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Fake it till you make it: the wolves of Instagram

theguardian.com

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Re: Fake it till you make it: the wolves of Instagram

#201

Post by leetcrew »

savanaly wrote: post #74
madeofpalk wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, that's only because you/we romanticise our industry. What a bizarre false dichotomy. Literal prostitution, retail job, or software development. There are plenty of others out there that are needed that people work in. Become an apprentice, learn a trade, and start business. Work in retail, become a manager, own a location, climb the ranks. Get a finance degree, work at a firm, create a consultancy.

That all sounds hard.

becoming a manager in retail is really not that hard. most of my friends that started working retail in high school are managers by now (unless they left for a better job).

Re: Fake it till you make it: the wolves of Instagram

#202

Post by codyb »

gowld wrote: post #184
bartread wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I've always found idolising scarface a little strange. Likewise, I find it odd when people go around wearing t-shirts with Che Guevara's face on them: I mean, the guy's allegedly a mass murderer. Kind of an odd hero to pick, right?

Just about every revolutionary hero is a mass murderer, from Che to Mao to Stalin to Churchill to Washington. And not everyone knows all the history of symbols.

Did Washington kill civilians? He was a slave owner. Not sure mass murderer is on the money like it is for Stalin and Mao. Don’t know enough about Che.

Re: Fake it till you make it: the wolves of Instagram

#203

Post by germinalphrase »

simonbarker87 wrote: post #25
21 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> young people prostitute them selves to get photo shoots at exotic locations or for luxurary stuff for likes So what's the alternative, working 9-5 in retail for minimum wage and after 10 years you are still nowhere? Unless you are in a highly demanded domain like software, there are few opportunities for young people.

The alternative is genuine entrepreneurship or working your butt off in school in an area that is actually in demand rather than a pointless degree. There seems to be an assumption now that everyone is entitled to a nice cushy lifestyle but if you don’t work in school, don’t develop in demand skills or find a gap in the market to exploit then it’s not going to happen.

...or wages have simply not kept up with inflation. I'm a high school teacher in a state that has a teacher shortage (and yet performs at toward the top of the national rankings). I'm good at my job - do it because it matters in a way that most jobs don't - and have rapidly moved up into the best districts in the state. In demand isn't always the issue. My take home pay is 27k. Teaching is obviously in the news lately for pay concerns - but this hollowing out of wages is across the board.

Re: Fake it till you make it: the wolves of Instagram

#204

Post by rconti »

neaden wrote: post #4

One thing I've been struck by with movies and films like the Wolf of Wall Street, the film Wall Street, Fight Club, or even the Great Gatsby is how many people end up coming away with the exact opposite message of the movie. They end up idolizing the vapid, shallow lifestyle that the movie is critiquing, because even though the film is critiquing that it can't help but also make it glamorous. Michael Douglas has said…

Think of it this way: It's a lot easier to look at someone ostentatiously wealthy and just say "well, I'll just cut out the bad parts like doing hard drugs and pissing it all away by being an asshole" than it is to look at Mother Teresa and say "I'll be just like her, except a billionaire".

That is to say, making a ton of money seems a lot harder than just not being an asshole.

Re: Fake it till you make it: the wolves of Instagram

#205

Post by gonehome »

lkrubner wrote: post #106
smacktoward wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because film is a visual medium, and in these movies the protagonist always looks cool . He may be doing terrible things, but he's wearing hip clothes and driving a gorgeous car while he does them. The visual language is all screaming "this guy's great!", and it ends up overwhelming the message the story is trying to tell. If you want to know what most people will think of a character in a movie, watch the movie…

I don't know if it's a matter of the protagonist looking cool. When Breaking Bad was on the air, I had a surprising number of friends who identified with Walter White. He did not look cool, he did not act cool, and the writers of the show did everything in their power to communicate "This man is a moral monster and a horror of a human being." Yet some people that I otherwise respected still identified with him. They…

I saw Walter in the beginning as someone who had no control of their life (even in his choice of how to die/reject treatment).

He slowly gains this confidence and control. He goes from being talked down to and ignored to being powerful (though at massive cost), but there's something appealing to that story of taking control. There's also an element of masculinity tied up in this too - when he stomps on the bully's leg in the clothing store early on. I think it's just being the alpha monkey.

Skyler was pretty controlling and self-righteous, I found her to be a pretty unlikable character. She cheats on Walt primarily to hurt him and she was also hypocritical, breaking the law for Ted when it suited her and helping with the money laundering without taking accountability for anything.

Walt at least (early on) started with the goal of raising money to leave his family - though this obviously mutates pretty quickly.

