The Aesthetics of Credibility
Something I've been dancing around when thinking about affiliate marketers is the lengths they go to make their recommendations feel credible. I wanted to do this because the enterprise as it stands isn't credible. I have receipts showing that advertising rates, a sort of dark money, dictate product reviews, and that experts cited by these copywriters have flimsy credentials. It's an advertising endeavor, after all. There was no reason to believe it credible.
And yet, I did. I used to read The Strategist and The Wirecutter often. My inclination was to believe what was written there. I feel the opposite inclination when confronted with other advertisements, those that tell me happiness is Cancun-colored and found in the Caribbean Sea for only $150 a night. Why did I feel the need to compile counter-evidence for one, but felt the other untrustworthy prima facie? Why didn't I go into the situation disbelieving every word out of the affiliate marketer's mouth?
Credibility seems to be a phenomenon felt as much in the heart as in the head. I wanted to think about how advertisers, artists, singers, thinkers communicate this feeling of credibility to people. I wanted to know the aesthetic of credibility. When I think about aesthetics, when I use that term, I mean how someone engineers a feeling in another person. I write, and I like to make sure that my writing engenders certain feelings in people: maybe thoughtfulness, rumination, nostalgia, maybe I want people to feel skepticism and disgust. And I use specific words to accomplish this. I use specific, aesthetic techniques.
I want to dwell briefly on the way that some different pieces of art make themselves feel credible. The genres vary, as do the techniques. But the feeling remains the same.
Affiliate Marketers
Good, encyclopedic affiliate marketers have the same homey, urbane feeling as modern Internet journalism. The second that you see a good affiliate marketers' website, you feel that they are credible, and a set of aesthetic features, some literary and some based in the design of the website itself, shepherds that trust.
One literary technique is the biographies given to their writers, blurbs I have mentioned before. These bios focus on the specific social and professional roles each of these writers play in their everyday lives: the pet owner, the recent mother. These our their credentials, their credibility. And the articles themselves include a number of rhetorical tricks. They often rely on actual credentialed experts, though these credentials are sometimes specious. They interview celebrities and summon from them the secret of their happiness, or at least their shopping habits.
But it's more than just the words, the ad copy, that makes these marketers feel credible. It's the site design itself. Affiliate marketing is so insidious because it looks like journalism, and because, to the average viewer, there isn't enough demarcation between what is advertising and what is objective journalism. The Inventory's site design mimics the rest of G/O Media, its parent company. Affiliate marketers look like journalism because their websites are designed to look like journalism, with headlines, subheadlines, head shots for the writers, a front page indistinguishable from the front pages of actual news websites.
Documentary and Kuleshoving Consent
I've been on a Dan Olsen kick. Dan Olsen's a media critic on YouTube who does deep dives into how movies and video games communicate their message to readers. I'm sure he'd generally agree with my engineering theory of aesthetics, and that certain pieces of media intelligently use design features to engender trust rather than suspicion. And he has a great video essay on how a geo-centrism documentary effectively uses a film editing technique called the Kulsehov Effect to convince viewers that the earth centering the universe is not farfetched.
Lev Kuleshov was a Russian who liked movies, a common character in cinematic history. And he posited that a viewer doesn't extract meaning from individual shots in the film, but rather from which shots are right next to each other. Shots put right next to each other are considered to be related, to be equivalent in a way. In the case of a geo-centrism documentary, the filmmakers exploited this fact by pairing interviews with well-regarded scientists alongside interviews with proponents of geo-centrism. By placing these interviews next to each other, Dan Olsen argues, the credibility that we rightfully give these well-regard scientists rubs off on the geo-centrists, and so we see both of these interviews as presenting equally reasonable sides. If we had watched either interview in isolation, if we had chosen to watch a few interviews by well-regarded scientists, and then a few interviews by crackpots, we would rightfully identify the two. But by muddling them together, the Kuleshov Effect works its magic. We see them as the same. We see both of them as credible.
Shaq
Shaq's mere presence in an advertisement for gig-economy app Steady lends the app major credibility. Iconography is probably the best way to describe why that happens.
Iconography is a method of art criticism that ignores the stylistic aspect of the work of art and instead focuses on the characters and images present in the work. Instead of judging a painting based on its three-point perspective or use of shadows, you note the biblical passages chosen for illustration, how Christ is framed in the image, which saints appear and which saints don't. Unlike a Kuleshov, or some style inherent to advertising, Shaq's presence tells a story and produces a credibility all its own, independent of the style of the ad. Nothing about the shot in particular impresses Shaq as credible. He's sitting on a couch. He's not well-framed. If an art historian five centuries from now were to find this advertisement, were she unaware of what Shaq as an icon of American success meant to people, she would not be able to deduce the meaning of the advertisement, why it came off as credible. That is, there is no traditionally aesthetic criteria here, but rather the presence of Shaq, through the alchemy which is iconography, communicates a sense of authority into you as the sign of the Cross once did in Medieval Europe.
Sometimes, the credibility is just Shaq.
Love Songs and the Autobiography
Every good love song is written in the first person, and the idea is that the song is credible because the singer-songwriter has experienced this particular relationship and can therefore comment on the universals of love, that is, they are credible because they have known love. It's why people have tried to identify the unnamed "you" that inspired "You're So Vain" by Carly Simon; they assume that Simon has written an autobiography, or a roman a clef, and they want to know who was the real, living breathing former lover who earned her ire. I think that's because we want to ensure that Simon is credible. The song speaks to knowing someone so vain and fabulous, and we want to make sure that she's not pulling the wool over our eyes here, that she's telling the truth. Sure, figuring out who inspired "You're So Vain" is good gossip, but if Simon said that she had made the whole thing up, that she had just strung some pretty words together or had come up with the song after watching a Billy Wilder movie, I think many would feel cheated somehow. We wanted to think she was for real. We wanted to think there was someone who flew their private jet across Canada to witness a solar eclipse. We wanted to think that she knows something about the vain people that we love. We want her solutions. We want Simon to tell the truth.