If you’re over 50, you are essentially chopped liver. This is the message we’ve received from the world of advertising since forever. Perhaps the most impressive aspect of this received wisdom is that youngsters pay universities tens of thousands to earn degrees in marketing, PR, and advertising which can be boiled down to the one basic idea.
Youngsters, then: What do they do?
Some have gone online in an effort to market themselves as experts, a field of activity once known as “influencers,” but increasingly known as “creators,” since the previous designation has become unfashionable. Thus, what used to be termed the influence economy has become the creator economy, which means predominantly young people on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok telling their peers about the latest new and exciting ideas they’ve come across.
Needless to say, the costs for entry into the creator/influencer space are low: It just takes a modern smartphone to record and edit the professional video, and an internet connection to post the content to a free social media site. This results in an inevitable scrum of creators acting like carnival barkers, trying to draw the attention of an audience.
What could go wrong? Mollie Johnson counts some of the ways in Discourse Magazine:
On a more fundamental level, there is a concern that influencer culture encourages the commodification of humans as they increasingly try to look more like businesses. They exchange their privacy for money. Followers and likes become status symbols: The higher the count, the more “valuable” the influencer. Human nature urges us to “keep up with the Joneses,” but is our obsession with these metrics leading us on a path to a society dreamed up by “Black Mirror”?
Particularly concerning is when influencers feel pressured by their audience to create specific content. While early influencers’ channels were self-directed, there was free creative expression.
Read the whole thing (it’s reasonably short).
It’s hard to shake the image of online weirdos voyeuristically looking into the lives of youngsters oversharing online. That is, of course, the doom-seizing part of my brain firing reliably. But I agree that parents should do better by limiting online use of their charges.
Contrary to the gloomy vision, of course, is Kevin Kelly, who long ago wrote about the promise of the internet in terms of how it could allow many people to find and serve niche clients, to work as content providers to a fan base willing to pay for it.
If we think of broadcast media as it existed prior to the internet, there were a few powerful companies and a limited number of stars, whether actors, musicians, news anchors, or political commentators, to name just a few categories. Their numbers were kept low and incomes kept high thanks to the limited venues for them to appear.
The internet and associated tech advancements have made it possible for everyone to have their own network, narrow-casting to an audience base willing to pay. Seen this way, it isn’t too surprising to find the potential for fame to drive neuroticism also finds wider distribution. The famous get dependent on the types of behavior that earned them their fame to begin with. And some of that behavior can tend to the pathological.
I have some fun news! I got accepted into our University's "Marianist Educational Associate" program. We'll have a retreat in late May.
I was strongly encouraged to apply last fall, but over Christmas the organizer encouraged me again, mentioning the retreat location this year is in Hawaii.
Did I mention Katie strongly encouraged me to apply as well? She wants to tagalong.
The University of Dayton belongs to the Society of Mary, and is of the Marianist tradition.
FWIW, the reason I was encouraged to apply was that I do a lot of programming for students on Catholic Social Teaching (applying it as a form of business ethics), and the University apparently really likes that.
And for the record, I decided to apply BEFORE I knew it was in Hawaii.
Although I have not done any field research on this, some academics I've met examined the OnlyFans marketplace (like substack, except the content is ummm, pictures, not words). Most make very little at (the media was less than $100 a month for paid accounts). I can honestly say I know of no one with a subscription to OnlyFans. Many content creators are looking for a niche (5 inch heels on POTUS candidates!), but the biggest niche are lonely guys.
What I thought was interesting, was when they went to explore which accounts were more successful, it was the accounts where the content creator interacted with fans, talking to them. There are apparently many lonely guys out there, willing to pay $10-$20 a month to have a woman chat with them on-line.
My entrepreneurial thought was to create some wholesome content (more suitable for substack than OnlyFans), targeted at the elderly, for pay. I could see a church doing this; creating social content, then using it to check on members, make sure the elderly don't feel forgotten.