The Monster Attacks

Ryan Holiday is the fool

In the second part of the book, Holiday mainly speaks about the dangers of manipulating the media. He exclaims that through his creation of false perceptions through blogs which lead to bad conclusions and wrong decisions, real decisions had consequences for people in the real world. At times, the perceptions created online can destroy the reputations of people. Jan A.G.M van Dijk in his article, Social Structure states that “The new media, the Internet in particular, add a new dimension to the blurring public-private distinction as new kinds of association and communication appear between interpersonal and mass communication (Dijk, 2006).” For bloggers, it almost seems that they have no respect for the private life of their targets; they create fake stories for personal gain. Bloggers accomplish deception through iterative journalism. In iterative journalism, bloggers are at the base of all actions. When they post something, each subsequent contact assumes that since the information is run on other sites as well, it must be true and verified. An example of this is when Ryan Holiday was promoting a movie for his friend Tucker Max. He vandalized a billboard advertisement to make it look as if someone was angry about the release of Tucker’s movie. Holiday then sent pictures of the vandalism to bloggers which in turn exploited this throughout the web. In return, Tucker’s reputation dwindled in the eyes of the public; however this scheme also promoted his movie.

Holiday mentions that bloggers create the problem of “feeding the monster.” The monster is the social media and how it can be manipulated to hurt others for self profit. Van Dijk also states in his article that “the network society is an unstable type of society. This is for the paradoxical reason that it is both too connected and too divided (Dijk, 2006).” Since bloggers are too concerned with pageviews and not concerned with the actual information they provide, a divide is created between truthful information and the information we see displayed on websites. It comes to the point where it is hard to distinguish reality from false information as an audience member. Holiday notices that this problem is ongoing and doesn't really offer a solution. Ultimately he wrote this book to uncover the truth behind media manipulators in hope that the public will become aware of the way blogs work and reduce the divide in our society.