Getting funny or dying

To quote the great Bill Simmons, "This is a free flowing conversation that occasionally touches on mature subjects." (including and especially attached videos)

I actually spent considerable time this week trying to think of paradigm shifts caused by social media and the train of thought eventually led me to think about the resurgence of music videos. I considered writing about how creeped out I get by the focused google ads and facebook ads but I wasn't quite as inspired by those.

My train of thought started with the viral video concept. I haven't been impressed by a lot of the viral videos that I've seen, but they've still gone viral. So instead of focusing on the content of the videos, I started to think about what causes people to click forward when they get one of those emails. And that made me think of other ways I'm exposed to these videos. A lot of these videos' build their popularity through the younger generation (I'm only 24 but still...) and these kids aren't sitting  in their cubicles using Outlook. So then I thought of the last time I saw a video that wasn't forwarded to me and it was this: Can't Tell Me Nothing . My buddy showed it to me at a party on his iPhone. To make the claim that just because music videos have come back into my life, they have somehow seen a meteoric rise in worldwide popularity, is a little bold. But then I'd go to parties at a buddy's house and while everyone is sitting around pre-gaming (I feel like I need to excuse the fact that we were post-college pre-gaming but I can't think of a good excuse, or another name for what was going on) my buddy hooks his laptop up to his TV and throws on his favorite music videos on youtube. It used to be that you could turn on MTV and be able to watch your favorite music videos. Then they decided they wanted to producing Emmy-worthy shows like Cribs and Jersey Shore and even VH1 isn't showing music videos. I typed in resurgence of music videos and actually found a little article about how youtube has singlehandedly saved the art. Music Videos/Youtube . I started out trying to think of what causes people to share these videos and just ended up showing that it's easy to do it, something we all already knew. Perhaps the biggest takeaway is just how many different methods of sharing there are, even within a generation. I've shared videos via facebook (Brett Favre, What Should I do?), through work email, showing them to friends on my iPhone, and texting them links to youtube. I just don't know what made me share them.

Victor Borge

Getting swoll/swelled

I read the groundswell article today on my phone. It's a concept I've seen before and I've talked about it a bit with my friends before. In working on my website recently, my partners and I had discussed viral videos and how they can garner the attention of millions of people in just a few days. One little breakthrough, and you've instantly got way more publicity than you every could have had through a consistent marketing campaign. The trick is obviously building something that can go viral.

But what interested me more was how a company could weather the storm of a negative groundswell. I don't think a company will ever come away unscathed but there has to be a better way of handling this. But if there was, would we really even know about it? Obviously the famously bad ones get the most publicity. It's a stretch but I think Charlie Sheen's recent meltdown could be a good case study. All of these actors/athletes/politicians are selling some form of a brand.  Rep. Weiner probably didn't handle this situation very well, and perhaps some of them are so bad that they can't be handled, but I have to say that Charlie made out pretty well. So many people attempt to duck-dive the wave or swim through it but instead Charlie hopped on his board and enjoyed the ride. The waves of public opinion can be overwhelming and most of the time they're going to crush you, but fighting it certainly isn't going to help. Now take away the analogies and I don't know how to surf through a public opinion catastrophe, and Charlie probably isn't the best role model for companies. But there might be some lessons to be learned (deep down in there somewhere) from his handling of the groundswell.

Getting Dumber/Smarter

I tried not to be too biased reading the first article but it was terribly difficult. The title alone threw me off, “Does the internet make you dumber?” And I think the second article, “Does the internet make you smarter?” validated my bias considering how much more I liked and agreed with it.

I felt that the first article had a major contradiction that undercut its hypothesis. It made the claim that we were losing our ability to focus, an ability supposedly gained by years of reading books. Carr then made the claim that the brain quickly “remodels” to fit the way that it’s used. If the brain is so flexible, then it shouldn’t have any trouble learning to focus again. Also, if the brain is more suited (from an evolutionary perspective) to a less focused environment like the internet, then couldn’t it be more effective as a learning tool? Also, people can set themselves apart now purely by their ability to sift through large quantities of data and information on the internet and make a decision.  People adapt and learn to excel in their environment. This change and adaptation to the environment is not a sign that we are getting dumber.

I liked the second article but I was initially going to argue that Shirky based his argument too much on the movable type analogy. To me, comparing technology transformations that took place hundreds of years apart made for a rather weak argument. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized how spot on he was. I think going into these articles I made little distinction between how knowledgeable and how smart someone was. For me and my group of friends, there’s no doubt that the internet makes us more knowledgeable. My roommates and I sit in our living room watching tv at night and inevitably have about 28 different arguments based on something that came up in a show. We search our iphones during commercials to find data to back up our arguments. These articles aren’t ALL at the highest intellectual level but there are a few high caliber arguments thrown in there. Years ago we would have had to go to the library to resolve these arguments or just sit there and argue ignorantly, and that happens if we left our phones in a different room. But at least most of the time now we can back up our argument with confirmation bias fueled facts.

Getting Started...

Well I got my blog for x501 all set up. It's a few hours late, but better late than never right?