Category: Articles

The end of Gawker

Last week, Gawker Media announced that it was closing its doors after a protracted legal battle with multibillionaire Peter Thiel, who seems to have made it his mission to destroy the site.

Gawker was a website that pioneered much of the content form and style of online writing we see today. As noted in its closing statement, which included site data, Gawker predates today’s tracking tools, including Google Analytics. Along with its affiliate sites like Deadspin, Jezebel, and Gizmodo, the ‘Gawker Network’popularized the snark and the informal and incisive style that is now characteristic of online writing. As the network’s flagship website, gawker.com was the first to publish posts on topics and from people that, arguably, wouldn’t have found a home otherwise.

As Adrien Chen notes — Gawker was a unique place to become a journalist because it put writers in front of the masses to ‘express themselves how they wanted.’ The site was the birthplace of much of Internet culture. Despite the temporality of the net, and our tendency to valorize something and then dispose of it, Gawker will likely live on as a legend, if for no other reason than the fact that most of its writing staff have gone on to other sites and publications to continue publishing content that perpetuates, in some way shape or form, the style originated by the site.

Gawker was generally the first in any situation to point out when companies, publications, and people — particularly people of power or influence — were being self-congratulatory, smug, or overly-indulgent. Gawker was also a pioneer in the comments section, which was one of the draws to the site. It created the kinja discussion thread, which is pretty similar to how comments and replies currently work on Facebook posts. It was ahead of its time. You can still see it in action on Gawker’s affiliated sites. It really attempted to create an online discussion between bloggers, writers, journalists, and commenters and this worked (or didn’t) to varying degrees throughout the site’s history.

Online conversations and commentary on any given issue can feel circular, and we often feel like everyone on a particular social media platform is all talking about the same thing. Recently, NPR decided to shut down the comments section on its site for partly the same reason: in July, of the 22 million unique users to the site, they had 491,000 comments. Those comments came from 19,400 commenters, or 0.06% of users commenting. Whatever discussion its posts were generating; it was amongst the same group of people.

But, just as in life, not all social spaces are created equal. On Twitter, Gene Demby, a writer at PostBougie and NPR’s Code Switch explained the trouble with comments sections and why it’s difficult to make them resemble anything constructive:

So in the wake of Gawker’s demise and NPR removing its comments section, it seems fitting to look at some of the trends of our particular social spaces. Public online spaces of interaction can be exhausting or potentially harmful for some people — mostly minority groups. But what about the areas we think of as being more ‘private’, or at the very least limited by permissions and friend requests?

Real friends — how many of us?

In June, Facebook retooled its algorithm to show more posts from your friends over media outlets in your news feed. Not only that, but it reportedly prioritizes the content from friends that you care about — aka the people you interact with most on the site. Facebook used to limit the number of posts you would see in a row from the same person. However, with this new update, this rule is less stringent, allowing your friends to dominate your news feed more than ever.

But, the truth is, Facebook is no longer an accurate representation of your social circle. Most of us don’t talk to 300 plus people a day, let alone probe them on their political and moral beliefs. However, it seems that more than any other platform, Facebook has become the platform for moralizing or politicizing. Facebook is at once, both personal and public, which means publicizing your views on topics that could be considered sensitive or controversial is safe and scary in equal measure.

Self-care

In many ways ‘Self-care’ is the Internet term of 2016. To be short about it — the year has felt bad. World-falling-apart-at-the-seams kind of bad. In case you’ve somehow forgotten, the year has been filled with terrorist attacks, police brutality, peaceful protests-turned-violent-attacks, unsavory politics, and a myriad of other now seemingly regular disasters. For many, social media has, if not perpetuated, at the least amplified, the feeling of constant bad news.

Self-care takes different forms. Some feel checking out from social media altogether is necessary — this is also become some face more discrimination and harassment online than others for sharing their views. And as for sharing your political views on Facebook — well, you can’t really make blanket statements for how this does or does not go, because the stakes are incredibly different, depending on who is doing the sharing.

Quartz published a (somewhat sketchy) article on data collected by Rantic, that suggested your political Facebook posts do not alter people’s behavior or views. The authenticity of the study can’t be verified, however, anecdotally, it feels true: most people who post political updates on Facebook are posting to an audience that, by-and-large, already agrees with them, and that these posts are not changing anyone’s political views.

On the flip side, The Ringer explored the mainstreaming of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement and the role of social media. Looking at how the hashtag has spread generally, and then rapidly, following horrifying cases of brutality caught on camera, it compares online tipping points of adoption to when Facebook introduced the equals sign as a profile picture option to show support for marriage equality.

To be clear, there are vast differences between expressing your political views in a well-thought out and constructed post detailing your experience or beliefs and changing your profile picture to include a watermark filter that identifies you as an ally to a particular cause or issue. The chasm between replacing your photo with a Facebook-created-and-sanctioned filter and reaching a point of frustration and confusion at systemic and institutional marginalization is miles wide. The Ringer article makes this point, but also suggests that there are crossover lessons.

Based on a study Facebook conducted on the equals sign profile picture, the number of people posting about an issue does have an impact on whether or not you follow suit. The median number for people to change their photo is eight. Once something becomes popular, there’s less social risk associating yourself with the cause — you can change your photo and update your status with impunity, you don’t risk political backlash or losing friends who vehemently disagree with your viewpoint.

