![]() ![]() This is not to say that the Star Wars publicity department wanted racists to take aim at the trailer, but given the number of pieces about “racist Star Wars fans” which followed over the next 24 hours, they would also have had to be idiots not to realise they’d stumbled on marketing gold.Īt the same time, celebrities had cottoned on to the value of clapping back on social media. Its first piece of promotional material could not have been more perfectly designed to provoke the ire of the franchise’s less-enlightened fans: a teaser, released in November 2014, featuring the actor John Boyega dressed as a stormtrooper. The new Star Wars trilogy, then, was perfectly positioned to become a flashpoint in this newest culture war - a war that directly benefited a media economy in which controversy meant clicks. ![]() Disliking it, on the other hand, marked you as not just a critic, but a Bad Person. POKEFACTORY UNHERD MOVIELiking this movie - even just liking the idea of it - meant you were one of the good guys. The ridiculous culture war known as Gamergate consumed the discourse for months on end, as did a massive controversy over the new, all-female Ghostbusters reboot. The US was becoming more tribal, and art, in turn, more political. The saga of Justine Sacco had recently introduced a hungry populace to the joys of playing hunt-the-racist on Twitter. And crucially, nobody took any of it all that seriously even being cruel could earn you a coveted place in the Celebs Read Mean Tweets roundup on Jimmy Kimmel Live.īut, in 2014, as cash-strapped media outlets chose to prioritise opinion journalism (quick and cheap) over investigative reporting (time-consuming and expensive), the news cycle became increasingly outrage-driven, and our thinking about the type of post that was deemed worthy of coverage changed. POKEFACTORY UNHERD FREEMore from this author The cruel world of yogaĪt the time, this interface between reporters and random posters was both friendly and fully symbiotic: the writers got free content, the posters increased their internet clout. Social media, then in its infancy, was a lifesaver: as a reporter at MTV News, I could curate a quick roundup of Twitter or Tumblr reactions to last night’s Game of Thrones episode in less than 20 minutes, which allowed me to meet my quota while also prioritising more interesting, time-consuming work (for instance, getting a trauma surgeon to assess whether it was actually, medically possible for The Mountain to crush Oberyn Martell’s skull like a grape). The pressure to produce content on such an accelerated timeline spawned a lot of half-arsed, hastily-executed work (“10 Times Brad Pitt’s Butt Made Me Want To Die: A List In GIFs”) but also created a constant scramble for something, anything, to write about. Now, a writer’s best option was freelance blogging, churning out listicles and aggregated new stories at $15 a pop - and with a quota, which at some outlets ran as high as 20 posts per day. (It was not unusual, at this time, to be told that the job you were applying for paid not in money but “exposure”.) Gone was the $2-per-word magazine staff writer position gone was the local shoe-leather reporting job that might launch a lifelong career. Imagine a horde of freshly unemployed veteran writers, alongside new journalism grads, desperately trying to claw out a livelihood in a world where writing had been completely devalued. It owes much to the 2008 recession, and the mass layoffs in media which fundamentally transformed how news was covered. Today’s predominant mode of cultural engagement began incubating on Tumblr around 2010, spread to mainstream media in the lead-up to America’s 2016 election, and now dominates the entire cultural apparatus up to and including Hollywood itself. ![]() But if you were to plot the marketing trajectory of Star Wars alongside the fall of traditional journalism, a pattern would begin to emerge. Suggesting millions of Star Wars fans are a bunch of racists-in-waiting might seem like a peculiar PR strategy. ![]()
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