Free speech and free attention

This is post is going to cover two different themes: social media and the attention it brings people, and Christian privilege in the public square. They’re related, I promise I’ll get to that point.

I grew up in a time that was right on the front end of the Internet age. As a freshman computer science undergraduate student in 1992, the Internet was still a weird buzzword that social rejects and highly specialized academics used.

The host of the local morning show that I used to listen to once told a funny story where he didn’t want to be pestered by the guy sitting next to him on an airplane. “So what do you do?” asked the guy in the story. “Computers,” lied the professional radio host. “That shut him right up!” he bragged. You can imagine how much that story cheered up a guy like me as I wrangled with projects in UNIX and struggled through classes on data structures and algorithms, and got scorned by the frat guys in my dorm suite.

People didn’t really get what was going on with the internet yet.  This cartoon was considered very amusing at the time.

The New Yorker mentions the Internet in 1993. How erudite of them.

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Just a few years later, the computer lab at my university was swarming with liberal arts majors checking their email. About half a decade after I received my BS, MySpace was born, opening up the internet to even more casual users. Blogging became a big thing. A few years on, MySpace was eclipsed by Facebook and Twitter. I barely used them for a while, but one day in 2008 I turned around and noticed that everyone I knew had a significant amount of content on there. So I became an enthusiastic Facebook user. This year I’ve finally decided to get more active on Twitter too.  (Follow me, @RussellGlasser, if you like.)

Anyway, this whole thing seems to have gone hand in hand with the reality TV phenomenon.  People not only expect to get fifteen minutes of fame, as per Andy Warhol, but they seem to presume that they’ll get a low level of attention at all times.  You watch a movie, you write a two sentence review of it, and people react to what you said immediately.  Sometimes you get into flame wars, and sometimes your friends love and praise your insight.  It’s kind of addicting.

Meanwhile, YouTube can make somebody a TV star for a few minutes or longer — randomly, capriciously, but often in an incredibly global way.  That Gangnam Style song is topping the charts in 30 countries, and it’s a major victory for the Korean music industry.  This is thanks in no small part to the ability of people to spread foreign content they like as easily as emailing a link to their friends.  The video has over a BILLION HITS on YouTube.

And someday it will have — dare I say it? — MILLIONS.

So I’m assuming that PSY is grateful for social media, that’s all I’m saying.

You don’t have to be a big media backed star to get famous, but it’s hard to predict exactly what will make you famous. A decent amateur video on Funny Or Die may be seen by more people than a big screen comedy that flops.  There’s now a whole industry of TV shows in the mold of Pop Idol / American Idol that are selling the idea of yanking schmucks off the street and making them famous, although they can be famous because they’re talented or famous because they really, really, REALLY suck.

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