Over the past couple of years though, a performative element has become part of the Facebook post/status update/profile picture change. This doesn’t exclude people from posting about causes or social issues they genuinely care about, but the performance and identification are not mutually exclusive. You receive social recognition and validation for said posts, have warm and self-affirming feelings about your beliefs, and are encouraged to post more on a similar topic.

So there is some truth to both sides. Facebook posts may not alter behavior, but they can grant people who would not take the initiative to post of their own volition permission to enter a digital and social space. Depending on the issue, commenting on social media can be in direct opposition to someone’s sense of self-care — or to put it another way, posting your political views on social media requires you to assess your level of comfort and safety within your online network, the same way it does in a real-life social setting. Studies that look at whether or not issues are adopted are operating on the assumption that all issues are created equal — or can be responded to with equal weight. Depending on the topic, people discussing an issue might not be the ones who are impacted the most. For some of these people, the political and personal blowback you can experience from engaging online isn’t worth the trouble.

And also, from those who are discussing a politically or socially sensitive topic, there’s a line — sometimes, identifying yourself as an ally to a given cause can come off as more congratulatory than not. Like when someone feels the need to tell you about the nice thing they did or are planning on doing for you, rather than just simply doing it, it can feel like cashing in on social justice credit.

#woke

There’s a whole segment of the population that doesn’t know what being woke is — which is an interesting phenomenon, because woke is now common enough to start turning back, almost full circle, to perform double duty as both a positive and negative term. As The New York Times stated in April, ‘Think of ‘woke’ as the inverse of ‘politically correct.’ If ‘P.C.’ is a taunt from the right, a way of calling out hypersensitivity in political discourse, then ‘woke is a back-pat from the left, a way of affirming the sensitive.’ More to the point than that even, ‘It means wanting to be considered correct, and wanting everyone to know just how correct you are.’

Although being woke is becoming a casualty of Internet performance, its origins are in black rights movements and essentially means being aware of the various complexities and problems which our society functions, the multiplicity of ways in which systematic racism and prejudice manifest, and refusing to accept them as the status quo. Its popularization is usually attributed to Erykah Badu, who urged people to ‘stay woke’ in her song ‘Master Teachers’ in 2008. Today, it can still mean that, but it can also mean that you’re so woke you haven’t slept in days, what with pointing out all the ways in which you are more awake to the various injustices in the world than everyone else. In the negative context, being woke is not only performative, but condescending and competitive.

Woke friends — in the negative sense — usually beget woke friends because woke users are generally very active on social media, in order to prove their wokeness, as public recognition is a core component. As an insult, woke is more popular on Twitter, but unaware woke behaviour is arguably more prominent on Facebook. Generally, Twitter is a more public forum: you’re interacting, or at least reading, tweets from people that are writing for a larger and more public audience than on Facebook. Therefore, Twitter users are quicker to point out this kind of behaviour in one another and you’re less likely to find the kind of affirmation you would from your friends.

The rules of engagement

Basically, this is all a word to the wise and consideration for your online objectives. If our social networks are generally comprised of people with similar political views and online discussions are usually dominated by a few, spreading messages and garnering support requires a tipping point for it to spread to a wider audience. But what that looks like and how that works is dependent on your audience and your issue. As the Facebook study on the equals sign found, the number of friends who adopted the photo played a role in whether or not someone would also choose to change their display picture, but so did demographic characteristics, such as age, gender, education, and factors relevant to marriage equality, such as religion.

As aforementioned, not all spaces are created equal. Assuming everyone has the same amount of political risk when adopting a given issue assumes that your entire audience is all on the same playing field. When you can have scenarios where one group needs to actively check out for self-care and the other has the luxury of becoming incredibly woke because the issue is for them, at most, performative, finding the tipping point is much more nuanced than simply attempting to get people onside.

This isn’t to say that you can’t use social media to do this — this is to say that you need to consider which group your message addresses, whether intentionally or not, the most: Performative support isn’t the kind that correlates to action, and worse, it’s the kind that can alienate real supporters from your efforts. If your issue is high-stakes for you, realizing that it could be high stakes for others is the minimum level of consideration you should give when using means to persuade them to publically support your cause. When people are actively avoiding engaging in issues to avoid being part of one group or to engage in a level of self-care, there’s an added level of sensitivity required in what you’re saying and how you’re saying it.

To take it back to Gawker — Gawker was unafraid to challenge the status quo, the powerful, and it took chances on content, sources, and the types of stories it ran. Much of its content was controversial, but it also gave a voice to a lot of people who wouldn’t have had one otherwise, and for that it will forever hold a place within the history of the Internet. And in the end, to the dismay of many, that level of confidence and brashness didn’t survive and it was forced out. Although it’s now bankrupt, Gawker Media as a whole will continue through its affiliate sites. But the brand and the ideals of gawker.com have been effectively shut down. The end of Gawker is bad for many reasons, implications for free speech being one of them. As much as the Internet seems like a free-for-all, it’s still worth asking who has room to participate and what’s at stake for them if they do.

