Brendan’s Alternate Tagline for Like, Follow, Subscribe:
Unsubscribe.
Quick synopsis:
A look at people using their kids for social media attention.
Fact for Non-History People:
Over 3.9 million moms identify as bloggers in the U.S. alone.
Fact for History Nerds:
Top parenting influencers make up to $5 million annually.
My Take on Like, Follow, Subscribe:
Listen, I didn’t come into Like, Follow, and Subscribe by Fortesa Latifi without some preconceptions. I abhor parents who use their children for online content. It’s dangerous, unfair, and incredibly selfish. Needless to say, I wanted this book to be a no holds barred take down of people who put profit before parenting.
This was unfair of me and probably not the best approach in looking at this corrosive phenomenon. Luckily, Latifi is a journalist and thus would put her own feelings to the side. Well, mostly. Latifi does occasionally insert herself into the story as a brand new mom herself, but she didn’t use the copious amount of four letter words I would have used.
Latifi’s narrative is various chapters which look at how parents could find themselves looking at dollar signs when they look at their kiddos. However, first Latifi throws the reader a wake up call. She looks at the roots of parent blogging which was very much rooted in a positive attempt to connect mothers across the internet. These blogs, well before constant videos and pictures, were a way for mothers to confer on things not discussed in polite society like miscarriages, post-partum depression, and the daily pressures of parenting. This time period of sharing life on the internet was unquestionably a good faith effort to connect and create a community. The thing was, though, that these blogs were about the parents. Now, well, that’s a whole different animal.
This is where the rest of Latifi’s book takes us. We learn how much money is in the kidfluencing (the very word might give me an aneurysm) industry, the people who are watching these videos, and the multitude of psychological questions which are raised. The numbers are clear. Videos which focus on children get better numbers. Why? Well, at least one answer to that question is sexual predators.
Latifi covers a lot of ground in about 250 pages. It means she is asking a lot of questions without necessarily digging too deeply into each topic area. As someone who has seen a few documentaries and read books by people in this industry, I didn’t get a ton of new information. However, I think this could be very eye-opening to someone who hasn’t consumed other media on the subject. If you want a rigorous narrative that provides numerous studies and data, then this one may not be deep enough for you. For everyone else, I think this could be just the wake-up call that you need.
(This book was provided as a review copy by Gallery Books.)
Verdict:
Good, but not the final comment on this subject. Buy it here!
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