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Yesterday, many people witnessed a phenomenon on facebook in which their friends, mostly females, posted a color as their status update. For example, our friend Olga Bonemarrow may have posted the following:
Olga Bonemarrow white
So, what did this all mean? I found out that girls were posting their color of their undergarments to raise awareness of breast cancer. I was vaguely amused at first, but the more I thought about it the more I disliked it.
What happens is that I don't think a stunt like this is really effective at what it does. For one thing, we're already pretty aware of breast cancer, in fact, I'd say we're more aware of it than any other form of cancer. What about other types? My grandmother died of brain cancer, which struck suddenly and swiftly. And how about skin cancer, the most common type of the disease? Are males going to post what's on our boxer shorts when the time comes for prostate cancer awareness?
And, dare I say it, are we aware of lung cancer? Of course not, because as we all know, the only people who get lung cancer deserve everything they get because you can only get it due to vice.*
The other thing is, awareness only does so much, and I don't think any of the awareness generated by this stunt will translate into action. If people truly want to do something about this, as a friend of mine said, volunteer at Cancer Care Alliance or donate money to cancer research. Posting your bra color will do little more than elicit snickers.
If you care about getting something done about breast cancer, doing something easy like posting a facebook status will accomplish next to nothing. The amount of sacrifice you put into making a difference shows your true commitment.
*Note: This is not true.
January 9 2010, 00:57:46 UTC 2 years ago
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It's some ass-backwards "campaign" where girls just post their bra colour supposedly to raise awareness for breast cancer.
Except without anyone actually telling you that, it just comes off as annoying meaningless spam that lowers your patience for the person posting it just a tiny bit more.
Then when you find out what it's all about, you're left... with an overwhelming sense of "well, that was a stupid waste of time", as it's sort of hard to raise awareness with unrelated abstract posts with no context or even reason to believe there may be a connection to a cause.
A five year old could come up with a batter campaign, because if you ask a five year old to make an advertisement for something, at least they'll have the common sense to give you the slightest hint as to what it's about.
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And that's actually true. I was actually tempted to block (at least temporarily) people over this, because the sheer quantity of meaningless was swamping my signal-to-noise ratio down into the "annoying" zone.
People don't need awareness, we're largely all aware. We need research and doctors and scientists and funding (and for goofball alt-meds to stop telling people 'stop going to doctors, we'll cure your cancer with HOMEOPATHY' and such).
But science isn't as glamorous or exciting as a feel-good grassroots "campaign" (if you want to call it that). Science and medicine are fraught with failure - a lot of learning what DOES work comes from learning what doesn't work (failure is a valid data point).
I don't hold much hope for this though, in a society where literally millions of dollars are thrown at manufactured pop stars and athletes while institutions like NASA have to make hard decisions like slashing their R&D budget just to keep launches running. Science just isn't sexy enough.
January 9 2010, 07:17:45 UTC 2 years ago
There is a myriad of problems in the world, and each individual only has limited resources to alleviate them. We should do what we can for cancer research, absolutely, and I'd be happy to contribute to a charitable cause to help fund it. But we should focus on the areas where we can help solve the most problems.