As much as it pains me to admit, The New York Yankees did something good. If speaking truth to power takes courage, speaking truth to delusion takes creativity. In both cases, the source of the threat determines what one needs to avoid it. With power, the threat is some kind of punishment for challenging authority. You need to be brave to speak the truth knowing it will cause some kind of repercussion. It takes incredible creativity to get facts through to the truly deluded. Instead of simply relaying information, you have to make it fit into a crazy way of looking at the world without distorting whatever makes your information true in the first place.

Last weekend, the Yankees did just that. They announced Alex Rodriguez would retire. Nay, they convinced Alex Rodriguez to retire, effective Friday, so that next year he can be a ‘special advisor’ to the team. This is quite the feat. Baseball players do not retire in August. Especially not baseball players like Alex Rodriguez. Even more so when they are four home runs away from 700 for their career and due to make 21 million dollars the next season

Rodriguez or A-Rod, needs no introduction for even lapsed baseball fans. He’s been making headlines in the sport since the mid 90s. The once-in-a-generation prospect developed into one of the best players of his era, collecting MVP awards and breaking records on his way to a World Series championship and, eventually, plenty of controversy. Over his career, Rodriguez was paid more than any other baseball player— ever—and by a wide margin. But, despite his obvious greatness, fans often consider him overpaid. His distant and occasionally controversial personality did not help either. Nor did rumors, like the infamous centaur painting.

For most of his career, Rodriguez was described — if you were being nice — as controversial. He was more often labeled narcissistic or straight-up delusional. At one time, he was the undisputed best baseball player on the planet and people were willing to overlook, or at least tolerate, his personality. But, injuries and age have taken their toll. For the past few seasons it’s been pretty clear that stepping aside is the one way Rodriguez can help his team the most.

Rodriguez reached a new low with the Biogenesis scandal. Rodriguez was suspended for the entire 2014 season for using steroids. This was actually the second time he was busted for PEDs. A 2009 Sports Illustrated story revealed Rodriguez tested positive for banned substances in 2003. At the time, the drugs were forbidden yet the league did not have an official screening or suspension policy. Rodriguez was only tested as part of a study to determine if they needed to implement harsher drug penalties, which they did. Other stars have continued being beloved or at least saw no real change in how fans responded to them after one failed test from the same era. David Ortiz and Andy Pettittie and Bartolo Colon are great examples. Even Ryan Braun is getting his image on back on track. The same can’t be said for A-Rod. The second time around, Major League Baseball was ready to make an example of him. It says something about how far they went with that example that people eventually started feeling sorry for a guy who was routinely booed in almost every stadium he visited. Even though The Yankees were very clear that they did not want him back, Rodriguez decided to play another year. Credit where credit is due, A-Rod had a mini comeback season last year and had he retired earlier, the narrative would be very different.

This year, the Yankees needed A-Rod to retire. Unfortunately, for them, consistently declining statistics, no longer being a viable everyday fielder, having to take steroids in order to mask those last two things, and getting suspended all of 2014 for being caught, (what some would call objective logic) was not enough to convince A-Rod his playing days were over. The situation was looking grim. This season was by far his worst as a professional, yet before last weekend all signs pointed to Rodriguez at least finishing the season and potentially joining the Yankees for Spring Training 2017. Then the Yankees came up with something amazing: A way to fit retiring into Rodriguez’s uniquely A-Rodian way of understanding the universe.

Watch last Sunday’s press conference. Rodriguez seems like he could pass a Turing test, hitting all the typical spots in the typical heartfelt athlete retirement speech. With over 30 years in the public eye, it’s fair to say he’s not that good of an actor, so the fact that he seems into it is probably genuine. This is not the same man who once justified using a banned substance with a disconnect that was equal parts Patrick Bateman and Sheldon Cooper. At this point in time, A-Rod isn’t retiring mid season because he’s a distraction in the clubhouse, a waste of a roster spot that could potentially give a prospect valuable big league at-bats, and simply not very good. He’s retiring now because he’s ‘accepting the end gracefully’ because it’s ‘part of being a great professional athlete’.

Now having your general manager beg you to retire mid season is probably not what most of us consider ‘accepting the end gracefully’, especially when that same general manager had been trying to get you to retire for years. Who cares? As great as A-Rod was as a player, is it the best idea for someone as notoriously hard to get along with as he is to be mentoring ‘the next generation of Yankees’? You can also question if someone with off the charts natural ability will be able to explain his process to people who are less skilled. But, the Yankees needed Rodriguez off their playing roster and they came up with an appealing offer for A-Rod that would allow him to accept a ‘graceful’ retirement. Money doesn’t matter to the Yankees like it does other teams; they still have to pay A-Rod, but his salary will no longer count against MLB’s luxury tax or be used by other superstars as an aggressive but technically within the realm of possibility number to start contract negotiations. It’s a win.

From a public relations perspective the win is even greater. Rodriguez’s last game becomes a national event. The Yankees get to do the history of baseball stuff they do so well. Since the team is in the middle of one of its worst seasons in recent memory, Friday’s game will be a much needed highlight in what looks like a depressing second half of the 2016 season. Convincing Rodriguez to retire now lets the Yankees focus their legacy machine on him for a few days, before pointing it on Mark Teixeira, their other, better behaved, superstar retiring at the end of the season. Now they get two special legacy nights in an otherwise disappointing season, when before there was only one. They also get to avoid all of the distracting press speculating about Rodriguez’s next move should he have remained active. Even just having him sit on the bench in recent weeks caused a small scene.

