Or maybe the title should be “Sheeple Herding.” It turns out that corporations that need to get a controversial viewpoint accepted in the mainstream can hire DC thinktanks that will do a media blitz to push the viewpoint and make it palatable to enough people to allow it to become acceptable.
Comcast recently did this to fight against the blowback caused by their blocking of P2P applications which caused a huge discussion around net neutrality versus normal network management. One of the ways they did this was to have bloggers paid for changing their positions and posting about it. (I wasn’t one of the lucky ones to be paid.) And unfortunately, in order to get this to work, it takes an unwitting audience to buy into the purchased and manufactured hype.
My latest post on this is over at Geeks Are Sexy here. Don’t miss it!
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