Social Media Run Amok

Confused by this. These r decent points. But vast amount of the social media dunking I saw over this ad turned not on the priv lifestyle but husband buys trim wife bicycle she slaves over for a year only to emerge as equally trim wife and then makes a hostage video of herself. https://t.co/x0c5cZnkyR

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) December 6, 2019

Probably you've heard of this.  It made it all the way into Psychology Today:

This is an amazing @PsychToday scoop https://t.co/fix91p3e4j

— Asawin Suebsaeng (@swin24) December 5, 2019

How bad is it?  Peloton lost $942 million in market value in a single day, "bringing the company's market cap to roughly $9.4 billion. It was also the biggest single-day drop for the company since October." Do with that what you will.

I couldn't care less, except for the fact that such an impact could be had via social media because of such an inconsequential cause as a really stupid ad.  And the impact is going way beyond Peloton's market value.  The previous Peloton ads I've seen all show lots of upper-middle class people (the bikes aren't cheap, apparently, and access to Peloton's website where people encourage you to ride hard for an hour is apparently pretty pricey.  Me, I go to the YMCA and watch MSNBC with the sound off while I ride for 30 minutes.  It's a lot cheaper, and the same effect.) earnestly sweating to some face on a screen telling them to ride harder.    Like this:

I had my carpenter build a $9,000 finished wood riser for my Peloton bike in my glass-enclosed zen garden/home gym pic.twitter.com/VJSOjctYtO

— Clue Heywood (@ClueHeywood) January 28, 2019

According to Twitter these bikes cost $2500.  As God is my witness I had no idea.  My 20-something daughter will be well into middle age  before I've been at the "Y" long enough to have paid that much annually.

This new one is more of a story, and yeah, it's creepy and hard to follow because the woman at the center of it doesn't change over the one year (Xmas to Xmas) presented in the ad in very truncated form.  And it's personal; all those ads of people in fabulous houses/apartments riding earnestly because they are rich and can afford to, didn't spark the ire this one ad with actors who spoke to the camera, did.  Which is the really disturbing part, and that comes through in the Psychology Today article:  these are actors, and fictional characters.  But apparently the actors in this thing have been berated on-line for portraying these characters, some going so far as to allege the "husband" is abusive to the "wife."  I feel like Frank Rich when Jerry Falwell claimed Bert and Ernie were gay; as Rich pointed out, they're hand puppets!  They have no genitalia, how can they be gay?  (Because that was Falwell's obsession; not that two people loved each other, but that two men were "doing it!")

These are actors.  "He" isn't abusing "her"; the two actors barely know each other.  This isn't even a movie, it's a 60 second TV ad.

There are deeper problems here than whether a woman making a video selfie is in fact filming a "hostage video."  (And what does it say that when a woman does it, we think of hostage; when a man does it (you know it's out there somewhere), it's no big deal?)  We really have to sort out our relationship to our communications technologies.  Well, and to our possessions; and to how we understand characters presented to us through those technologies.

This is really effed up.