Re: Fake it till you make it: the wolves of Instagram

#206

Post by jstarfish »

bartread wrote: post #146
lkrubner wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if it's a matter of the protagonist looking cool. When Breaking Bad was on the air, I had a surprising number of friends who identified with Walter White. He did not look cool, he did not act cool, and the writers of the show did everything in their power to communicate "This man is a moral monster and a horror of a human being." Yet some people that I otherwise respected still identified with him. They…

The interesting realisation for me about Walter White came when I started watching the season through for a second time. But first... SPOILER ALERT! I mean the first time around I had some sympathy for the guy - he was a disappointed and somewhat embittered middle aged man still trying to do his best to support his family, and then he's given this crappy cancer diagnosis. I felt bad for him. Fair to say that by the t…

> Fair to say that by the time he just lets Jesse's girlfriend, Jane, choke to death on her own vomit whilst unconscious I'd entirely lost that and felt nothing but loathing for the character

> But what I realised on revisiting the show a couple of years later is that Walter White didn't break bad. He was bad from the very beginning.

Jesse's girlfriend got him hooked on heroin. Jesse was on a downward spiral and would surely die thanks to her continued interference. Walter saw the toxicity of both the drugs and the relationship and did Jesse a cruel but necessary kindness by letting her asphyxiate. It wasn't ethical, it wasn't humane, but it served a greater purpose (even if it was so Walter wouldn't be without an assistant).

He did far worse deeds for less grounded reasons as the series went on; there are better examples to choose from to make a case of villainy. If anything, what changes through the series is his disconnectedness from everything he was fighting for. As he lost his son's respect, his wife, his family, and his friend, his world became significantly more introverted and he was willing to tolerate greater and greater amounts of collateral damage in the interest of his own survival (since he had nothing left to care about but himself until the ending).

Re: Fake it till you make it: the wolves of Instagram

#207

Post by dajohnson89 »

smacktoward wrote: post #44
neaden wrote: post #4

One thing I've been struck by with movies and films like the Wolf of Wall Street, the film Wall Street, Fight Club, or even the Great Gatsby is how many people end up coming away with the exact opposite message of the movie. They end up idolizing the vapid, shallow lifestyle that the movie is critiquing, because even though the film is critiquing that it can't help but also make it glamorous. Michael Douglas has said…

It's because film is a visual medium, and in these movies the protagonist always looks cool . He may be doing terrible things, but he's wearing hip clothes and driving a gorgeous car while he does them. The visual language is all screaming "this guy's great!", and it ends up overwhelming the message the story is trying to tell. If you want to know what most people will think of a character in a movie, watch the movie…

the problem lies deeper than film. america at its core is obsessed with wealth, and it's always been this way. the ethics of how the wealth is acquired and spent matters very little. we idolize drug dealers, mobsters, serial bank robbers, bookies, counterfeiters, etc.

Re: Fake it till you make it: the wolves of Instagram

#208

Post by FridgeSeal »

Balgair wrote: post #123
mundo wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a fascinating TLP article on this very topic[0]. Here's the most relevant bit: * The reason TV sociopaths are admired is that they are on TV. They have a story. Do you really admire Tony Soprano? Which part? His loveless marriage to a crazy person? A mistress who is even crazier? His gigantic belly and panic attacks? The fact that no one actually likes him? That his daughter was dating a black guy? ("I wouldn…

I noticed this exact thing when Desperate Housewives became popular. Suddenly (it seemed), many of the people around me started to act like the characters on the show; tuning in for more information each Sunday night. I seriously kid you not, some even started to take their kids' Ritalin just like on the show. It was... bizarre . Many people really do take their cues about how to behave/act from the pseudo-Jungian ge…

This is interesting, do you think people do this because the people they see in Desperate Housewives and the examples in the parent comment have a sort of "clearly defined" identity and people watching this media look at how explicitly defined these characters are portrayed and contrast it against their own sense of self, find it lacking (either because it is, because they imagine it to be, or because something like that is inherently truly difficult to pin down because in reality "bright line" definitions of character don't exist?) and then start to model their life on what they see because it gives them something concrete to centre themselves on?

Re: Fake it till you make it: the wolves of Instagram

#209

Post by bluedino »

jimmies wrote: post #122
TallGuyShort wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's just the visual element. I mean Scarface looks pretty terrible by the end of the movie, and people idolize him. I suspect it's more that stories are now told purely for short-term entertainment value. We don't focus on the substance of the story or the moral, we focus on the kind of clips that end up in a trailer. You see similar trends in popular literature too.

>I mean Scarface looks pretty terrible by the end of the movie, and people idolize him. You got the wrong idea. I don't think anyone idolizes Tony. It's a great movie and Tony is a great character and Scarface tells an interesting story, not because the protagonist made himself rich. Same as Godfather, I like it and I like them not because they are rich, but it was because they made interesting choices. Let's talk ab…

>> It's a great movie

It's a horrible movie. Terrible acting, no story, shallow characters, it's almost a parody of the Miami drug scene.

Re: Fake it till you make it: the wolves of Instagram

#210

Post by jstarfish »

gowld wrote: post #190
david927 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember in Marketing class they taught us about "Herb the Nerd". In the 1980's Burger King was expanding and as part of this came a big advertising campaign centered around a nerdy-looking guy called Herb, who was the only person who hadn't been to a Burger King. If you could spot him in a Burger King restaurant, you could win money. It was a colossal failure , and instead of increasing customer volume, ended up h…

Domino's Noid also had a tragic ending. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noid

Can't forget the Quizno's rats.

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/ad_report_card/2004/0...

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