Thankfully, most public affairs campaigns don’t involve clients who are completely far-gone, like soon to be former Yankee Third Basemen. However, they do often require helping people confront perspectives outside of their own. One way to learn how to do that is to study extreme examples of speaking truth to delusion or talking sense to the senseless — when courses of action completely logical to the general public are explained in terms most would find crazy, in order to get a particularly removed individual back to acting like they share a consciousness with the rest of us.

Thinking about it now, Alex Rodriguez retiring on Friday makes too much sense for everyone involved. The only reason it wouldn’t have happened would have been because it involved Alex Rodriguez himself having to agree to it. Then The Yankees spoke truth to delusion. Being ‘special advisor to the next generation of Yankees’ because part of being a great player is ‘accepting the end gracefully’ was a bridge from our world to A-Rod’s. Even though those words probably mean slightly different things in each one. The Yankees made sense out of a senseless situation. They turned a potentially ugly, drawn-out issue into a much bigger and much cleaner PR win: getting Alex Rodriguez to accept a portion of his mortality, making conventional wisdom palpable for someone who built an image around defying it is something we can all learn from, even if the Yankees are teaching the lesson.

The title of this post is from a Hamilton song called ‘The Room Where It Happens.’ If you’re (I can only assume) somewhat against joy and music and are unfamiliar with Hamilton, here is the not-even-Cole’s-Notes-worthy synopsis: Hamilton is a Broadway musical about the life of Alexander Hamilton that incorporates both show tunes and hip hop. It also incorporates diversity and inclusion, casting people of colour in roles they would not normally be cast. ‘The Room Where It Happens’ is sung by Aaron Burr, Alexander Hamilton’s frenemy, and ultimately, the cause of his death. Throughout the story, Burr desperately wants to be involved with the top-most decision making with the innermost circles of government and power, but he never quite gets there.

Part of the explosive popularity of the musical is that, although a show about grand and momentous events, the characters, ideas, and sentiment expressed throughout are deeply human and relatable. ‘The Room Where It Happens’ is a great song because most people are not content to merely observe the happenings of process — whether that process is political, popular, or a play. One of the most popular Hamilton memorabilia is an annotated songbook, detailing from start to finish the development of the show and the thought process behind the lyrics.

We have always mined the yearning to be in-the-know. The late 90s and early 2000s produced a spate of ‘Making the Band’ shows that allowed us to witness the formation and progression of various pop groups. Singing and dance competitions such as American Idol and So You Think You Can Dance dig from the same source, purporting to show us what it takes to become a star, while also involving us in the process. There are whole series dedicated to watching people prepare food. We are fascinated by preparation itself, and we like to be involved, or at the very least, know what being involved looks like. Exclusives, back-stage interviews, and unguarded moments with politicians, bands, and other celebrity figures all occur in rooms where things happen and where most of us would like to, at least for a brief moment, hang out.

The added dimension — especially in relation to political and public affairs campaigns — is transparency. And in general, there’s a hesitation to stay away from process because we make the assumption that there are things no one wants to know, things they will find boring, and things they shouldn’t know. Understanding process means understanding, in Hamilton parlance, how ‘the parties get to yes/the pieces that are sacrificed in every game of chess.’ How much you reveal and how you do it, though, is difficult to determine. Watching the progression of Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the public’s reaction to her, and her in comparison to Trump, can show the disconnect between process and person, political and personal. Rebecca Traister, who has been chronicling the campaign for New York Magazine, spent time with Clinton on the road and said ‘something about the candidate is being lost in translation,’ and that she has been ‘plagued by the ‘likeability’ question since she was first lady.’

The likeability issue exists on a smaller scale for issue-based campaigns and their leaders. In an endless challenge to appear accessible, but authoritative, intelligent, but digestible, indomitable, yet palatable, the game is to be genuine while juggling demands that seem both unrealistic and completely fair to ask of the people and procedures that govern.

Repeatedly, the assessment of some of the current political circumstances is that there is a push against traditional institutionalism in favour of grassroots movements — or more specifically, grassroots movements that rely on the halcyon glow of imagined better days. The attempts to dismantle entrenched power structures is becoming more raucous, such as siding with Trump. And this is how complicated the game can be. Ironically, the Trump faction who champions various throwbacks to outdated power structures can be considered anti-institutional, despite the fact that of the two candidates, Clinton is the only one who could make history by challenging the institutionalism of male leadership by becoming the first female president.

The fact that coming off genuine is often a practiced art is as old as politics, but the rooms where things happen are becoming less physical and more conceptual. Who’s in and out of the room depends on who you’re asking, and along with the loss of trust in institutions come informal concentrations of sway that often have a better idea of how to walk the line of disclosure between the seemingly private and public. But letting people into the metaphorical ‘room’ is, in fact, one way to do this. Struggle is inherently humanizing — perfection, alienating — but with all of the deconstructing and shifting of actual physical institutionalism, there’s also new gradations and realizations of struggle. Not all struggles are equal, and a challenge constantly put to Clinton is whether or not her struggles are relatable.

