The concept of an influencer should, ideally, be made illegal. I’m convinced the primary reason they are popular, is people are too lazy to want to have to read news/information of whatever topic and assemble it into something resembling their own opinion. They’d much rather have some other person read, parse, watch the goings-on and then deliver it as the influencer’s opinion. That way, people can subscribe to people that have similar opinions as themselves, and not be spooked by information that is “scary” or challenges their worldview.
It is like influencer was the next progression after social media echo chambers came into existence. A role inserted between old/traditional methods of information delivery, that parses it and delivers it in a format appealing to a particular audience. A role that has never had any certification or vetting process. Just some dude with a microphone in his mom’s bathroom.
So many people (in America at least) legitimately want to get into this as a “career” too, which is disturbing. Rather than doing real work of any kind to benefit society. If everyone is an influencer, who’s maintaining the codebase that makes their streams possible? Designing the hardware the software runs on? The power plants that run the datacenters? etc.
That being said, traditional media definitely hasn’t adapted well to the changing methods of information delivery, so maybe this is our 21st century media transition happening organically, and standards will eventually follow, hopefully.
" I’m convinced the primary reason they are popular, is people are too lazy to want to have to read news/information of whatever topic and assemble it into something resembling their own opinion. They’d much rather have some other person read, parse, watch the goings-on and then deliver it as the influencer’s opinion."
You’ve essentially described why idiots like Joe Rogan are so powerful
The concept of an influencer should, ideally, be made illegal. I’m convinced the primary reason they are popular, is people are too lazy to want to have to read news/information of whatever topic and assemble it into something resembling their own opinion. They’d much rather have some other person read, parse, watch the goings-on and then deliver it as the influencer’s opinion. That way, people can subscribe to people that have similar opinions as themselves, and not be spooked by information that is “scary” or challenges their worldview.
It is like influencer was the next progression after social media echo chambers came into existence. A role inserted between old/traditional methods of information delivery, that parses it and delivers it in a format appealing to a particular audience. A role that has never had any certification or vetting process. Just some dude with a microphone in his mom’s bathroom.
So many people (in America at least) legitimately want to get into this as a “career” too, which is disturbing. Rather than doing real work of any kind to benefit society. If everyone is an influencer, who’s maintaining the codebase that makes their streams possible? Designing the hardware the software runs on? The power plants that run the datacenters? etc.
That being said, traditional media definitely hasn’t adapted well to the changing methods of information delivery, so maybe this is our 21st century media transition happening organically, and standards will eventually follow, hopefully.
" I’m convinced the primary reason they are popular, is people are too lazy to want to have to read news/information of whatever topic and assemble it into something resembling their own opinion. They’d much rather have some other person read, parse, watch the goings-on and then deliver it as the influencer’s opinion."
You’ve essentially described why idiots like Joe Rogan are so powerful
“Fuck journalists and artists. We should just give all of their power to corporate media and record labels.”