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