Extract from ABC News
Analysis
Is there a proper term these days for going "viral" twice?
The first time around because you were an unwitting and unwilling participant in someone else's performative charity moment, and then the second time around because you told them to knock it off.
Maree – and no, we have never disclosed her surname — first made TikTok notoriety for being the apparently sad and lonely woman who didn't know she needed the bunch of flowers given her by the self-styled Insta-Samaritan Harrison Pawluk while he was secretly filming her.
But then she barn-stormed her way through the false, saccharine narrative of a plague of not-so-random social media acts of kindness when she called Harrison out on it on my show this week. And Maree was splendid in all the glorious fury of a woman above a certain age who just wasn't going to take this crap anymore.
She was incensed. She was visibly irritated to be duped into accepting the flowers. She had asked if she was being filmed and Harrison's associates denied it. She didn't want the flowers, nor to have to lug them home on the tram.
She dutifully cut the stems on an angle as her mother had taught her and put them in a vase, and when a friend rang to tell her the video had been viewed 57 million times and had elicited thousands of comments suggesting she was a sad sack of a lonely woman who really needed that moment, she threw the flowers out.
The thing that irritated her most?
Maree was enjoying a coffee on her own and Harrison, she told me, had interrupted her quiet time. She wanted him to know that what irritated her most was the patronising assumption that women, especially older women, will be thrilled by some random stranger giving them flowers.
This is a thing on social media, you know: the deliberate targeting of people — usually much older than the aspiring influencer — who seem to the TikToker to be somewhat shambolic, or homeless, or in need or unable to pay for what they are about to buy (how they can divine that I have no idea).
I've seen videos of men with their heads down bagging the last of their groceries as someone silently smarms into view, sneakily swipes their own card across the reader, and then disappears stage right. One such man, upon being told that his groceries had already been paid for was bewildered and rattled: "Oh — I have to go find him and thank him …" he stuttered to the cashier, grabbing his bags and now feeling compelled to abandon whatever plan he had for himself and instead find a random stranger in a sea of faces.
The comments, of course, told a different story: thousands of presumably younger followers moved to tears by a moment of kindness that is only ever real if it's filmed in 16x9 and uploaded with comments enabled.
As one of my more acidic listeners observed: "If you do something nice for someone but you don't film it — did it even happen?"
The danger of making assumptions
There are two fascinating issues here, I think: one is the danger of assumptions in any kind of charity, whether it's performative or not; the other is the social media targeting of a certain kind of person, and there is a generational factor in all this that's hard to avoid.
I know someone who does a lot of this kind of charity: she tries to give money to people on the street she identifies as in need, and with fascinating results. Of course, she's relying on her own assumptions about who needs it and who wants it, but intriguingly her strike rate is only around 50 per cent; half of those she approaches take her money, the other half firmly reject it — often with anger and even abuse.
Here's the lesson: despite what you think you see, not everyone wants your charity, or pity.
And then there's the generational thing. Maree's two brushes with internet fame were distinctly different from each other, and not only because the second time around she was wresting power back from someone who claimed to know and define her circumstances. Really, the most significant difference second time around came from what is the other hand clapping in all TikTok moments — the comments section, where a post can live or die in fame or infamy.
This time around the comments took a sharp turn and the weepy pity evaporated, to be replaced by howls of resentment from women well beyond their 20s who were angry at the assumption that a woman on her own was lonely and could be a sitting duck for some young tyke keen to build their profile.
I read comments from woman after woman who was so cross at the patronising decision they identified at the heart of this stunt: that a woman of a certain age should just be grateful for the attention.
Now, I've never been a fan of the Grumpy Old Men/Women TV franchise; it seems to me that no matter how old and how aching you might be — and even after how much rubbish you've had to put up with over your long years — a bit of compassion, humour and politeness is still required as a fully paid-up member of society.
But if any more influencers want to inadvertently create an international army of pissed-off women ready to beat them over the heads with an arsenal of rejected flowers, then go ahead, make their day.
No comments:
Post a Comment