3 ms·
My girlfriend is a "content producer." She makes travel/restaurant/"location" content. Because she is large enough, she does not make content for someplace unle
by mlsu 4y ago
My girlfriend is a "content producer." She makes travel/restaurant/"location" content. Because she is large enough, she does not make content for someplace unless they pay her, unless she really just likes the place.
People frequently bemoan that she is "spoiling" or "ruining" the places that she is promoting -- because they don't know that the place is paying her!
I really want everyone who travels to realize: no, it's not content producers who are ruining it. It's YOU. YOU are ruining these places. You are going there, putting your footprints on the trails, using the restroom, polluting the parking lot. You are responsible. You are the one who wants only what the location can give you -- a pretty view, a life changing epiphany, an "authentic" view at a different culture, a different experience. And what do you give back? Your purchase at the gift shop? You're the selfish one. And, you're the stupid one, because you're not even getting paid for it!
Of course, I don't really believe that. At least not 100%. I do think travel is inherently a selfish act, just like eating at a restaurant is a selfish act. It's alright to be selfish: really, it's OK. Because if it's not OK, that means that it's not OK to live at all.
DFW puts it better than I do [0]:
As I see it, it probably really is good for the soul to be a tourist, even if it’s only once in a while. Not good for the soul in a refreshing or enlivening way, though, but rather in a grim, steely-eyed, let’s-look-honestly-at-the-facts-and-find-some-way-to-deal-with-them way. [...] To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.
[0] http://www.columbia.edu/~col8/lobsterarticle.pdf http://www.columbia.edu/~col8/lobsterarticle.pdf
- zucked 4y agoThere's so much silly about this, I'm struggling with where to start. >I really want everyone who travels to realize: no, it's not content producers who are ruining it. It's YOU. YOU are ruining these places. How do you suppose so many of these places are "discovered" in the first place? My beef with these "content producers" is that they've all got the "I'M THE MAIN CHARACTER" vibe. They hog all the views, the private spaces so they can make their locale look a specific way. I don't really care if you're being paid for it - that doesn't mean you get to hog the space so you can preen and primp it into a specific A E S T H E T I C.
- mlsu 4y agoI'm not actually taking this tone here, this is kind of a play argument: --- You're hogging the space! Why do you get to be there? Content producers are allowed to have whatever vibe they want. If you want to have a private space, why don't you pay the owner to close it off? Then you can have what you want, and the owner won't need to reach out to a content producer to market their space! YOU'RE the reason the content producer is going there. Because you spend your money at the gift shop. You're not working there, you're just consuming. Consuming the view; consuming the silence; consuming the clean air. At least the content producer is working! Who is selfish? --- You cannot visit a place without changing that place. The unspoiled place is spoiled by the very fact of you being there. You and the content producer are equals. The only person with the high ground here is someone who lives there (who, themselves have a range of positions on this argument; many want more visitors!), or someone who never visits. The point I'm trying to make is entirely separate from how you feel personally about "content producers." I get that some people personally don't like the content. I, personally, hate it -- I don't even have instagram or TikTok. But then again, I don't like fan fiction, or MMA, or Burning Man. It doesn't really matter what I like, does it?
- hef19898 4y agoI do have to agree with the parent that a paid influencer is basically a professional marketer. And that, paid or not, an influencer without followers is neither an influencer nor a problem. As with everything consumerism, us consumers cannot ignore that, collectively, we are driving a lot of that development. With the more than generous and friendly help of Social Media companies of course.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago> People frequently bemoan that she is "spoiling" or "ruining" the places that she is promoting -- because they don't know that the place is paying her! People would know if your girlfriend was not breaking the law: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2019/11/ftc-releases-advertising-disclosures-guidance-online-influencers https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2019/11/...
- slothtrop 4y ago> It's YOU I don't think we can divorce content producers from everyone else qua "ruining it". Otherwise, I mostly agree. My view on travel is cynical. It's just a pleasurable extravagance, and for some reason (ime) championed by types who ostensibly decry consumption or consumer culture.