Would Anyone Other Than Silent Bob Just Gotten the Silent Treatment?

Southwest Air made an “oops” last night. One of those, “someone is getting a talking to today” kind of oops-es. What happened? Well über director (with the exception of a few films) Kevin Smith was on a Southwest flight (an airline that tries to be very social media aware) and was asked (read told) to get off the flight because he was a “security-risk”, the risk you ask?

He’s overweight.

Like me.

Kevin Smith did want most social media-connected people would do when faced with an injustice, he tweeted about it.

A lot.

This sent Southwest’s official twitter account into damage control mode and today there is an official apology from Southwest, but I haven’t been able to read it because their servers are getting hammered right now. The Inquisitor makes a very interesting point about all this social media brou-ha-ha:

Later tweets point out that Southwest’s later hand-wringing on Twitter seemed largely due to Smith’s celebrity pull and not his shoddy treatment at the hands of cabin crew. Southwest’s rep on their official Twitter feed replied several times about the incident, and posted about it today on their blog. However, one wonders if it was just Joe Twitteruser who’d been subject to the same public shaming, would the airline have responded as quickly? Certainly not as publicly, but would they have been as concerned?
link: Kevin Smith tweets through Southwest Airlines humiliation

So, if the same thing happened to me, with two orders of magnitude fewer followers than Kevin (1.6 million to my 7,000), would I have had a personal phone call from the VP of Customer Relations at Southwest? Yeah probably not. Is this a bad thing though?

No, not at all.

Kevin could have easily just said nothing. He could have handled it differently. But he spoke out. He spoke out for all of us of larger girth (my girth seems to be increasing of late). He spoke out and got attention, because he’s famous.

Maybe this attention on Southwest’s policies will do some good for all of us. A nice public shaming of the Captain of the plane is good. Shine a light on size bias. I hope that policies change. I hope that airlines get a clue. Look, Americans and Canadians are getting larger, despite all this health consciousness. What would happen if a quarter of a plane is about Kevin Smith’s size? Would they all be asked to get off?

So as much as you might be tempted to say “oh it’s just because he’s famous…” and write all this off, I think we should say “Because he’s famous, maybe something can change…”