Ryan Holiday - Book 1, Tactic #9 & Book 2, XV

Tactic #9: Just Make Stuff Up (Everyone Else is Doing It)

Tactic #9 makes the point that any story can become a big story if fluffed up enough. He makes that point that there are certain viewpoints one must achieve in order to make the story big. He highlights that if given urgency, bloggers will publish anything because they see urgency as importance. Some readers, if not most, have continuous fear of anything, and if they feel that something is urgent, they will share and view more blog posts than normal. Bloggers capitalize on urgency because they know that in that moment, readers will not look into the facts of an article as much as they would into everyday, boring blogs. In order to get a leg up on the blogger world, one must make information up to get their blog seen and shared.

XV Cute but Evil

In the second book Ryan opens about the consequences that come from the tactics he outlined in the first book and how he does not wish to be apart of the lying anymore. In XV: Cute but Evil of book two, Ryan describes ways in which media bloggers pull readers and viewers deeper into the media abyss. One example Holiday used was how he was at a convention one time and he noticed a media blogger continuing to post updates to various social media sites, without even paying attention to what was happening in the convention. By posting multiple updates to multiple sites, it drew people in because they were just waiting for the next update, even if it was true or false. Which relates back to Tactic #9 in book one where bloggers would make things up just for higher ratings and views.