Who is #AlexFromTarget…
It sounds innocuous enough. Young guy works at a supermarket chain. Job informs his twitter handle. Still it is not so simple…
Young Alex was snapped at work, that is the retail outlet Target. Lack of imagination not with standing, #AlexFromTarget went viral shortly after said snap was uploaded with Alex Lee (pictured) acquiring half a million new followers. The growth rate was ridiculous and not unsurprisingly the cray was in tow; his girlfriends has received death threats. The Young Turks‘ Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasperian discuss the trend with their usual incisive brio.
In the first place, the sheer vacuity of the news story is damning. Fella in his mid-teens, admittedly easy on the eye, inspires reactions that render proportionate responses a distant memory. Not a good day for millennials (and as one, I am disappoint!).
The second note is thornier one that Cenk brings up with the simple question: “what if it had been a girl?”. If Alex was a girl then the backlash would strip the hair off a badger, or at the very least give Alex something resembling a crew cut.
Until Wednesday the story stood as damning indictment of the inanity with which innovation is deployed. However, information has come to light that in this case hysteria had help. According to CNN ‘a tech startup is claiming responsibility for making #alexfromtarget one of the “most amazing social media experiments ever.”‘ Adding ‘But it’s unclear whether the company really deserves the credit.’ It seems the company Breakr used ‘fangirls’. Breakr CEO Dil-Domine Jacobe Leonares wrote on LinkedIn Monday:
“Abbie (@auscalum), one of our fangirls from Kensington, UK posted this picture of Alex Lee (@acl163) on Twitter. After spreading the word amongst our fangirl followers to trend #AlexFromTarget, we started adding fuel to the fire by tweeting about it to our bigger YouTube influencers,“.
It may still be too early to piece together the whole of the story. Still there is an unsettling quality. By effectively chumming the water online, one can take something unremarkable and give it attention it definitionally does not deserve. I personally will reserve judgment till Sunday, John Oliver’s all over this, I am sure (well, I’ll wager).
Meantime, what do you make of Breakr and it’s wily way?
