You should know about 'Pearls With Sharon'

My wife recently became hooked on a Facebook live stream, Pearls With Sharon. Her sister told her about it shortly before the lock-down happened. Every Thursday, Sharon does a 3+ hour QVC-like live video stream where she sells colored pearls. Some light research indicates these are dyed, freshwater pearls, but I don't understand the mechanics or cultivation process. She opens presumably live oysters on screen while calling out the buyer's name. After a frequently used catch phrase, like "1 - 2 - 3, for good luck!" she does a reveal of the number and colors of pearls the buyer 'won.' The stream is part game show, part shopping channel, part reality show, chat, gossip and commentary. I get the sense that it is a multi-level marketing type endeavor. Sharon also streams on other nights, hawking women's tights and Pampered Chef products. She occasionally mentions these during her Thursday night stream. Sharon also works for Uber Eats, Grub Hub, and Instacart on weekends, and I have to wonder if this is to support her MLM interests.

She talks about the stream as 'her show,' and anecdotally, her viewer numbers seemed to have ticked up during the quarantine, and she has upped her production game, creating a spinning wheel (à la The Price is Right) to add excitement & additional chance to the purchase process. She seems to know most of the viewers, calling them out by name as they join and responding to chat messages live, with responses like "Judy, you didn't get the jam I sent you? Oh, maybe I don't have your latest address since you got the restraining order."
God knows what the women do with the pearls they buy. Sharon does sell necklaces and some kind of broach that have pearl mountings in them. I don't think my wife has any intention to buy pearls, even though Sharon calls her out by name & asks what she'd like to buy.

She uses lots of homey language like "Holy Moly! Holy Moly!" and she is always excited about every pearl reveal. On the flip side, she'll occasionally lapse into descriptions of the 'foreigners working for Instacart'. Certainly some dog-whistle phrasing, although it never gets ugly (debatable perspective).

I suppose streams like this have been going on for a while, and god knows that gamers and musicians have been doing streams on Twitch and YouTube for a while, but this is something new, I think. An older women, during a pandemic, is using video streaming quite competently, to create a social space that fulfills multiple needs for herself and her friends.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Rush: Chapter 1 (58-68)

One of the things I think about when I read passages about these artists is, what did they think about themselves? Like, there seems to be some pretentiousness about calling yourself an artist, as we discussed in this class, around Martin Creed, I think ("What the fuck am I doing?"). I don't know, maybe I'm projecting my self-doubt on others, because it's hard for me to reckon someone without self-doubt. Like does Mühl take himself completely seriously? Is Scheiss-Kerl supposed to be serious and profound? I know that rocking people's assumptions is part of art, but really? I know, art doesn't have to be serious; I guess simply prompting disgust in the viewer could be a legitimate goal. Others, however, looking at the "'bathetic sadomasochism', of the Aktion artists, whether directed towards men and more specifically towards women, fatally undermines their claims to liberation, catharsis and expiation" (A.L. Rees).
Read more

How art can help us understand AI

Image
This Axios article  talks about human rights vis-à-vis technology and artificial intelligence. "Uncanny Valley: Being Human in the Age of AI," which confronts exhibition goers with powerful images of data monetization, algorithmic bias and the loss of humanity, opens this week at the de Young Museum in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. Trevor Paglen's "They Took the Faces from the Accused and the Dead" consists of hundreds of faces used to train an artificial intelligence engine, all without any of the subjects' consent. "What we are looking at here is dirty data," curator Claudia Schmuckli said.
Read more

randomart in ssh (nerd alert!)

Today I learned about randomart in ssh. It generates random ASCII art from ssh keys. Think old-skool BBS art generated with letters, numbers, and punctuation. SSH is a command-line utility for connecting to remote servers. It uses cryptographic keys to secure the connection so it can't be eavesdropped on by folks in the middle (using a network sniffer, for example). Anyway, ssh keys are long strings of characters, and they are easy to verify with a computer, but difficult for humans to verify visually. Changing even one character in a key makes it into a different key, and that would be hard for humans to detect easily and routinely. So, the authors of ssh, an Open Source tool, implemented a feature that generates a unique picture (but the same one every time for a specific key). If you regularly ssh to a server, it's anticipated that you'd notice any changes to that picture. The key fingerprint is: SHA256:o5lJ57gY1oUS+VIMP/KU7T5varCH+6Xsc+M0/BXyHUw HaX0r@shell The ke...
Read more