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.
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.
It was about Barbara Streisand trying to keep her house(?) out of the media or something. I can’t remember what it was she was trying to hide, but I am 70% certain it had something to do with a property.
Some photographer took a picture of a random cliff that looked amazing in the sunlight and that picture just happened to include her home at the time. Except no one knew that and her subsequent blow up in trying to get the photo removed led to everyone knowing that her home was in the picture, and if she hadn’t made a fuss, it would have continued being a secret.
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…
Thing is, it wasn’t labeled as HER house; I don’t even think the photographer knew. They just took a picture of a large house on a beachside cliff.
Once she began making a big deal out of it though, every newspaper and website had it published. She made it worse by making it a thing. It was the original celebrity self-own of the internet era.
And it was inside a huge (10k+) batch of pictures documenting the entire California coastline. Basically nobody had even seen it at the time she, or at least her lawyer, threw a fit about it.
Victim blaming and gaslighting
??? How am I blaming her? Am I misunderstanding you?
The Streisand effect itself is victim blaming
I have a pretty bad memory and I still knew what caused the name. But I was aware of it when it happened, not learning about it much later. That probably helps.
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.
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.
🙋 Language evolves in weird tangential ways. Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra isn’t too far off from reality tbh.
It was really the south park episode that did it.
