walter g1 wrote
The problem is Sony is selling the A7ii for $1398, on sale for $998 right now.
Another Sony user in a national forum also came up with this.
Are you guys reading from some kind of script?
Since when is an over-4-years-old camera a competitor of any kind in such a novelty-geared market like this one?
You guys really should stop seeing any piece of Sony gear as some kind of holy grail...
PK
it is very likely that Sony pays for an army of social media trolls to put out stuff like this. It's too coordinated and too many for this to be a coincidence.
The admins of sites like Nikon Rumors, and even Roger Cicala of Lens Rentals, has noticed this militant form of Sony trolling.
And you are right...what is funny is that the same talking points are repeated over and over again, sometimes almost verbatim. It's like a coordinated political campaign.
I doubt they are paid trolls, but more likely spec geeks who mostly photograph underexposed brick walls. They have time to be on multiple sites and copy and paste their "information or knowledge " from one site to another. They are trying to save us.
I don't know what they are, but only Sony fan comments frequently come from anonymized addresses. I've been blogging for over a decade and there have always been trolls and fanboys, but this is new.
Meh. C'mon, Roger, you could have stopped at "there have always been trolls and fanboys."
Anonymous internet screen-names are ghosts whether they have "anonymized addresses" or not. You aren't going to meet many or any of the people here, in person, even if you could be sure they were actually people. You'll never know real names. You'll never build a meaningful conversational context. It's just ghosts.
So all you've really got to go on, here, are the intrinsic qualities of the individual posts you read. Are they informed? Are they critical? Do they express particular skill or talent or perspective?
If I had to chart the thing that's changed over the decade you (and maybe I) have been blogging, it isn't the rise of Sony or any company's marketing trolls-or-bots-or-scripts. It's the overall diminishment of those vital, intrinsic qualities in posts and conversation--the critical perspectives, the informed context, the expressions of skill--that were the only thing sustaining the usefulness of "conversation among ghosts."
The entire forum--the web, really--is now mostly just uncritical and emotional parroting of marketing language. A camera company's marketers use a phrase to describe some feature or capability, and a bunch of screen-names jump on the net to shout that phrase at each other as though it were a
prima facie fact with decades of context and empirical user validation behind it. If you doubt me, just think back to all the impossibly pointless arguments you've seen circling use of the word "Pro" or "Professional" to describe some sort of feature or technology.
Sony (and Canon, and Nikon, and the rest) don't need scripts or bots. And if they're paying people to post, they're wasting money. Because there are hundreds and hundreds of screen-name ghosts ready to wage pitched marketing battles on their behalves, for free. People apparently
want to believe the marketing narratives these companies spin, more than they want to do the work or put in the time to build a broad, informed perspective--a sense of reality--around them.
It's sad. Because of course, in this case, "doing the work" means shooting, finishing, sharing photographs. Isn't that the point of buying a camera in the first place? Yet all of these people would rather spend their "photographic" time parroting a marketing narrative to people they'll never meet, people they'll never know, people they can never know they've persuaded.
These companies and their marketers have tapped into a vein of human nature, here, that's powerful in the short term; but, as they shamelessly exploit it, it's not so good for the long-term health of craft they aim to supply.
