Stop calling them "influencers", they are Sales People. They influence nothing, they sell you the same crap any ad does.
Sales people, advertisers, spam, all the same thing.
They pander to the less informed, shove confirmation bias into everything, and pretend to sound like an 'expert" on what they spew. Basically a con artist.
And they really want to be famous, but have zero talent. Again, con artist.
Not even sales people, just marketing people without a fixed affiliation. The only people they influence are the people for whom the name influencer is not a red flag that they're being lied to.
Having said that, "influencer" is a lot shorter than that, and at least everyone will know what you mean.
This is how I think about social media in general. It's a spectrum from mostly fake to all fake. Even the least fake profiles still only show the good parts of their life and unedited photos are still hand-picked from a bunch of other ones they don't want people to see.
Hell even my own Pixelfed feed which is 100% landscape photography is all more or less fake. I take hundreds of photos and only publish one or two of the best ones and even those are heavily edited. It gives a totally false impression of how good of an photographer I really am.
Ever watch somebody who doesn't know about all that use the rawdog Internet? It's amazing how people can just sit there, deal with all that, and not go apeshit. The population has been conditioned.
It feels like a weird study. I can't tell if the study, or just the article, was trying to make GenZ look like fools yet again, when the actual results found are "GenZ is like a lot of other people in yet another way".
Anyway the difference now is that peoples opinions are amplified and spread quickly. Combine that with sponsorships and uninformed takes and you are in trouble. It Aldo doesn't help that people these days are lazy and dopamine junkies.
Wheel is excellent entertainment, and far more human than most of these pretenders.
I make the distinction among “streamer” who is doing a play by play similar to sportscasting, “presenter” is showing facts or teach a lesson like online learning, “op ed” to explain an opinion or parody, and “influencer” as someone trying to be center of attention but usually brings no value and has no reason to be famous except from being famous.
Maybe it’s just my own biases, but
I can listen when my kids watch e-sports, recognize it as sportscasting
I appreciate how “Everyday Astronaut” explains things
I’ll go with Jon Stewart for presenting news topics with a sense of the absurd because I don’t have the patience to find a streamer equivalent
somehow people like the Jenners, Lindsay Lohan, Kardashians, are famous for being famous, and supposedly “influence” people? Some of these really seem like the worst of humanity and ought to just be ignored.
Personally I despise everything about the idea of influencers. I have yet to see one who wasn’t an outright attention whore or just trying to get free shit.
I don't think it's a bad thing to want to be paid for being the center of attention. There's pathological levels to it for sure, but we're communal, creative creatures. Maybe it depends on how we define influencer, idk. I was gonna comment that younger generations aren't fully developed physiologically, so the appreciation for fully human influence could be chalked up to that
Right. There have been folks getting paid for (and enjoying) being the center of attention since culture has existed. The entire concept of cinema comes from this. I wouldn't call Rowan Atkinson or Penn & Teller "attention whores or people who only want free shit" but they are the "influencers" of their time.
The dynamic has shifted, but I don't see it as some inherently bad thing, this just reads as a "kids bad!" kind of statement.
Does anyody really look at anyone in an ad and say, "Yes, that's a fellow human, I connect with them on a personal level"?
I've been perceiving them as robots since 1986. Because even as a child I knew people in an ad don't act or talk like everybody I knew in real life and what they were portraying was completely made up, unrealistic dialog and scenarios.
Exactly. Marketing generally doesn't try to speak to your rational forebrain. It's going for your subconscious, by design. It's why ads can be so random and still retain efficacy.
I'm a millennial, but I don't necessarily care if the person I'm watching exists or not.
That's not to say there aren't a bunch of other factors involved that would generally steer me away from artificial people (general corporate BS being the obvious one), but all else being equal, I'm totally fine with it.
How the internet created ever more hucksters. Went from door-to-door to screen-to-screen salespeople. Topping things off, if they're growing up okay being influenced by a bot, well aren't we all screwed.
I know every generation says this, but I actually think Gen Z is doomed. They have like 50% support for Hamas lmao, brain rotted by social media and echo chambers