The spat106 short longform #21

Focussing unwanted attention on yourself

When you don’t want attention on yourself but gain it through the sheer act of not trying to get attention is very annoying. This is what I should do to get more people reading this newsletter. I kid, or half kid, kid being short for kidding and not meaning a child goat or a child human. One of the recent examples of this is New Zealand’s foremost white man reckons showpiece, Mike Hosking. The BBC in Britain had revealed the salaries of their newsreaders and presenters, with the public astounded by some of the figures. So Mike Hosking thought the same shouldn’t be announced here in New Zealand by TVNZ, the state broadcaster. Obviously one of the reasons why he wouldn’t want it revealed is because he’s in their employment, presenting the 7pm current events show Seven Sharp. Seven Sharp referring to the amount of times Mike Hosking makes racist and sexist comments during the half hour.

The thing is when you don’t want talking about your salary, the wise thing to do would be not to fuel the fire by then writing columns and soundbites about how the revelation of TVNZ salaries should not be done. However Hosking is unwise and that’s exactly what he did. If you ask me and nobody has, if the rumours of Hosking or any newsreader being paid $500,000 plus per year is too much. That is a lot of money for what they are do, that $500,000 could be better used to pay Mitchell Santner to play for 6 weeks for the Kolkata Knight Riders in the Indian Premier League cricket tournament.

This phenomenon of getting more people to pay attention to an issue when you didn’t want to is called the Streisand effect, named after Barbra Streisand because now more people pay attention that she missed out the third a in her first name and didn’t want to be the standard Barbara. I kid of course, and yet again I’m not referring to goats, Barbra had put a lawsuit to remove a picture of her residence from a website, which of course then drew people’s attention to the pictures of her residence, which weren’t getting attention and also weren’t going to get any attention had she not filed the lawsuit in the first instance. Barbra Streisand is probably hoping in hindsight that she never got people to pay unwanted attention on her house, and also regrets now that whole effect is named after her. As if having her initials be BS and missing an a from her first name wasn’t bad enough. So the Streisand effect is what Hosking is doing drawing people into wondering what his salary is by constantly writing articles about how people shouldn’t know what he gets paid.

Now to the topic of child humans and child goats, if I were to say stop thinking about it them you’d pay more attention to them. And kids, in both senses of the term, get enough attention without me making you pay more attention to them by saying that you should not be paying attention to them. So how do I get you to pay less attention to kids? By saying that you should pay attention to them. However this may have the unintended effect of you still paying attention to them. The only kid I want you paying to is Kid Rock as he is thinking of running as a US senator in the near future and as we know celebrities running for political office in America is almost never a good thing.