And then there’s the Internet. Grassroots movements benefit from the informal and widespread use of the Internet, as it’s enabling this shift from a physical room to a metaphorical one. And the Internet, and all of the various platforms by which we share and shape our identity on the Internet, has only helped to extend this fascination with behind-the-scenes exclusives into our personal lives, promoting a level of information, accessibility and narcissism that also makes us interested in how others conduct their own navel-gazing. We have come to expect that at some point, we will see a humanizing side to any larger than life figure with glimpses ‘beyond’ a public face — perhaps we want myths more if we can be part of their making. Successful strategies get imbued with importance ipso facto, reinforcing our desire to know the ‘exclusive’ details as campaigns and projects progress.

Basically, letting people in on some of the dirty details has its time and place. When brought down to a procedural level it’s not always boring: the daily grind of how things get done, insecurities on success, the setbacks that one experiences along the way, are shared experiences, similar to Burr’s frustration with ambition expressed in the song. In the song, Hamilton counsels Burr: ‘If you’ve got skin in the game, you stay in the game.’ In politics and in public affairs, removing some of the mystery is one way to make people feel invested. Revealing process has a role to play in increasing understanding of what’s at stake, making people feel important, and feeding our need to know some semblance of ‘truth’ behind what’s going on.

It’s not easy. You have to know when and how much to share, but within the context of shifting expectations, it’s become an integral part of how we determine the trustworthiness and likeability of a person, an organization, or an issue. Plus, for all the Hamilton fans out there, you have to remember Alexander Hamilton’s other piece of advice to Aaron Burr: ‘you don’t get a win unless you play in the game/You get love for it, you get hate for it/You get nothing if youﾅwait for it, wait for it.’

The Promise of Information Freedom

Control was the Internet’s great promise when it went mainstream. I distinctly remember logging on for the first time in late 1995. I loaded one of the first search engines, Infoseek (this was pre-Google, of course), which aggregated popular content by subject and went click-happy exploring the ‘Word Wide Web.’

If you remember pre-Internet life, you certainly remember how thrilling this was. You felt like you were in the driver seat. You could explore topics and find whole websites dedicated to the same interests you had. You held the keys to an instant library curated by a community of freaks and geeks who shared your niche passions.

Within a year, our house had its first Internet-ready computer, and I would subsequently spend hours and hours after school, just ‘surfing’ this massive sea of information. It was freedom. When Google came along and archived the Internet so that you could search just about anything, it truly felt like information freedom. And until recently, that was always the frame I used when thinking about the Internet. It’s a place of uncensored, unrestricted, limitless information available to anyone who wants to find it.

Or is it?

The Reality of Information Overload

There is so much information on the Internet (in excess of 1.2 million terabytes, by some accounts), there’s simply no way to realistically navigate all it on our own. That’s why we have become so dependent on curators. The most popular platforms, of course, are Facebook, Twitter, and even Google.

Canadians cite Facebook as their number one destination for news. But Facebook gives us a distinct point of view on the world, one that is mostly removed from real-world realities. Its algorithm is designed to populate your news feed with content you are most likely to find engaging. If you start liking your best friend’s baby pics, you’ll start to see more baby pics. Start an instant messenger conversation with someone and suddenly you start seeing a lot more of their status updates in your timeline. The algorithm is designed to keep you hooked with constant doses of entertainment so you keep coming back. The more effective the algorithm, the more daily users it generates for Facebook, and the more advertising it can sell. It’s a symbiotic relationships that, for the most part, keeps everyone happy.

But, does that come at a cost? Freakonomics Radio has a fascinating episode on this issue earlier this month. The episode begins with a story by Zenep Tufekci who studies the social impact of technology at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. She recounts how she experienced the Ferguson Unrest of Aug 2014. When she logged to Twitter, her feed was consumed by this story—an unrelenting stream of tweets about police overreaction. When she switched to Facebook, she saw nothing about. It was as if she had a lense into two completely different universes. And in many ways, that’s each social platform: its own universe, with distinct user experiences that filter information in their own ways.

Unlike Facebook, Twitter has left its social feed largely unaltered since its inception 10 years ago; it remains an unfiltered stream of consciousness. Twitter’s most avid users love that feature, but for many, it’s overwhelming. Where Facebook has successfully grown its user base by finding more sophisticated ways displaying relevant content, Twitter has taken an approach that ‘Internet Freedom’ advocates would appreciate: it keeps the faucet open. What comes out of that faucet is largely unfiltered, which, of course, has caused Twitter grief on more than one occasion. Cyberbullying aside, Twitter has been struggling of late, and Wall Street wants it to adopt a Facebook-like algorithm. But even if it sticks to its guns and continues with its current feed format, it remains a biased view of the world. As a user, you can only diversify what you’re seeing in your feed by altering the list of people you follow.

The lense through which we see, use, and consume information on the Internet is increasingly—almost exclusively—a lense shaped by others, for our viewing pleasure. We let our social feeds tell us what matters, what news to read, what video clips to watch, or which Netflix series to get hooked on next. Precisely because there is so much information, it’s easier to embrace a socially-validated news feed. If our social networks, and the social platforms we use every day do all the hard work of finding the content that resonates most with us, who are we to stop them? It’s too convenient; it simplifies our life.

