Is there a steeper learning curve than that scaled by the influencer Zoe Rae, who recently left Bali in high dudgeon because, “it’s not how it looked on Instagram”?
She huffed off to Dubai, which apparently – and without wishing to deter anyone – does look how it does on Instagram.
By all means laugh, but in influencer parlance, she stood in her truth and called Bali out as a lived experience she did not choose to include in her truth stance.
It would be nice to think that in her ingenuous absurdity, she could be the priceless catalyst to re-frame the whole influencer/lifestyle brand/selfie-core firmament. Might her unwanted lived experience mark the moment that curated content looped so far round the bend that it actually recognised its own backside and got such a fright that it remembered that thing called reality?
There have been indications that the movement to curate away real life’s tiresomeness was getting out of hand. One website has taken it upon itself to rate the attractiveness of diners at various New York restaurants, enabling other diners to spare themselves the horror of going somewhere where merely ordinary-looking people might lurk.
One can imagine Rae’s surprise at seeing actual, uncurated Indonesians in Indonesia, and some aesthetically unpleasing and even unsanitary vistas. But the chance this shock might spark a general fact check beyond the Insta-lens in influencer-land seems sadly faint.
Reality curation will be with us for the foreseeable future, and is increasingly impervious to fact checking by the legacy media, according to CNN’s senior correspondent Donie O’Sullivan. He has been covering QAnon, deep-fake news, online conspiracy theories and the general run of alternative “my truth” media in the United States for several years.
He warns that influencers and online media communicators have overtaken the mainstream/ legacy media – print and broadcast – in their sphere of influence. From Piers Morgan – usually fact adjacent if bumptiously opinionated – to Joe Rogan, a major vector for fact Teflonism, alternative news outlets draw mass audiences, and their fans do not trust the old media when it tells them they’re getting important facts wrong.
Speaking in Dublin recently, Kerry-born O’Sullivan said he fared better in the US than many another mainstream reporters because his Irish accent (“and me being short and fat”) meant he didn’t seem like a typical TV reporter, and could often break the ice with a natter about which Irish county his interviewees’ forebears came from.
Many of those attending Donald Trump rallies generally distrust and even despise the likes of CNN, O’Sullivan says. The important thing now, he says, is to give people with fact-resistant views a hearing and show them some empathy – hard as it is when they say, for instance, that Covid never existed.
Though unhappy when TV and print began giving movements such as QAnon coverage, he now believes the anxiety over platforming was a mistake, as it served only to pump up the alternative news sources now overwhelming the information market.
O’Sullivan says he’s now convinced that giving alternative views a hearing is necessary, and that while CNN and others still have a responsibility to furnish the facts as well, it’s vital they resist any whiff of being crusaders in the process.
He also suspects audiences now increasingly appreciate longer-form interviews – Rogan’s run to three hours – which legacy media conspicuously shies from, fearing low attention spans.
If deep-state conspiracy thinking and Trumpian mercantilism are lifting mass-audiences’ consumption of long-run information programmes, that could at least be a spinoff benefit. But the truthier end of the media is increasingly curated by the off button.
O’Sullivan has himself been curated away, being among those journalists temporarily barred from X by owner Elon Musk.
Nevertheless, like Bali, he does exist.
