And Then There's This_ How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture - Bill Wasik [5]
Bloggers, mashup artists, YouTube videographers, political “hacktivists”—these people aren’t sitting in their bedrooms spinning out moony personal diaries, hoping that someone will come along and recognize them. Aware they’re always being watched, they act accordingly, tailoring their posts to draw traffic, stirring up controversy, watching their stats to see what works and what doesn’t. They develop a meta-understanding of the conversation they’re in and how that conversation works, and they try to figure out where it’s going so they can get there first. Often these web amateurs have learned these rules just by observing—by lurking on other blogs before starting their own, for example. But just as often they learn from on-the-job experience of sorts, by having scores of ideas fail while one succeeds against all expectation. Either way, countless Internet “amateurs” come to think about their projects with a hard-nosed sophistication that rivals anything to be found inside the conference rooms of our corporate culturemasters.
In fact, the relevant actors of so-called consumer-generated media—the tens if not hundreds of thousands of content creators who are attracting fans beyond their own circles of friends—are every bit as savvy, as ambitious, and as calculating as aspiring culture-makers have ever been. Time’s own examples bore this out: the amateurs who won a following that year invariably had done so cannily. S. R. Sidarth, the young man responsible for Sen. George Allen’s infamous “macaca” moment on YouTube, was an ambitious young volunteer for the opposing campaign who was trailing Allen specifically to document his missteps. The Silence Xperiment, a pseudonymous “bedroom producer” who created a wildly popular mashup album combining the raps of 50 Cent with the music of Queen, had previously DJed clubs, and also had his own radio show (albeit at a college station). Lane Hudson, the blogger whose “Stop Sex Predators” blog posted the e-mails and chats that brought down Rep. Mark Foley, himself worked for a number of political campaigns, including John Kerry’s for president. Tila Tequila, the model/singer who became the first MySpace phenomenon, sent a mass e-mail to “30,000 to 50,000” people inviting them to join up and add her as a friend. These were people who wanted a piece of mass culture; and so they watched the culture, learned from the culture, and then used what they learned to get what they wanted.
And so it goes every year, with the hordes of supposed naïfs out there writing their blogs, producing their videos, posting their songs. Bands trawl other bands’ MySpace pages, raiding their friend lists to try to find potential fans for themselves; every month, thousands more buy a software program called Easy Adder, which (for $24.95) allows them to automate the friend-request process, sending friend requests to hundreds or even thousands of potential friends at a time. On YouTube, video-makers create their own “channels” with customizable promotional backdrops, and they pimp their home page URLs at the ends of videos. Bloggers follow their stats and trackbacks; they add other bloggers to their “blogrolls” in hopes they will reciprocate. Having been sold culture for so many years, in so many sophisticated ways, consumers have now been handed the tools to sell themselves and they are doing so with great gusto.
All this is why I, for one, had no quibble with Time’s choice of “You” as the person of the year. Indeed, I will happily put “You” forward as the defining person of this whole random decade, which our hordes of cultural critics have redefined so often and so variously that it lacks an identity or even a name (the Zeros? the Oughties?). But