” generates 13,959 results. Book titles include Solution Selling: Creating Buyers in Difficult Selling Markets by Michael T. Bosworth, The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use Social Media, Online Video, Mobile Applications, Blogs, News Releases, and Viral Marketing to Reach Buyers Directly by David Meerman Scott and Buyer Beware: Finding Truth in the Marketplace of Ideas by Janet Parshall. 10.5 percent of native-born Americans between the ages 25 and 64 are employed in the sales industry.
Robber Barons
Robber Barons was the name given to exceptionally successful business people in America during the late 19th and early 20th century. Most of the Robber Barons came from humble backgrounds, and started businesses at times when many industries were beginning to grow substantially.
Robber Barons were both admired as people who became rich and powerful, yet hated as monopolists who exploited their workers. In fact, these Barons were able to create such a large divide between rich and poor that Jay Gould, a gold and railroad Baron, once allegedly said “I can hire one-half of the working class to kill the other half.”
In 1890, the Sherman Anti-Trust Act was passed, the first law enacted to limit the exploitation scope of the Robber Barons’ business practies. The Sherman Act outlawed monopolies and anything which unreasonably restricted trade, such as price fixing. Over the following decades, more business regulations were enacted, bringing the reign of the Robber Barons slowly to an end.
American Teaching
Perhaps because of the high cost of tuition at American universities, Americans typically view students as customers and schools as businesses. As such, teachers will attempt to cater to the needs of their students – if a certain process doesn’t interest the customers (students), the teacher will change it in order to keep the customers attentive.
During their classes, if American teachers notice that students aren’t paying attention, they will often include several amusing anecdotes that they tell throughout the class to keep their students’ focus.
For example, during a physics class, it would not be uncommon for an American professor to stop the lecture to talk to students about how Herman Weyl (one of the early proponents of group theory) had an affair with Erwin Schrodinger’s (the physicist who’s best known not only for his quantum mechanics equation but also for his potentially dead cat) wife, or how Murray Gell-Mann (who won the 1969 Nobel Prize in physics) was so narcissistic that he once warned his cab driver not to cash his check, because he believed that his signature was worth more than his cab fare had been.
American teachers will also include anecdotal stories from their own lives if these stories have any relevance to the subject matter. For example, if the teacher is describing a discovery made at CERN, he/she might talk about a colleague who worked there.
Eyewitness News
The first eyewitness news program began at KYW-TV in Cleveland, Ohio in 1959. Although this program was called Eyewitness News, it still followed the traditional news format (a news anchor reading the news while looking into a studio camera), until Al Primo became the news director in the early 1960s. Primo, a former anchorman, decided that instead of the typical news format, his news station would rely primarily on visuals, especially film and videotape.
Soon, the new format had spread to more than 200 local television stations across the country, and in 1965 KYW moved from Cleveland to Philadelphia, where Primo formed the first on-camera reporting team. Now, in addition to news anchors, reporters could be seen onscreen.
As the eyewitness format grew in popularity, more developments occurred all over the US. WLS in Chicago began using co-anchors who would chat on air about the news stories, a new style which was known as “happy talk.” At WABC in New York, field reporters appeared on-camera to discuss the stories about which they were reporting.
Eventually eyewitness news became so standard and so popular with the masses that now it is often referred to as “people’s news.” These days, virtually all local television and network stations in the U.S. use some form of eyewitness news, and many countries in Europe and Latin America also use similar news reporting styles.