Advertising, pay gateways, and subscriptions – there is nowhere to go on the internet without having money to pay or time to spend. And something about this feels unfamiliar and very wrong.
Somehow, this Friday I ended up on the couch with my girlfriend watching Netflix. Actually, I know exactly how – I had a busy week and I wanted some cuddle time. And my 90 Day Fiance vote was overridden, so we watched “Next in Fashion”. I found this show to be a horrific knockoff of Project Runway with terrible fashion sense. Gigi Hadid is no Heidi Kloom and ,whoever her co-host is, he’s no Tim Gun. Sorry to momentarily vent, but there was nowhere else to do it!
I went to Google to search the reviews and see what everyone else was thinking. Usually, there’s at least one voice of dissent with which I could agree and then return to whatever is more important. Surely at least, Rotten Tomatoes would have judged this show for its lack of authenticity.
But this is what I found on the first and second pages of Google Search results. A magnificent PR hit job executed by market buyers, Netflix owned blogs, paid-content-writers, and SEO masterminds. There is even a Wikipedia page to take up space on this terrible show no one actually watches, but “independent” blogs claim people do.
Somehow, this Friday I ended up on the couch with my girlfriend watching Netflix. Actually, I know exactly how – I had a busy week and I wanted some cuddle time. And my 90 Day Fiance vote was overridden, so we watched “Next in Fashion”. I found this show to be a horrific knockoff of Project Runway with terrible fashion sense. Gigi Hadid is no Heidi Kloom and ,whoever her co-host is, he’s no Tim Gun. Sorry to momentarily vent, but there was nowhere else to do it!
I went to Google to search the reviews and see what everyone else was thinking. Usually, there’s at least one voice of dissent with which I could agree and then return to whatever is more important. Surely at least, Rotten Tomatoes would have judged this show for its lack of authenticity.
But this is what I found on the first and second pages of Google Search results. A magnificent PR hit job executed by market buyers, Netflix owned blogs, paid-content-writers, and SEO masterminds. There is even a Wikipedia page to take up space on this terrible show no one actually watches, but “independent” blogs claim people do.
Source: How To Buy Two Pages of Organic Search
My shock! Rotten Tomatoes yielded a score of 85%. That’s really good! So I clicked the link to see why I am a fool and all of my fellow viewers feel differently. But the disappointment continued when I was presented with a number 85% (no full length reviews) from “official critics”. And the audience metric, of course hidden from Google’s first page – 45%. Not great! Not good….BAD.
So the internet tells me numbers and hides the actual community feedback and voices.
I f#cking hate this show and binged both seasons because it’s terrible. But this is besides the point.
The internet of the 1990s and 2000s promised a digital world where voices across the world could be connected, knowledge would be accessible to you wherever you were located, and we could freely express ourselves. Today, if you want to access the halls of the internet it requires a toll. Communities are segmented by languages. The most desirable content is kept behind a paywall – Quora, Reddit, NYT, Wall Street…otherwise.
So the internet tells me numbers and hides the actual community feedback and voices.
I f#cking hate this show and binged both seasons because it’s terrible. But this is besides the point.
The internet of the 1990s and 2000s promised a digital world where voices across the world could be connected, knowledge would be accessible to you wherever you were located, and we could freely express ourselves. Today, if you want to access the halls of the internet it requires a toll. Communities are segmented by languages. The most desirable content is kept behind a paywall – Quora, Reddit, NYT, Wall Street…otherwise.
