Over the years rings have popped up on Jake's fingers. From plain bands to black diamond engagement rings to himself. And there is always speculation when it began.
It looks like it goes all the way back to the beginning. Check out the glimmer of a ring at the premiere of Jake's first major movie October Sky in Knoxville.
4 comments:
The expressions on those girl's faces... priceless. They look as if it's 1964 and he's Paul McCartney or something. Hilarious. Fangirls never change.
So, the ring isn't a matrimonial / commitment ring then? Jake was not with Austin yet in October Sky days was he? It seems Jake wears a different ring on a chain round his neck.
...whole dueling twitter strategy with Jake and Austin is all about active deception and creating a false heterosexual image for both guys as well as to hide those pesky kids he refuses to acknowledge...
This is taking a classic corporate PR strategy and applying it in a modern way to closet a celeb. The strategy is actually 'obfuscation' and it is used when the truth would almost certainly have negative consequences and outright lying isn't an option. In addition to PR this strategy is also employed all the time in politics.
It doesn't really take much effort either because it works so well and in our modern world social media could not be better designed for it.
With social media there is no gatekeeper / no journalists filtering false information or asking questions to reach the truth. Instead the messenger is usually a "friend" or at the very least someone you assume to be a real living, breathing person / after all, they have followers and post pictures of themselves and talk about what they had for lunch, right?
People don't trust the US government, they don't trust corporations (and they shouldn't) and many don't trust advertising anymore, they don't even trust the mainstream media and yet... they have a blind trust when it comes to information disseminated through social media. And this is the best thing to ever happen to PR because 1) it works like a charm and 2) it costs almost nothing.
Another point I want to make are the importance of independent bloggers to PR manipulation. I rep family products. It's hard to believe but to many moms, a fellow mom blogging in her pajamas is a more trusted source than the nightly news and certainly more trusted than an advertisement. A full-page ad in a parenting magazine can cost me $20k but I can pay a mommy blogger to write a post with language that I feed to her for $100. For real.
In the celeb world it's blogs like Lainey, Celebitchy, Just Jared, Perez etc. that become the pawns to help legitimize the messages floating around in social media.
Thanks FIT for all the insight you have been sharing with us. Welcome.
With social media there is no gatekeeper / no journalists filtering false information or asking questions to reach the truth.
I certainly don't disagree with any of your points about the “flexible” uses and low cost abuses of social media. However, I would go one step further and suggest that there is outright lying going on, as well. Proactive lying, as opposed to basic obfuscation, not only by the celebrity in question, but by their friends, family and industry writers/insiders who make their living covering the entertainment industry. Twitter alone cannot continue to perpetuate the lies of a closeted entertainer, without amoral comrades in arms. Even the so-called mainstream media is complicit, a lap dog to corporate masters…willingly going along to get along so they can continue to be granted access. Basic journalistic standards like fact checking, actual investigative reporting, avoidance of the regurgitated sound bit have long been discarded as impediments to career advancement.
There is no doubt that twitter is a powerful tool not just because it provides a very economical semblance of credibility as well as the illusion of spontaneity (perceived lack of bias), but because tweets can be scrubbed clean in a nanosecond later on if they become "inconvenient". The only possible remnants of the cover up, maybe a renegade retweet here and there still floating about in the twitterverse. But, then again the intended low-attention-span social networked audience is not much interested in anything other than a reinforcement of their own point of view and prejudices, which often includes a rabid fandom’s litmus test for what passes as “fact”.
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