Tag: influencers

On Clark Kent

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, movies2 Comments

We just got back from Superman, the first movie I’ve seen in theaters in a good long while and the first superhero movie I’ve seen in theaters in longer than that. If I write a review of this movie right now it’s going to come off as completely unhinged, because I don’t remember the last time I loved a movie as much as I loved this one. Y’all know what I’m like about this stuff. I need to give it a day or two to cool off before I try to write a review. That’s assuming I don’t see it again tomorrow, which isn’t off the table, and which might reset the clock.

It’s fucking fantastic. Go see it. But let’s set that aside, and talk about TikTok for a minute.

This is KJ and Trinity Blair. They’re TikTokers. They’re also identical twins. KJ has about a quarter million followers and Trinity has 1.6 million. Before I say another word, I wanna be real clear that I have no intention of saying anything negative about either of them and since both of them are way more famous than I will ever be it’s not like they have a reason to give a shit what I think anyway.

Trinity Blair’s main account is here and KJ’s is here. Trinity also runs a podcast, I think, but I don’t really know anything about it. Go ahead and look at any of their videos. I guarantee you will see a comment where someone asks if they know about each other, and anything where both of them show up you will have someone who will ask if they are twins. I only know they exist because they ran a little … joke, if you’re being generous, publicity stunt if you’re slightly less generous, or “scam” if you’re not generous, where they pretended to not know each other existed a while and actually brought their parents into it where each of them confronted a parent about her “secret” twin sister.

Now, through this whole thing, there were people posting comments and linking to videos of the two of them together, because it’s not like they purged their accounts before they did it. But one way or another they probably realized that they’d be able to convince a whole lot of people that they hadn’t previously known about each other, since every single time one of them posts they get a dozen comments about it anyway.

You know what you don’t ever see in their comments? “Hey, are you two secretly the same person?”

And maybe you see where I’m going with this, and what the connection to Superman is.

I have long been willing to die on the hill that everyone in the world not knowing that Superman and Clark Kent are the same person is not remotely the high bar to suspension of disbelief that people think it is. Clark Kent and Superman have been seen together. They live in a world with shapeshifters, for God’s sake, and there are photographs of the two with each other. Clark Kent, while an influential journalist, is just a journalist, and a print journalist at that, and unless you think most of the world can pick Josh Marshall or Jamelle Bouie out of a lineup he isn’t close to being famous enough that most people know his face. And you know what people would do if they thought the two of them looked alike?

They’d say “Man, you and Superman really look alike,” not “Man, you and Superman are clearly the same guy!” Trinity and KJ Blair are literally identical and people regularly question whether they’re twins. That’s the reaction– people looking at twins and questioning what they’re seeing. Every set of identicals on the planet has the experience of someone seeing them with their twin and asking if they’re identical twins, and I suspect most same-gender fraternals have been asked the same thing.

Superman shows his face. There’s no reason for any random person to ever have the idea that he had a secret identity in the first place. And I’m sorry, it’s a hell of a leap to just randomly decide that he is this other dude who’s busy with a journalism job even if he does get to interview Superman a lot. You would absolutely have people using the interviews as proof they’re not the same person.

There was a great comic where Lex Luthor programmed a computer to figure out who Superman was, and the computer told him the truth– that Superman was Clark Kent. And Lex completely ignored it, as the idea that anyone with that much power might masquerade as a normal person was so completely unimaginable to him.

Corenswet’s Clark doesn’t get as much screen time as I might have hoped, so you don’t get a ton of data about what his Clark acts like– although the scenes with his parents are absolutely stellar. There’s no moment like this, though:

So yeah. This character gets superpowers from Earth’s yellow sun, can shoot fire out of his eyes, and regularly lifts skyscrapers when he isn’t busy flying over them. The idea that the whole world doesn’t just automatically know that he’s some other random human out of eight billion who sort of looks like him is far from the most unbelievable thing about this story.

