Upworthy
"We launched Upworthy 18 months ago based on a pretty crazy idea: that if you can catch people’s attention, they actually care more about the most important topics in the world than they do about celebrity sideboobs or iPhone rumors or weird old tips about belly fat."
At first glance, this statement from Upworthy's blog seems well-intentioned and harmless. If I were to merely glance over it, I would applaud the author's desire to turn our society's attention towards matters less trivial than celebrity sideboobs.
However, upon further inspection, and upon breaking down the parts of the above statement, I realized how completely and utterly wrong it is.
First, the author makes a pretty grand generalization that "people" care more about "celebrity sideboobs" than about "the most important topics in the world." This statement is not only a sweeping generalization, but it also perpetuates negative stereotypes about this generation of people, and it shames and belittles. Making others feel bad about their interests is not going to win you any followers in the long run. In order to get others to "care," we should be engaging them and challenging them to think about how they relate to these broader issues, not by making them feel like a bad and petty person.
Second, the author of the statement is relating catching people's attention to caring, when in reality no such connection exists. Many things catch our attention throughout the day, from friends to advertisements to strange noises to spectacular sights. No matter how long our attention is paid to these various stimuli, there's no guarantee that we will actually end up caring about them. Caring, in contrast to attention, comes from a much deeper place within ourselves. In order to get people to care, we need to do more than catch their attention. Simply making somebody aware of an issue is not going alter any aspect of how they fundamentally feel about it.
The author backs up his point about caring by noting:
"It’s not just that you come and watch stuff, though. You actually do some pretty wondtacular things. Seventeen million of you saw the story of Zach Sobiech's heartbreaking last months — and then helped contribute over $300,000 to his cancer charity. When we found this amazing video about GoldieBlox, a toy set that encourages girls to become engineers, you didn’t just watch and share — you went out and bought 23,000 of them in two days. Now GoldieBlox is one of the top toys in Toys R Us. And you’re lifting up the stories of people like Alice Guy-Blaché, a cinema pioneer whose contributions were in danger of being forgotten. In just two days, you donated more than $80,000 to filmmakers who can now create a documentary about her life and impact."
Upon reading this, I felt immediately skeptical. Where is this data coming from? How can you prove that its your viewers who have made these donations? Throughout this whole paragraph, all I can see is Upworthy fluffing the egos of its viewers, while sneakily taking credit for their accomplishments.
And finally, there's this: "Our mission here has always been to draw attention to stuff that really matters using irresistible social media."
Irresistible? Irresistible? How can you use a word like that to describe "the most important topics in the world?" If these topics are anything, they're ugly, uncomfortable, frustrating, confusing, infuriating, and convoluted. They should never be framed in a light that makes them irresistible to the public. As much good as Upworthy claims it's doing (at least in monetary terms), the "irresistible" approach that they've taken is a distorted representation of reality, packaged neatly into an appetizing bite, that ultimately draws attention away from the real heart of the issue - because it's not as pretty to look at.
At first glance, this statement from Upworthy's blog seems well-intentioned and harmless. If I were to merely glance over it, I would applaud the author's desire to turn our society's attention towards matters less trivial than celebrity sideboobs.
However, upon further inspection, and upon breaking down the parts of the above statement, I realized how completely and utterly wrong it is.
First, the author makes a pretty grand generalization that "people" care more about "celebrity sideboobs" than about "the most important topics in the world." This statement is not only a sweeping generalization, but it also perpetuates negative stereotypes about this generation of people, and it shames and belittles. Making others feel bad about their interests is not going to win you any followers in the long run. In order to get others to "care," we should be engaging them and challenging them to think about how they relate to these broader issues, not by making them feel like a bad and petty person.
Second, the author of the statement is relating catching people's attention to caring, when in reality no such connection exists. Many things catch our attention throughout the day, from friends to advertisements to strange noises to spectacular sights. No matter how long our attention is paid to these various stimuli, there's no guarantee that we will actually end up caring about them. Caring, in contrast to attention, comes from a much deeper place within ourselves. In order to get people to care, we need to do more than catch their attention. Simply making somebody aware of an issue is not going alter any aspect of how they fundamentally feel about it.
The author backs up his point about caring by noting:
"It’s not just that you come and watch stuff, though. You actually do some pretty wondtacular things. Seventeen million of you saw the story of Zach Sobiech's heartbreaking last months — and then helped contribute over $300,000 to his cancer charity. When we found this amazing video about GoldieBlox, a toy set that encourages girls to become engineers, you didn’t just watch and share — you went out and bought 23,000 of them in two days. Now GoldieBlox is one of the top toys in Toys R Us. And you’re lifting up the stories of people like Alice Guy-Blaché, a cinema pioneer whose contributions were in danger of being forgotten. In just two days, you donated more than $80,000 to filmmakers who can now create a documentary about her life and impact."
Upon reading this, I felt immediately skeptical. Where is this data coming from? How can you prove that its your viewers who have made these donations? Throughout this whole paragraph, all I can see is Upworthy fluffing the egos of its viewers, while sneakily taking credit for their accomplishments.
And finally, there's this: "Our mission here has always been to draw attention to stuff that really matters using irresistible social media."
Irresistible? Irresistible? How can you use a word like that to describe "the most important topics in the world?" If these topics are anything, they're ugly, uncomfortable, frustrating, confusing, infuriating, and convoluted. They should never be framed in a light that makes them irresistible to the public. As much good as Upworthy claims it's doing (at least in monetary terms), the "irresistible" approach that they've taken is a distorted representation of reality, packaged neatly into an appetizing bite, that ultimately draws attention away from the real heart of the issue - because it's not as pretty to look at.