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.
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…
Victim blaming and gaslighting
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 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.
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.
