And Then There's This_ How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture - Bill Wasik [4]
The fourth attribute, however, is new and somewhat surprising. It is what one might call sophistication: where TV success was a passive thing, success in viral culture is interactive, born of mass participation, defined by an awareness of the conditions of its creation. Viral culture is built, that is, upon what one might call the media mind.
THE MEDIA MIND
In the waning days of 2006, Time magazine blundered into ridicule by choosing “You” as its Person of the Year. On a CNN special, Time editor Richard Stengel announced the decision while brandishing a copy of the issue, whose cover’s reflective Mylar panel served as a murky sort of mirror.
STENGEL: Time’s 2006 person of the year is—you!
SOLEDAD O’BRIEN : Literally me?
STENGEL: Yes, you! Me! Everyone!
Just four weeks later the New York Observer would describe the choice as “a public belly flop, an instant punch line among readers and commentators”; and indeed, in their shared derision for Time, American pundits had come together in an almost touching moment of fellow feeling. From the right, Jonah Goldberg groused, “You are Person of the Year because the editors of Time want to live in a Feel-Good Age where everyone is empowered.” From the left, Frank Rich bemoaned what You were ignoring: “In the Iraq era, the dropout nostrums of choice are not the drugs and drug culture of the Vietnam era but the equally self-gratifying and narcissistic (if less psychedelic) pastimes of the Internet.” Time and its critics seemed strangely united, in fact, in their interpretation of the choice, and of the underlying online reality it was supposed to celebrate. “You” were supposed to have taken control of the culture—“the many wresting power from the few”—simply by enacting, each of you together, your naïve, untutored yearnings for community and self-expression. As NBC anchor Brian Williams put it, in a (cautionary) piece in Time’s package:
The larger dynamic at work is the celebration of self. The implied message is that if it has to do with you, or your life, it’s important enough to tell someone. Publish it, record it . . . but for goodness’ sake, share it—get it out there so that others can enjoy it.
Let us set aside, for a moment, the irony of Brian Williams accusing others of the “celebration of self,” and let us instead pose a question: does this vision of Internet culture—as a playground for unsophisticated navel-gazers—actually square with reality? I would argue that it is a deep misunderstanding, and one that dates from an earlier era. Before the Internet, only professionals could attract audiences that ranged far beyond their own circle of acquaintance. But today, we have an era of truly popular culture that is not professionally created: people can now attract tremendous followings for their writing or art (or music, etc.) while making their livelihoods elsewhere. For this reason, debates about the Internet’s effect on culture tend necessarily to boil down to debates over the merits of amateurism. Web 2.0 boosters celebrate the power of the collaborative many, who are breaking the grip of the elites (and corporations) over the creation and distribution of culture. Detractors fret that the rise of the amateur portends a decline in quality, that a culture without professionals is a culture without professionalism—a world of journalism without regard for fact, art without regard for craft, language without regard for grammar, and so on.
Mostly, though, both sides miss the point, because both lean, like Williams, on a homespun notion of the “amateur” that simply doesn’t reflect how amateurs act when they get an audience online. The majority of bloggers may well be writing tedious personal journals, but the readership of that kind of blog is usually not intended to stray, nor does it stray in practice, beyond the bounds of the blogger’s own acquaintance. Much the same can be said of YouTube or Flickr: the content is purely personal and pedestrian precisely to the extent that