One of my favorite stories from the vaudeville era involves the magician Frank Van Hoven. There\u2019s no reason anyone would know his name today, but a century ago he was a popular comedian. His act was pure slapstick, with very little actual magic, but audiences loved it just the same. A nutty character on and off stage, Van Hoven knew how to get publicity.<\/p>\n
Once he was performing in a town where two of his nephews lived. He paid them each $5 to meet him at the theater after his last performance. After the last show of the day, he packed his bags and headed out of town. That\u2019s when the nephews earned their money. As the car drove away, both boys ran after it for half a mile shouting, \u201cDon\u2019t leave us, Van Hoven! Don\u2019t leave us!\u201d Of course, the newspaper mentioned it.<\/p>\n
This kind of hype is an old show business tradition. In T. S. Eliot\u2019s famous poem \u201cThe Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,\u201d the self-deprecating speaker claims at one point that he is not \u201cPrince Hamlet,\u201d meaning that in the great drama of life, he is no tragic hero. But he could be an extra, he says, someone who would do to \u201cswell a progress.\u201d\u00a0 That\u2019s Elizabethan talk for \u201cstanding around onstage to make a crowd look bigger.\u201d<\/p>\n
The practice of inflating crowds with rented actors was never limited to the theater. Funerals in the 19th century often featured paid mourners; people who made a living showing up in their finest black garb to follow a hearse to the cemetery and cry loudly. These folks seldom knew the deceased, but they were hired by families who didn\u2019t want to be embarrassed by a low turnout at the memorial. Oliver Twist gets a gig like this in Dickens\u2019 famous novel.<\/p>\n
Advertisers thrive on this sort of thing. For years, McDonald\u2019s kept a running tally of its total number of customers \u2014 \u201c42 billion served\u201d \u2014 and frequently changed the number under the golden arches. In 1994, after half a century of hawking hamburgers, the company surpassed the \u201c99 billion served\u201d mark and announced that it would no longer update the sign. There comes a point when enough is enough, especially when your tally resembles the national debt clock.<\/p>\n
Politicians have not been above spending a little campaign cash to hire people to show up at their rallies (or to heckle an opponent\u2019s rally). And activists have not been above accepting this cash in exchange for adding to the headcount. It\u2019s all part of the game. I certainly would want to be paid to listen to some politicians talk.<\/p>\n
Even churches are not immune. When it comes to Sunday attendance, everyone knows what a \u201cpreacher\u2019s count\u201d means.<\/p>\n
So, I suppose in the digital age it was inevitable that we would get Devumi, a Florida company that is currently under investigation for selling fake followers to celebrities, sports stars and advertisers. A master of aggregate identity theft, Devumi\u2019s crime is stealing names from Twitter and other social media platforms and selling the bundle to the highest bidder, who then gets a whole lot of instant friends.<\/p>\n
The high friend counts on Facebook and LinkedIn and so forth have always struck me as the silliest form of vanity \u2014 filled as they usually are with acquaintances, friends of acquaintances, distant relatives, hangers-on, relatives of the hangers-on, people we\u2019ve met once, people our friends have met once, names from headstones and other assorted party crashers who do not know the person claiming them as friends any more than he knows them.<\/p>\n
So, until the company gets indicted, Devumi will keep helping us pad our resumes with fake followers who are yet one more step removed from our real circle of friends. Frank Van Hoven would have loved it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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