Loosing Juice
As most of our listeners are aware, we are relatively new to this. Sure, we are just finding our sea legs and learning how to work the front and back ends of this thing, so we are bound to make mistakes. I am honored and excited to report that we have received our first critical email. I feel so legitimate!
“If you write to or about us – be it here, in the Freedomizer chat room, on Twitter, or on our Facebook page – we MIGHT read it on-air, and we WILL make fun of your loose arguments, poor spelling, and bad grammar. Or, we might compliment you for a well-thought-out and nicely written response, even if we disagree with your sentiments. Either route is entirely up to you.”
I jokingly called it “hate mail” on another show, and that was strictly in jest. I did not see any hate in this email. It was a genuine concern that the writer felt two of the words they read on the front page of our blog did not completely define one part of one episode of our show and thus we entirely misrepresented our mission.
I will read his email without including any of his personal information.
Subject: “Upbeat and Fun”
….you promise “upbeat and fun” then go off on a Weinstein rant that is full of vitriol and your website craps of “trigger warnings”… nothing about that feels upbeat or fun. I’m not saying anything about your opinions themselves but your stated purpose and your actual actions don’t match…you’re loosing juice due to a lack of metacognition. Maybe reflect, realign, relaunch..
Sent from my iPad
I’ll admit that I fired off a quick response thanking the writer for his input and asking him to listen to more than one segment. There has been no further communication. One can only hope he still tunes in. I do now wish that I had addressed this email on our next show, but I was remiss. I will make no excuses, though I have plenty. Because we promise to give everyone a voice, I feel it is important to address our listener’s concerns. I gave this email careful consideration.
The first thing I did was look up the term “metacognition” because it seemed redundant to me. The partial definition is as follows:
Metacognition is “cognition about cognition”, “thinking about thinking”, “knowing about knowing”, becoming “aware of one’s awareness”
Ooookay… so I spent a few days metagognating, and I have a Tupperware container full of belly-button lint to prove it.
Jokes aside, Mr. AB had a point. I certainly do not want us to loose any of our juice. That would definitely be a terrible, terrible thing. So, instead of limiting ourselves to “upbeat and fun” juice in a smaller vessel, we enlarged the vessel. We now have new verbiage on our front page (which is literally the only place that had the words, “positive and fun” listed before). Oh, we will still hit these things; we are just so much more than that.
As far as crapping “trigger warnings” — they were meant to be a parody, and when I threw them up against the wall, they stuck, so they stay.