Whether we want to admit it or not, we’ve reverted to the passive consumption that the Internet was supposed to free us from. In 1995, I took delight in having complete control (or what felt like complete control) over what I consumed. In 2016, I’m so damn busy, and have so much information to sift through, I love having all that hard work done for me through a couple apps on my phone. But I concede that in embracing this reality, I’m letting others tell me what information to consume. And by doing so, I’ve given up control as a consumer of information.

As we consume an Internet that is curated by a small group of highly-influential companies, we should remember, the Internet looks the way it does because we want it to look that way. We can’t fault Facebook, Google, or Twitter for serving up content its users want to see. If we don’t like that idea, we should stop watching cat videos or opt out of the platforms altogether. Right — so that won’t happen any time soon — which means that as professional communicators, we need to crack the code and find ways to make our content pass the rigorous demands of Facebook’s algorithm, or Twitter’s finicky user base.

How to crack the code

In truth, we shouldn’t even focus on cracking the code. Curated social feeds only work if they display content people want to consume. Our goal should be the same. Admittedly, this is no easy task when it comes to public affairs content. In this space, we’re typically dealing with matters that have some regulatory, legislative, or public administration concern to them. Snooze! Who wants their social feed experience disrupted by content that deals with such serious, and potentially boring issues? In a universe where people would rather watch clips from the Late Show, inserting ourselves in that space with a serious, cognitive, or alarmist message is jarring and typically off-putting to most people. That’s because they turn to their social channels for distraction or to connect with others, not to hear about why they should sign your petition demanding the government sets a renewable energy target of 100% by 2050. But we know that people will engage on these issues. However, it takes a thoughtful approach, and one that meets people’s expectations for what they will see on these platforms. So, how can we get people to respond to ‘boring’ issues that typically rely on the cognitive side of the brain to make the point?

1. Lead with motive and make it emotional

People are naturally cynical, which means we need to lead with motive and be completely transparent about it. But to make your message a one-two punch, you need to avoid cognitive arguments as much as humanly possible. Our brain is wired to ignore the boring and respond quickly to novel, concrete, visual, and high-contrast messages instead. Eventually, you can speak to the cognitive side of the brain with compelling facts and figures, but before getting to that point, the brain needs to be primed. After it’s primed, It will respond much more quickly and be motivated by emotion. When in doubt, remember, people care about people. Obviously, they care about themselves, but they also care about their identity – the tribe with which they associate. Appeal to both their self-interests and the interests of the communities they align with.

2. Make it enjoyable

Even if you’re campaigning on an issue that will get people worked up, present yourself as a happy warrior. Have a little bit of fun. People go online to have fun, and if you’re going to serve up your message in that context, make sure you fit in. If fun is completely off-brand for you, or if you worry about it backfiring—always a real possibility—then the rest of the user experience needs to be completely engaging. Even on serious issues, make your campaign video absolutely moving from the first frame to the last one. The creative should be beautiful, and any video should be immaculately composed. The copy should read flawlessly. All aspects of the campaign should have an attractive design aesthetic. We’re bombarded with facts and figures all day; we rarely come across quality content. So when quality appears in our feeds, we react.

3. Make it novel

When we’re scrolling through our social feeds, we’re looking for something different—something unexpected. We want something to grab our attention. As communicators, getting that attention is one of the most difficult assignments we could ask for. We literally have split seconds to grab someone’s attention. As Chip and Dan Heath taught us, ‘before your message can stick, your audience has to want it.’ So, spark their curiosity. Shine a light on your audience’s curiosity gap, then immediately fill it.

4. Keep it simple

This is an easy one to get wrong. When we think about keeping things simple, we often think about the KISS method, (Keep It Simple, Stupid), which actually takes us down the wrong path. It gives us the wrong impression that we need to dumb down a message. However, the problem with dumbing down the message is that we look like we don’t have anything to back up or point or that we have something to hide. We should never hide. For our message to have credibility, it needs to be complete. So rather than try to dumb it down, we should focus on the priority that matters most. What’s the core message? That’s what we communicate. Ah, if only it were that simple, right?

5. Use vivid imagery

People need to visualize our message. They need to see what a perfect world looks like. The best way to help them visualize that future is to paint a picture with language that is concrete. Don’t force the viewer to work hard to imagine the end-state. Show it to them immediately so that the cognition doesn’t get in the way of emotion. Help people ‘see’ what you’re saying.

For almost a month, wrestling fans have been buzzing over Total Non-Stop Action’s (TNA) online video, ‘The Final Deletion’. For whatever reason, not everyone sees the beauty in suplexes, power bombs, or watching grown men hitting each other in the face with trash cans. Even as an avid wrestling fan, parts of it are hard to get through. However, you need not worry, I watched it for you, several times, and can tell you why this match and its fallout in TNA storytelling is a perfect vehicle for explaining the difference between simply deleting content and actually changing public opinion in an online reputation campaign. In addition to possibly resurrecting Matt and Jeff Hardy’s careers, ‘The Final Deletion’ also brings to light an inherent contradiction in the ‘right to be forgotten’ concept, important to anyone working in online reputation management.

