Influencers want content even when you just want dinner

They are everywhere, my dearest gentle readers, and influencers’ omnipresent influences are becoming the bane of our very existence! Let me elaborate.

After much insistence and persistence from your overenthusiastic, yet dear old friends, you step into a much-hyped restaurant in the glorious by-lanes of the Tristate Area. Quite pointless, if I may add, as the mediocre but overpriced food will inevitably disappoint.

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The entrance is crowded by a flock of hyperactive young people, dressed in bodycon crop tops and sheer pencil skirts, made up beyond belief. The makeup of some of the girls is thick enough to stop a bullet. You observe two sets of lashes on their eyes, causing near blindness due to their weight, but one must look like they were born with eyelashes fluttering like a drunken butterfly’s weary wings, no?

Their hands clutching mobile phones in the manner a drowning person would grab onto a flotation device. Again, you observe. As you try to make your way through this rampant chaos to find a wretched table to sit and eat, flashes blind and blur your vision from all sides and voila! You have entered the realm of the influencers.

Then begins the drudgery that is dinner.

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Surrounded and hounded by influencers from all sides, taking hundreds of shots of the food, the decor, the cutlery, the napkins and the fly on the wall, your appetite dies a slow, sad death, and you question your very existence. Shrill, high-pitched bits and pieces of words come within your earshot, destroying any chance of having a lively conversation with anyone in a socially acceptable tone.

Your friends, overenthusiastic as they are, but still amazingly perceptive, sense your trepidation but ask you to behave as if your face is like a TV show with subtitles as you throw annoyed glances in your general direction!

Dearly missing the safety and security of your humble home and your darling cook Parvin Khala’s simple but delicious food, you desperately want to make a hasty exit when suddenly, an influencer corners you! You watch with utter horror as she holds her cute little furry microphone (because who needs to seek permission to interview someone, right?) to know your opinion about the food on Facebook Live!

Before you have a chance to blink, she’s pointing her camera at you and like a deer caught in headlights, you mumble some niceties when she does the inevitable — showing you at your vulnerable state to one and all, because what are you to her but just content?

Like influenza virus influencers are everywhere you turn — the supermarket, at the salon, sometimes even at your local dentist’s! Snapping away to their heart’s content a million pictures a minute, yapping away in their irritatingly nasal voice, trying to be all upbeat and cheery, but come on, who are they kidding?

Violating everyone’s privacy and personal space, they are constantly looking for content that will help their channel or page gain traction online. And before you all come at me with pitchforks, allow me to explain my hostile stance.

I am not against all influencers. Some of them actually create great content. I would be remiss to not admit that I myself rely on a few good influencers for their insights. Be it makeup, fashion, food or travel, influencers are indeed useful. But every other person with a smartphone and mobile internet is hardly that. Particularly those who have zero credibility or knowledge about the products they endorse or the content they get paid to create are a real nuisance.

To that end, many influencers end up misguiding their viewers and face backlash, especially from an impressionable audience who believe everything they see on the internet.

Creating content without any real knowledge about a topic can be damaging, harmful even. Accountability is another matter that needs to be considered. It is a fact well established that most influencers get paid to endorse or promote a product, so it’s not always that the quality or veracity is verified.

Who will assume responsibility for damages incurred to viewers influenced by paid influencers if a subpar product or service is recommended by them? Hence, the viewer’s discretion is paramount. Do not be fooled by gloss and glam — do a deep dive yourself before trusting anyone on the internet, for there is a cost involved in being “influenced” by influencers!