Good evening everyone. I just came home from a nice walk in the snow. It's the first time this season it stays on the ground and not just melts away. I love snow. Anyway, I have some thoughts about optics.
Today the swedish director general of the Civil Contigiencies Agency, Dan Eliasson, announced that he will resign. The reason is that he recieved some criticism about traveling on vacation to the Canary Islands now in the middle of the worst part of the Corona pandemic for Sweden. The Swedish government has recommended people reduce their travelling as much as possible, and he, a major figure in the government, travelled to a tourist heavy destination. So that's not good. I mean, it's not exactly world news, but this is a good example of bad optics.
So optics, if you don't know, is simply a term you can use in public relations to describe how something looks from the outside, how it's percieved. And I want to tell you that sometimes that matters for good reasons, and sometimes for bad ones. In the case of Eliasson, his actions will probably not direcly harm many people, but it can do major harm indirecly. If the government says A and does B, how likely is it that the public will listen to A? So the government is correctly distancing themselves from Eliasson to show that they do not do B. So this is a case where optics matters in the way it's percieved.
But sometimes it doesn't actually matter really, but still affects the world around us. For instance, things were looking pretty good for US presidential candidate Howard Dean going into 2004. So in a rally mid January the crowd got loud and he was loud back, culminating in him delivering a short and happy shriek. This quickly turned into news and a meme and he was promply laughted at by millions. (Search for ”Dean Scream” if you're interested.) The optics here might even have made him lose the nomination later on. But does his scream really matter? Would it affect how he would perform as president? As an extra point, contrast this to say, Van Halen, who often benefited from, liked, and endorsed whatever rumour circulated about them. Memes are good optics for some and bad for others. But the optics here doesn't make someone a good or bad politician or musician.
And lastly we have the cases where optics are used for sinister reasons. Say for instance there's an article released about a large company. In this article we can read all about how this big company is doing all kinds of bad things, things that look really bad in the public eye. And the public, they get outraged. Now what does big business do every time this happens? That's right, the CEO resigns (with a small bonus of a few million dollars) and the company releases a statement on how they are looking into the bad things and moves forward. Good! Right? Wrong! The optics here are made to be good, but how much does the company actually need to change after this? Or can they just continue on as usual, perhaps with a few small policy changes and a new face to represent them?
This all might be a small point to make, but it's something I would like everyone to actively think about. Sometimes optics matter, sometimes it doesn't. And sometimes it's used to hide something rotten. So please keep that in mind whenever the news tells you of some controversy or another.
Have a good one!
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