Main Argument

Ryan Holiday’s main argument throughout the book is that as today’s blogs generate most of the media reporting, it is very easy to create false stories. Online bloggers to do not care to and have no incentive in checking facts and stories, instead they greatly profit from stories that go viral and generate clicks and pageviews. Holiday mentions that as blogs create viral information that gets shared throughout other blogs, the “news” begins to enter bigger platforms of media. Mainstream press and television feel the need to report on the same issues and topics that blogs are dealing with in order to stay relevant and in the loop. Holiday describes how he himself has participated in the fabrication of numerous lies that in turn have generated enough buzz to appear in top ranking media networks such as the New York Times and CNN.

Holiday draws a connection between the early era of newspapers in relation to the way blogs decide what is good and newsworthy. In the past, Holiday states that every newspaper had to sell each copy they had every day. This was tough task since there were too many newspapers and not enough people willing to waste their money on what they thought to be unimportant. Newspapers had to sell their copies at all costs, this lead to the creation of brash headlines that were designed to make people buy on impulse. Most of the time, the information sold had very little to do with the truth or what really was important in the world.  Celebrities, scandals, and thunderous words drowned out deep analysis and the news that mattered. The invention of the subscription model was what eventually got newspapers to thrive and formed them into reliable sources of deep analysis (although we know this is not the case today since information at times comes from faulty sources).

Similar to the newspaper model of before, blogs act in a similar way. In How Can the Political Economy of Communication Help Us Understand the Internet, the author Robert McChesney states “commercial pressure has led to a softening of standards such that stories about sex scandals and celebrities have become more legitimate because they make commercial sense: they are inexpensive to cover, they attract audiences, and they give the illusion of controversy without threatening anyone in power (McChesney, 2013).” Ryan Holiday provides us with similar information, one of the schemes he played out while working at American Apparel gained him and his company international controversy. He released advertising campaigns that exposed lightly dressed women and well dressed men in areas where American Apparel had zero audience members (Bangladesh and Sweden); the images created great controversy in these nations and generated enormous amounts of coverage. The advertisements found its way to online blogs and the national press. For Holiday, doing this was inexpensive, it made commercial sense, it attracted new audience members that American Apparel did not have, and it ultimately created advertising for the company at a very cheap price.