In which c’mon, Medcline, help a blogger out

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, ParentingLeave a comment

Any of y’all have any pull with Medcline? I wanna try out their shoulder pillow. The CPAP means I can’t sleep on my stomach anymore (well, okay, the sleep apnea means I can’t sleep on my stomach anymore) and I’m tired of shoulder pain and waking up with my hands asleep. I’m sleeping a thousand times better than before I had the CPAP but I feel like there’s still room for improvement. That said, I’m not willing to drop the kind of money they want for their system on something I can’t see or touch before I buy it. Therefore they have to respect my status as an Internet Influencer and send me one for free. I have prior experience with reviewing pillows! How many Important Influencers can say that? Not many, I tell you.

So, yeah, get on that, y’all. I’m 5’10”, by the way, since that appears to matter.

There will be no ranting about postcards tonight, because I’m taking the night off, and no ranting about school either, because the boy is still sick and I ended up having to stay home with him today since my wife had unavoidable commitments at her job. He went to urgent care on Monday and was greeted with a shrug and a “Man, viruses are a bitch sometimes, aren’t they? Bring him to his regular doctor if he’s not better in a few days.” Today we took him to his regular doctor and were greeted with a shrug and a “Man, viruses are a bitch sometimes, aren’t they? Bring him back if he’s not better in a few days.” All I know is the kid’s been sleeping 20 hours a day for a week and a half but that doesn’t seem to be helping anyone find anything actually wrong with him.

Anyway. Another part of the reason I’m not doing postcards tonight is that it’s somehow 7:00 already and despite being home all day I don’t have anything ready for tomorrow yet. The fact that I spent the whole day screwing around on BlueSky might have something to do with that, I suppose. (Follow me on BlueSky, while I’m begging for stuff!) So I probably ought to go do some lesson planning now, I suppose.

In which I will not sell your shoes

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy2 Comments

I ordered some shoes off the Internet. No, not my beloved Kiziks, although I did order yet another pair of those,(*) but some other brand that are going to scan more as a business/work shoe than what I’ve been wearing lately. Am I going to tell you what the shoes are?

No, because they immediately emailed me– and they’ve emailed me several times since– congratulating me for my new status as a “brand ambassador” for them, and explaining how I can get money by getting other people to buy their shoes, and giving me discount codes I can share, and explaining their reimbursement structure, and I’m like … motherfucker, I don’t even have the shoes yet, and can you maybe ask me if I want to be a brand ambassador, maybe a week after I’ve had them, to see if I even like the Goddamn things?

(Also: I ordered these with my real name and personal email address and it’s not like you have to enter your website to buy shoes, so there’s no earthly way they could connect the shoe-buyer with this site. I’ve had things sent to me for review before, and that’s its own thing. I bought these and they think I should sell them as a side gig now. I assume they’re doing this to everyone.)

The aggressiveness is equal parts off-putting and alarming, and honestly it makes me want to return the shoes as soon as they arrive, which is vastly annoying, as I do actually like the looks of the damn things or I wouldn’t have ordered them in the first place.

(*) In all seriousness this is, I think, my fifth pair of Kiziks, and if they want me to be a brand ambassador I’m all over it, but these other folks are gonna have to generate some goodwill with a quickness if they even want to keep the business they already got from me.

TikTok talk

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek1 Comment

So, yeah, I threatened everybody with writing this post yesterday, and as of right now it’s still percolating in my head, so screw it; we’re officially in “my blog” territory here and I strongly suggest that no one bother reading this as I intend to simply dump the contents of my brain into this blank text box and then go about my day.

Y’all might remember a web service by the name of Vine that shut down a couple of years ago. Vine was the Twitter of video; your videos couldn’t be more than something like six or seven seconds long, and somehow even given that restriction Vine was frequently hilarious. It takes quite a bit of creativity and talent to manage to be consistently interesting in six-second bites, and unfortunately I didn’t find out about the service until too close to it going away; I never actually posted any videos (I am funny in certain contexts; seven-second videos is not one of them) but I enjoyed browsing the site before it got turned off.

Enter TikTok. I first downloaded the app … I dunno, a month ago, maybe, thinking that it might be a worthy replacement for Vine. And, well, it’s not, if only because it’s doing entirely different things. TikTok, you see, exists solely to generate memetic content. The interesting thing about the app is that it allows you to copy the audio from any other posted Vine and use that audio with your own visual content. You can also “duet” another video, which plays that original video alongside yours with the audio from the original video; you can add your own text if you like.

