Tell me What I Think

It took me ten or fifteen minutes to figure out what the heck I was looking at. One after another, unfamiliar people appeared on the screen and talked about different parts of BSG and how great they were. One guy loved the special effects. One guy talked about how great the actors were. Another told us how much he enjoyed the drama. An African-American couple told us how they enjoyed the shared experience of watching the plot unfold.

Who were these people and why the heck were they telling me about their feelings?

About halfway through, though, I started noticing the captions. One guy was a famous author. One guy was a famous director. The black couple were famous actors.

There were all these famous people, telling me how much fun they were having watching the show.

I felt the uncomfortable grip of manipulation. Somebody was out there wanting me to feel like I was a part of this really cool thing! Here were all these famous people having these great experiences watching the show, and I could be part of it all! I could be a member of their special group!

Yuck.

I wished it stopped with these "testimonials," but it doesn't. Seems like everywhere anymore there is this constant fake social manipulation going on. There's some really cool group of people having a great time, and I'm "on the inside" having all of that fun with them.

I saw it first on MTV years ago. I was thumbing through the channels one day and there was a show about bands from the 1980s. Instead of actually telling us about the bands, maybe having the bands speak for themselves, what MTV did was predigested. Here were currently famous people -- bands, personalities, and such -- telling us how much they enjoyed bands from the 1980s. They would show some event from the 80s, but it was clear where the focus was: here are all of these really cool people having all of these really great experiences, and you could be part of it too!

At the time, I took it as just another example of how you can sell to 12-year-olds a lot differently from adults. It looked like an extension of those TV "infomercials," in which the presenters really pushed hard for people to buy into some new experience.

But I'm not so sure any more. I'm starting to see this fake social engineering in a lot more places than before. Begining social web sites commonly use "sock puppets" -- fake posters -- to make it look like the site is popular and things are happening. Membership numbers on web sites are inflated and/or faked as common practice.

Perhaps this is the way commerce is supposed to work in the 21st century: convince consumers that they are part of a unique and elite "clan" by participating in your product, then continue to reinforce their feelings of being part of a group.

I've got really mixed feelings about it, however.

It's bad enough they waste my time telling me what to buy, why do they want to tell me what to think too?