The rise of pity marketing
newstatesman.com
The rise of pity marketing
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Re: The rise of pity marketing
#2Re: The rise of pity marketing
#3> This manufactured pity instead blindly inflates the value of the work in question – as if to say: if the story is sad enough, the art is automatically good.
This poor fool still believes that social media has a shred of authenticity left. There is no such authenticity on social media platforms, the entire system is designed to generate content that creates engagement.
I think it says more about our society that people have found success in begging online than it does the beggars themselves.
Re: The rise of pity marketing
#4> This manufactured pity instead blindly inflates the value of the work in question – as if to say: if the story is sad enough, the art is automatically good. This poor fool still believes that social media has a shred of authenticity left. There is no such authenticity on social media platforms, the entire system is designed to generate content that creates engagement. I think it says more about our society that peo…
When it comes from corporations, I'm with you: nothing is genuine, everything is carefully manufactured to elicit an emotion (to buy and consume).
But from individuals? Sure, there's astroturfing, but there's also genuine messages with no ulterior motives.
Or do you think everyone posting here on HN has ulterior motives?
Re: The rise of pity marketing
#5> This manufactured pity instead blindly inflates the value of the work in question – as if to say: if the story is sad enough, the art is automatically good. This poor fool still believes that social media has a shred of authenticity left. There is no such authenticity on social media platforms, the entire system is designed to generate content that creates engagement. I think it says more about our society that peo…
When it comes from corporations, I'm with you: nothing is genuine, everything is carefully manufactured to elicit an emotion (to buy and consume). But from individuals? Sure, there's astroturfing, but there's also genuine messages with no ulterior motives. Or do you think everyone posting here on HN has ulterior motives?
I think it all comes down to what your definition of authenticity is and acknowledging that the vast majority of social media behavior is learned to elicit some sort of reaction and not to necessarily replicate your real-life behavior and mannerisms.
As far as HN goes, I find myself posting for upvotes sometimes instead of having the more nuanced conversation. It’s why I typically abandon my account around 2-3k upvotes. Even these systems reinforce our beliefs that we are always correct or more correct than someone else because we have more upvotes/karma/whatever.
I don’t think everyone has ulterior motives in the sense that there’s a hidden agenda to adhere to. But I also think it’s impossible not behave in a way that reinforces the clout mechanisms that exist on all of these platforms, which ultimately does detract from authentic behavior.
Re: The rise of pity marketing
#6Are we sure all the examples cited were manufactured? Isn’t it possible that in a lot of the examples, someone had a bad day and other people responded with kindness?
Re: The rise of pity marketing
#7This reminds me of those cases where creators have faked illnesses to market their work and get attention through sympathy, which usually goes horribly wrong. For instance, folks like Belle Gibson here:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-32420070
Or the folks documented here:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/03...
Or the example that reminded me of this, when a Super Mario World modder faked having cancer so famous YouTubers like ProtonJon and Raocow would play his ROM hack on their channels.
I guess that would be the logical extreme of this behaviour. Just flat out making up a sob story to get attention for your work if you don't have an actual one to market.
Re: The rise of pity marketing
#8Same issue as all those so-bad-its-good movies.
At first, there was legitimately bad movies being made by honest crews trying to make something.
Then, once cringe got popular, a hundred made-to-be-bad movies popped up immediately which were actually just bad because they lacked authenticity.
Re: The rise of pity marketing
#9The pity commercial is why I hate watching the Olympics in the US.
They'll skip over half the competitors just to show us how poor and sick some athlete's mother is or whatever.
Sometimes you even miss the winner while the person they were talking about doesn't even medal!
Re: The rise of pity marketing
#10I'm really curious to go back to Show HN posts and see if there are any interesting stories associated with the project. It would be fascinating to see if some of the stories didn't hold up but the projects benefitted from them. I bet it happens even here on HN.