What this means is that TikTok is literally the worst earworm generator on the entire Internet. And while it doesn’t have Vine’s restrictions, the videos are usually short, somewhere in the neighborhood of 15-30 seconds, maybe, although most of them are on the shorter end. Huge numbers of TikTok videos are either people lip-synching audio that other people originally recorded or sometimes putting it in another context. It can be hilarious, but when you’ve heard different spins on the “Her Name is Margo” audio from twenty-five different accounts over the course of a single day it’s going to start infecting your dreams, and God help you when a snippet of a song that you actually hear on the radio goes viral. It’ll melt your brain.

There are, near as I can tell, two components to the app. The first is the For You page, which is an endless stream of videos that I assume have been curated by an algorithm and may or may not differ in some way from user to user. The goal of any video is to make it to the For You page, because most people (I believe) interact with the app by mindlessly scrolling through those videos and that’s the best way for any individual video to get a lot of attention. You can like individual videos, which adds them to a list in the app, and you can follow individual creators, which creates a second list that is just of those creators, but doesn’t appear to be sequential or anything like that. It’ll just go on forever, repeating videos if necessary, until you die or close the app. It is terrible for those of us with mildly addictive personalities because it never ends and there’s no way to get shunted off into an article or something that causes you to accidentally learn something and get off the site for a few minutes. Just hours of the same five audio clips repeated until you die.

And then there’s Charli D’Amelio.

Charli is a fifteen-year-old high school freshman who has, as of this exact moment, twenty-seven point nine million followers on TikTok, the current high-water mark for the service, and I don’t believe second place is very close. By comparison, Barack Obama has about 113 million followers on Twitter, a much older and more established service, and oh also he was President of the United States.

Charli is a dancer. She dances. That’s basically it. She has a bunch of short dances that she’s (mostly? I assume?) made up for various songs (or, rather, parts of them) and she does her little dances and that’s the end of the video. She doesn’t speak in most of her videos. Now, don’t get me wrong, the kid is talented; I know she wants to dance professionally in the future and she’s absolutely going to be able to do that if the Social Media Queen thing doesn’t work out for her.

But I’m not just mentioning her for the hell of it. Remember how this site works. It works by other people taking audio from your videos and then either repurposing it or duetting you, where their video appears next to yours. And every single time Charli releases a video literally millions of people record their own videos either doing the dance alongside her, reusing the audio for something else, or issuing commentaries at varying levels of societal acceptability. And a quick look at her feed reveals that she’s done six videos just today. And every single one is going to end up being memetic content in some way or another. There is an entire account dedicated to finding out where she bought her clothes and posting where to get them and how much she spent. (Her family seems to be reasonably well-off, but the clothes aren’t expensive enough to warrant commenting on, for the record, much less creating an entire account for.)

I did a little experiment earlier, counting videos on the For You page and checking how many were either Charli’s videos or Charli-adjacent somehow. Each time I went through 100 videos, which takes less time than it sounds like it does since it only takes a second or so to figure out if she’s in the video or not. I did some of them logged in as me and some completely logged out to see if the app was deliberately steering Charli videos to me.

Out of a hundred videos, the high mark was eighteen having something to do with Charli– four in a row, at one point– and the minimum was three. Which means that even on a signed-out, no-algorithm account a minimum of three percent of the videos this site was serving to me were from one person, on a site with hundreds of millions of users.

Think about that. This kid is fifteen and she is basically running this entire social media network. TikTok, at least partially because of the way it’s built– you could never have something like this happen on Facebook or Twitter because of the way people interact with them, and while Instagram influencers are a thing nothing Kylie Jenner has ever done has accidentally made it into my feed– has unintentionally (?) created a situation where one user is driving an enormous amount of their traffic– either from people watching her or reacting to her with their own videos. It’s nuts. Babygirl was at the Super Bowl and the NBA All-Star game, for God’s sake. How do I know that? Dozens and dozens of videos of her, from enough users that it literally couldn’t be avoided.

I don’t know if this is a sensible way to create a social media network, but it’s certainly interesting.