Suspension of disbelief.

  By Gonzalo López Martí – Creative director, etc.  / lmmiami.com/

• Stop for a minute and consider this: the entire edifice of our industry is glued together by a few cognitive, psychological and behavioral phenomena. *
• Mimetic theory: aka herd mentality. Our inability or unwillingness to make informed decisions pushes us to just follow those who we trust. The result: tribalism.
• Mimesis: the human ability &/or tendency to represent reality in artificial ways, in other words, art in its broadest sense, which technology is making more disturbingly accurate by the day. Exhibit 1: Deep fakes.
• Suspension of disbelief: the proclivity of our brains to be absorbed by, and transported to, the alternate reality of a narrative we know full well is fictional, e.g. crying during a romantic movie or believing that Lionel Messi will actually swap his jersey for a bag of Doritos.
• All these mental/emotional operations have a tremendous incidence in the crazy reality that surrounds us in 2019: fake news, astroturf campaigns, faux influencers, assorted trolling, government psyops.
• It is increasingly hard to distinguish the figments of someone’s imagination with tangible stuff that happens IRL (In Real Life).
• We live in a world where entire swathes of the population believe the earth is flat and vaccination is a global conspiracy.
• Bring out the tinfoil hats.
• “This past August, Netflix announced that it was canceling a program called The OA—and the tech giant was promptly confronted with some very vocal backlash. Launched in 2016, The OA is a supernatural drama about a missing blind woman who returns to her suburban Michigan family with her vision inexplicably restored. The series was expensive to shoot and its audience relatively tiny. For a broadcast network, cancellation would be a no-brainer. But the show’s ardent fans were incensed. They put up billboards and organized flash mobs in Times Square. They started a Change.org campaign to save the series, gathering 80,000 signatures. Some protested outside Netflix’s offices in Hollywood and New York. And one hard-core devotee, an unemployed TV writer named Emperial Young, went on a hunger strike, saying she needed The OA more than she needed food.” **

*You can read last week’s column here on these topic here: https://hispanicad.comagency/business/mimetic-theory-suspension-disbelief
**Source: https://fortune.com/longform/women-netflix-streaming-wars/