We all know the pattern by now. Something minor happens. One of the affected parties doesn’t want people talking about it. So they go on a crusade against anyone tha makes a small mention about the thing which ends up making the thing super famous.
It is called the Streisand effect after Barbara Streisand who famously went through such a thing. But for all the fame the effect has, how many people actually still remember what it was originally about, without looking it up?
I certainly don’t. I’m pretty sure I looked it up once but apparently it wasn’t interesting enough to remember. This just proves once again that ignoring the thing is much more effective than trying to silence talk about the thing.
Kind of similar to the Watergate scandal and all subsequent -gates. I think it’s about some spy drama revealing the president’s crimes at the Watergate Hotel that led to Richard Nixon resigning but that’s about it. And that’s probably wrong.
Now that I think about it (I should really get out of this shower) there are probably tons of idioms that are even further removed from their origin. I bet some are so far removed that we don’t even register them as being idioms. They’re just words.
I hate those sayings that nobody ever finishes. “Speak of the devil” didn’t make sense until I learned the rest “…and he shall appear.” “Better the devil you know…” is another one. There are more I can’t remember off the top of my head.
This goes so far as to totally obscure the meaning of the original saying. It’s not just “The customer is always right.” It’s “The customer is always right in matters of taste.”
Somebody took shots from the air of her home. She tried to get them removed from the public sphere. That caused headlines and as a result more people saw them attached to these news stories than ever would have if she hadn’t made an issue out of it.
Didn’t google, didn’t read the other comments.
Nah dude, that was Nelson Mandela. You’re thinking of the Berenstein Effect.
You can take your gaslight and shove it up your Baader-Meinhof-Effect!
Classic Godwin’s Razor reply.
You think you’re an expert but you’re not! Some serious Freddy-Kruger effect happening here.
Streisand didn’t want aerial images of her house to be available on the internet. The subsequent outrage made it so those pictures got on newspapers nationwide.
Well, that actually doesn’t seem unreasonable.
“Please stop photographing my private property.”
Pictures of property go in newspapers instead
I mean…she has a point…
Thing is, it wasn’t labeled as HER house; I don’t even think the photographer knew. They just took a picture of a large house on a beachside cliff.
Once she began making a big deal out of it though, every newspaper and website had it published. She made it worse by making it a thing. It was the original celebrity self-own of the internet era.
And it was inside a huge (10k+) batch of pictures documenting the entire California coastline. Basically nobody had even seen it at the time she, or at least her lawyer, threw a fit about it.
Victim blaming and gaslighting
??? How am I blaming her? Am I misunderstanding you?
The Streisand effect itself is victim blaming
I see what you mean. In my experience of the internet it’s called “The Streisand Effect” only when the person complaining about something (and therefore giving an issue attention that it otherwise wouldn’t have received) is generally considered to be “in the wrong” on the issue. I can’t think of a case where someone received blowback for speaking up about an issue (professional repercussions, exclusion from social circles, “cancelling” by various parties, w/e) but was considered to be in the right by the the people calling it “The Streisand Effect”. It feels like there’s a necessary component of “you complained about something you shouldn’t have and were justly punished for it” schadenfreude attached to the term that differentiates it: if you don’t have that you’re just bravely and correctly shining a light on an injustice and it’s not called “The Streisand Effect”, it’s just raising awareness or something.
I think you’re being downvoted because the victim of the alleged injustice complaining about that injustice and then deserving the backlash is baked into the term, and calling it “victim blaming” feels off, but it technically is, it’s just that calling something “The Streisand Effect” implies that the “victim” in the situation deserved what they got because they complained about something trivial, or an effect of privilege, or some other thing that, in the eyes of the public, makes them unworthy of sympathy. But I think carrying that implication of guilt means that it is, technically, victim blaming, and the person using the term “The Streisand Effect” implicitly agrees that the victim deserves blame for their actions. And knowing the internet, I doubt this assessment is correct 100% of the time.
I’m curious to see if other people agree with this assessment. I haven’t done any research on whether my experience of the term is shared by other people, so this may not be a strong theory. Just a thought that spawned off your comment. But it is an interesting perspective.
There was no “victim” originally. She turned herself into one by pointing out that it was her house. Before that nobody knew.
It was about Barbara Streisand trying to keep her house(?) out of the media or something. I can’t remember what it was she was trying to hide, but I am 70% certain it had something to do with a property.
Some photographer took a picture of a random cliff that looked amazing in the sunlight and that picture just happened to include her home at the time. Except no one knew that and her subsequent blow up in trying to get the photo removed led to everyone knowing that her home was in the picture, and if she hadn’t made a fuss, it would have continued being a secret.
it was about this photograph
Of course I went to the wikipedia article to get a link the actual image to post here, but, to answer your question: yes I did in fact remember what the photo looks like without looking it up.
I’d forgotten that the term was coined by Mike Masnick, though.
I have a pretty bad memory and I still knew what caused the name. But I was aware of it when it happened, not learning about it much later. That probably helps.
I do. I’ve been reading Techdirt for over 25 years, so I’m sure I read the original post where the term was coined at the time it was first published.
Wow! I only very recently found techdirt.
🙋 Language evolves in weird tangential ways. Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra isn’t too far off from reality tbh.
It was really the south park episode that did it.