First, some context: This video is sports entertainment. Professional wrestling is an art-form. It has unique conventions or ways of conveying symbolic meaning. For example, in professional wrestling acting is judged like nachos: the cheesier the better. And ‘The Final Deletion’ is cheesy. The premise of the video is that ‘Broken’ Matt Hardy challenges ‘Brother Nero’ Jeff Hardy to a match for the right to the Hardy family legacy, with the loser being deleted from existence forever. Remember this is a professional wrestling storyline—a parallel fantasy universe from which we can draw lessons for the real-world. The threat of ‘deletion’ instead of a simple loss, and the deliberate choice to use digital vernacular and present it as a pre-recorded video instead of a traditional taping in front of a live audience, makes Matt’s attempt to remove Jeff from existence comparable to real-world efforts to displace unflattering articles in search engine results.

Despite winning the ‘Final Deletion’ match, when Matt subsequently goes on a live broadcast, he is greeted by fans cheering wildly for the supposedly deleted Jeff. These fans are much like real-world Internet users who create more content about an event even after the initial post is removed. Many politicians who have been caught deleting controversial tweets know this reality all too well. At this moment Matt realizes he can never truly delete Jeff so long as the audience remembers Jeff. This is a perfect demonstration of how digital content is not completely isolated from the physical world and removing it does not automatically cause the events leading to its creation to disappear from people’s heads. Since the audience will never forget about Jeff as long as Matt is around, Matt must create new content or extend the narrative in order to realize his ultimate goal of controlling the Hardy legacy. He needs to give people a chance to move on and accept the new status quo, instead of wondering where the guy from the last match disappeared to. So how does Matt deal with this reality? He changes the conditions of their match; Jeff will no longer be deleted. Instead, he’ll become Matt’s slave. Yes, it’s ridiculous, but it elegantly completes the metaphor—in the real world, we can’t delete content, but we can use new content to establish different front page results in search engines.

While this blog post gives me a convenient excuse to write about wrestling, the events surrounding this video do a better job of highlighting the difference between deleting content from the Internet and actually removing an issue from public conversation than any white paper could. In fact, ‘The Final Deletion’ deserves credit for three reasons, two of which matter in illustrating this point:

• it’s responsible for the most attention TNA Wrestling has ever received;
• it illustrates how to effectively manipulate search results in a reputational campaign by bringing to light a fundamental paradox in the much debated ‘right to be forgotten’ initiatives that concern anyone managing a brand with unfavourable search history;
• and, of course,
  it features a frog splash from a very tall tree.

Last week, articles discussing ‘The Final Deletion’ were shared over 10,000 times on social media. Articles about ‘TNA Wrestling’ in general struggled to generate that kind of engagement during the entire month of June, and most of the content was about whether or not the company would be sold or file for bankruptcy. It’s hard to compare ‘The Final Deletion’ to other clips in TNA’s catalogue. Reaction segments are a good equalizer. The segment reacting to ‘The Final Deletion’ on TNA’s weekly broadcast was viewed more than 192,000 times since being uploaded on Thursday, while the next highest segment was hovering around 90,000. With one event, the online narrative about the TNA has shifted from one about financial difficulties to how amazingly crazy ‘Broken’ Matt Hardy is, increasing viewers on TNA broadcasts as wrestling fans look to see what sport’s entertainment’s new answer to Tommy Wiseau will do next.

Sure, people are debating whether ‘The Final Deletion’ is a piece of art or even an act of professional wrestling, but there’s no doubt that it is fantastic when considered as a piece of viral content. It’s a backyard wrestling video from a second tier promotion. The fact that it has more than 300,000 views (on just the official link) is incredible. Imagine if a second round playoff series in the QMJHL was generating more buzz than The Stanley Cup. Thanks to ‘The Final Deletion’, TNA was on the same level as WWE for a short time, going by general share of voice among people who care about such things. That really is an amazing achievement.

The match itself incorporates several spots (wrestling term for planned sequences) recalling famous matches in The Hardy Boys’ career going back to their time in WWE, which had never really been acknowledged in TNA storylines before. The audience is reminded of what it means to be a Hardy in the storyline world of professional wrestling as the two brothers symbolically rewrite history by performing new versions of the stunts that made them famous in the first place. Here too, we can draw lessons for online reputation recovery campaigns. Taking professional wrestling seriously for a moment, the fight is a violent and indirect way of redefining one’s past by repositioning key points in its foundational narrative. In terms of digital reputation, you can compare it to disavowing links to unfavourable articles while tweaking public-facing copy to meet the same communications objectives as before, without using words or phrases that might have been used in unflattering coverage.

‘The Final Deletion’s’ aftermath and the fallout on TNA’s weekly broadcast cement it as a definitive metaphor for effective online reputation management. Matt eventually realizes a pinfall victory is like a running a digital reputation campaign without any offline support. Without something to replace whatever you are trying to delete or remove, people will still remember the original, and create more similar content to take its place. As long as other people remember Jeff and create content about him, he is never truly deleted. The crowd remembers Jeff and chant his name until he appears in the ring. In real-world campaigns, these chants are manifested in the form of new content that appears in search results in place of deleted content Removing results from search engine pages, without offline efforts to create equally prominent content in its place, makes those results harder to find, but they still exist. Users looking for information about major brands or high profile individuals will not be satisfied with mediocre placeholder content and will ultimately rediscover scandalous material, bringing it back to the forefront of search engine results. Why? Because as Google and European courts are starting to articulate, being forgotten is not a right. Privacy, within reasonable limits, is a right. But there is a very big difference between the two.

