Ok, so for all these years I have been a non-blogger. One who blogs not. I somehow had myself convinced that I was not sufficiently opinionated that I would ever feel the need to shout those opinions at the internet.
Ha.
Oh well.
Ok, so the first thing I feel the need to shout at the internet about is the concept of 'going viral', and the idea that this is not only a good thing, but is one of the most exciting phenomenons to come out of the internet, expressed beautifully in this talk by Kevin Allocca
The idea is that the media that get spread through social network platforms like Facebook and twitter are those that are recgnised by the viewer as having sufficient value to be worthy of the attention of their friends. The implication is that this represents the future of a more democratic media industry, whereby public opinion serves as a huge, organic filter, selecting that which has value to the people of the internet as a whole and promoting it through a multitude of small actions from individuals, rather than being slave the tastes and agendas of a few individuals in control of large industries.
Except there seems to be something wrong with Kevin's argument. The problem is that the best examples of media from this new dawn of viral, democratic media that he pulls out for us in this talk are a man falling off a bicycle (sorry for spoiling the punchline of that one. No, wait, I'm not sorry), the Nyan cat and Justin Bieber. Justin Bieber? Really Kevin? Aside from the matter of his debatable artistic merit, Justin can hardly be said to a product of a more democratic media industry. Maybe he started as some kid getting a lot of hits on youtube, but that's not what made him commercially successful. What made that happen was the Raymond Braun Media Group deciding they could make money out of this kid. Is Kevin saying that the viral phenomenon is so great because it's made the job of talent spotting by large corporations easier? What about the Nyan cat? Is it really important and/or exciting that it traveled round the world? Or is it just like any other running joke that happens whenever people as shamelessly, wantonly geeky as me and my ilk gather together, except that this one happened in cyberspace rather than a physics department staff room somewhere?
The concept of things going viral is not of course new, nor is it limited to the internet. Aside from the example of actual viruses (the kind that make you ill), there are plenty of to choose from. In his book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell gives the example of Hush Puppies shoes, which were going out of business, but then became cool and trendy with a small group of New York hipsters and suddenly, completely unexpectedly, not least to the Hush Puppies company themselves, they were everywhere. Both Gladwell and Allocca ask why things go viral. How could we predict or control it? Both decide that we cannot predict or control it, that it is an unpredictable, surprising process, whereby a chance act causes unexpected things to rise suddenly to fame after years or days of obscurity.
I have a different answer. My answer is "nobody cares."
I'm not saying that to be offensive. What I'm trying to do is make a point about viral mathematics and how they work.
Let's say you've made a YouTube video of your dog wearing your tortoise as though it were a hat, and you send this to a few friends. Let's say that your video is sufficiently amusing that, on average, each of those friends sends it to one other person. Your video will make its way slowly around the interwebs, but the number of people watching it at any one time will remain constant.
Say however, that your tortoise is not very cute (I know, that's impossible, all tortoises are cute, whatever, just bear with me) and hence the average transmission rate of your video falls from one to only zero point nine. Now the number of people watching will go down, halving every six or seven transmissions, until nobody is watching it any more.
On the other hand though, maybe your tortoise is not only cute, but he is wearing a hat of his own, making for a moment of meta-hatted magnificence in YouTube viewing. The average transmission rate rises from one to one point one. Now, instead of halving, the number of people watching is doubling every six or seven transmissions. Let's say it takes, on average, about ten minutes for someone to watch your clip and send it to a friend (one transmission). If you uploaded and sent it to just one friend at nine o clock at night, by the time you get to work the next day at nine in the morning, just twelve hours later, well over a thousand people will be watching it right at the very moment that you stroll over to your desk and check your YouTube profile to see how your amusing pets are getting on. By the time you go for lunch it will be ten thousand, and by the time you leave the office at six pm, it will be well over five hundred thousand.
My point is, the difference between viral and not viral is small. Sometimes as small as a tortoise's hat. Viral mathematics only come into play when nobody really cares. It doesn't really matter whether you get your daily pet related giggle from a hatted tortoise, or a tortoise 'sans chapeau'. It doesn't really matter whether you wear Hush Puppies or Converse. Honestly, nobody really cares very much. It's just that lots of people care a tiny bit. When the differences are more significant, such as between a hatted tortoise video and a David Attenborough documentary, then the viral mathematics collapse and it becomes a normal, stable, predictable system. Of course everyone watches the tortoise with the hat.
What I mean is that just because anyone's short video clip of their pets can go viral and be seen by millions, doesn't mean that anyone can make a David Attenborough documentary. That takes a lot more than youtube hits.
So, please can we stop being confused about democratic means of consumption and democratic means of production. The fact that it is popular doesn't make it important, exciting or cool. That was true of the kid at your school who hit puberty before anyone else, wore a leather jacket and smoked by the back gate, and it is true of things on the internet.
Yes, the internet is a fantastic tool for independent artists, musicians and the like. It allows media, opinions, culture and even education to reach places they never otherwise would and for the incremental opinions and choices of lots of people to have a large impact. It allows for thousands, millions, perhaps even billions of people across the globe to organise toward a single cause. The use of Twitter in the Arab spring revolutions, the 38 degrees movement to save the NHS, microfinance organisations like Kiva, crowdfunding organisations like Kickstarter, democratic tools like Avaaz. These things are important, exciting and cool.
Nyan cat is not.
Sorry Kevin.
