In comparison with the post that follows this one about rural poverty in the US, here’s a distinctly first-world commentary about promotion via social media.
From Fast Company:
Increasingly, the stylish places that serve you food are being designed to cater to your feed.
. . . .
There are two lines at Cha Cha Matcha, a small cafe on a busy corner of NoLita in Manhattan. The first one is where you wait to buy matcha, a whipped green tea drink that is de rigeur among food-trend fetishizing millennials, in the manifold formats the cafe has on offer. (Latte, cappuccino, lemonade, splashed with coconut milk if that’s your thing, for about five bucks a cup.)
The other line is a little harder to describe, but is something akin to those groups of kids at Disneyland waiting to take a picture with their favorite animated character, except a lot more fashionable and marginally better behaved. They’re all waiting in front of a neon sign that hangs in back of the store, the words “Matchas Gracias” glowing in bright pink cursive. One by one they crane their hands just so, grasshopper-green drink backlit by the sign, trying to get the perfect photograph.
If you live in New York or Los Angeles or San Francisco—or, increasingly, London, Paris, and any other self-styled stylish city—you’ve seen similar people strike similar poses outside similarly unique restaurants, cafes, and bars over the last few years. “Influencer” is the catch-all term, a descriptor that is either highly covetable or dripping with irony, depending on who you talk to. But most of the people snapping away outside places like Cha Cha are only aspiring to that label, or maybe they’re just heavy Instagrammers, like any one of us —which means they’re not getting paid to shoot, filter, edit, tag, geotag, share, and like. What they represent to Cha Cha—and, really, what any customer with a smartphone and half an Instagram habit represent—is free advertising.
Link to the rest at Fast Company
https://www.instagram.com/p/BWqKX4lARXJ/?taken-by=chachamatcha
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https://www.instagram.com/p/BTrKhccAdaU/?taken-by=chachamatcha
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https://www.instagram.com/p/BXOKwHTA5-4/?taken-by=chachamatcha
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Here’s a link to all the chachamatcha hashtags
That’s where I stopped reading. But what the frell is NoLita?
I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!
How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one’s name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!
Emily Dickinson pretty well sums up my life and my take on letting the entire wired world know every moment of one’s existence, instead of existing.
I’m very glad I’m not obsessed with pictojournaling my life. I don’t have an instrgram account. I only rarely post pictures to my Twitter account and even more rarely do so on my blog. I have much more important things to do when I’m out, like actually enjoy the food or beverage I purchased, pay attention to my friends, occasionally even strike up a brief conversation with a strainger while waiting in a line somewhere, and listen to music on my headphones and read or daydream new scenes for my stories while in a waiting room.