Google’s ‘right to be forgotten’ initiative is a program that, theoretically, allows individuals to remove web pages containing personal information from search engine results. A version is technically live in the US, it has been contested in European courts for years, and was recently rejected by a court in Japan. A version very similar to the American one was recently (and very quietly) made available to Canadians with lawyers already considering the possible implications. For major brands and people regularly in the headlines, the program is essentially meaningless. Google will not, nor is it under any obligation to, delete results that are a matter of public record and interest, regardless of how embarrassing those events may be for the people involved. Results related to crimes, politicians, or public figures are not eligible for deletion under ‘right to be forgotten’. This is not because Google engineers are especially fond of these things. Search engines aggregate information that already exists in some form so that it is easier to find digitally. They do not write negative content, yet they’re often blamed for its continued effect on a subject’s reputation.

When a crime or political scandal stops being covered by broadcast or television news, it is quickly forgotten because watching old news broadcasts is almost as pointless as saving old newspapers. People move on from a story, however, the physical copy of that news report still exists somewhere. Digital content related to a story will linger in search results for its main keyword because those results are not designed to reflect the general news, but an up-to-date understanding of a keyword, which often includes recent news headlines. Even if the general news cycle has moved on, negative results naturally stay relevant longer when eligible news stories are confined to one keyword, as they are in any Google search. Understanding this is part of the game. Successful reputation campaigns prepare clients to accept that negative content will be associated with their name for some time. First, campaigns need to address underlying digital metrics — like traffic — that have a more tangible effect on most businesses, before focussing entirely on removing unflattering content from search results. Though clients often disagree when it’s about them, people have a right to read about things that make the news. So in order to change the digital narrative, you need new content to establish a separate yet equally plausible story.

This is especially true for ‘public figures’. Search engines determine who is a public figure using an algorithm to calculate mentions by frequency and volume within a particular content type. Anyone with enough of a certain type of coverage can be considered a public figure in Google, even if they are far from a celebrity in real life. In a famous case from a few years ago, a Google leak revealed that 95% of “right to be forgotten” requests came from private individuals. Many of those requests were for news articles where victims’ names should never have been printed in the first place, but under the ‘right to be forgotten,’ the articles cannot be removed as they deal with a crime. Many other cases involved an original version of a story being indexed in Google results, despite a correction being issued in the print version. In both cases, the privacy violations were the news publishers’ fault, not the search engine’s. Google simply aggregated the content it was given. It is very rare that a result actually fits the criteria for deletion: roughly 75% of ‘right to be forgotten’ requests are denied. Requests are rejected because content with enough visibility to negatively affect someone’s reputation normally also makes it socially or historically relevant, and its omission in a search would reflect poorly on any search engine’s basic competency. Though legislators have begun to acknowledge the unprecedented power a company like Google has over people’s reputations, it is very unlikely any search engine will ever be asked to remove news articles from its results in a country paying even basic lip service to ideas of free press, speech, and access to information.

The problem is that while forgetting is not a right, we do acknowledge people are entitled to some element of privacy. However, the idea that anyone can remove knowledge or events from the public record because it embarrasses them is more ridiculous than anything in ‘The Final Deletion’ video. ‘Broken’ Matt Hardy comes to a version of this realization. After the crowd cheers for Jeff in his first live appearance since the video aired, Matt decides to redefine the terms of their match, much like we create more content when executing a reputation recovery campaign. In TNA storytelling, Matt quickly redesigns his plan so now Jeff will have to stay and work for him. This makes sense in the broader context of a match to determine the superior Hardy brother: like everything else about ‘The Final Deletion’, Matt’s reframing of the match is an excellent example of how one can change how an individual is perceived online by emphasizing different aspects of their background. Matt creates new content by changing the original narrative from ‘loser is deleted’ to ‘loser stays and lives’ in wrestling’s version of indentured servitude. This allows Matt to restore his desired reputation as the dominant Hardy and remove negative results (represented by his brother as a threat to whatever he plans on doing in TNA).

We need to think on those same terms when conducting digital reputation recovery, especially with major brands and public figures. Instead of trying to ‘delete’ individual pieces of digital content, you need to understand that the content, or some mention of it, is going to be there for some time, and try to leverage that to your advantage instead. The crowd chanting for Jeff Hardy after he was ‘deleted’ is comparable to how in digital terms, stories live on as reposts, shares, or mentions in comments long after the original digital source is removed. Digital reputation recovery is about giving them a reason to forget. You can use the first wave of negative content to understand the exact reason people are upset, then leverage the public figure or brand’s prominence to inject new content into search engine results to address negative content, without mentioning it directly. It is not easy. But, if a backyard wrestling video can go viral, it’s proof that when it comes to the Internet, anything is possible – it just can’t be deleted.