How do things get popular on the internet?

I’ve created the graph below to help explain the phenomenon.

The answer, put simply, is nerds.

The word nerd gets a bad rap. Basically, anyone who frequents a social news site is a nerd. Nerd just means that you are tech-savvy and internet-literate. I’m proud to be a nerd. Nerds have first-dibs on information, and information is power.

In the graph, coolness is a reference to when you are laughing at the joke. Have you heard the joke before, did you get the joke right as the punchline was delivered, or did you laugh once the comedian left the stage?.

The graph shows that nerds are the ones telling the jokes.

David After Dentist: A Case Study

Let’s take a quick look at a real-life example of this model: David After Dentist.
You can watch the video here.

DISCOVERY
David’s father uploads the video on YouTube on January 30, 2009.

SOCIAL NEWS
Video is picked up on Digg on February 4. It gets 10,000+ diggs.

FACEBOOK
Social news site users then pass it on to the general population through instant messages, Facebook walls, emails. It gets talked about at coffee breaks everywhere, Did you see that video of the kid after the dentist?

MAINSTREAM NEWS
Wall Street Journal writes about the video on February 9. Time Magazine does an article on the video on February 11.

SOCCER MOMS
On March 26, The Today Show interviews the family who made the video.

Why Nerds are so important

For every David After Dentist, there are a million non-starters that never even come close to pop culture stardom; they get filtered out during the Social News stage. Nerds whittle away all the meh content and highlight the gems. When it comes to the internet and user-generated content, nerds are the gatekeepers.

In previous generations, the ones doing the content filtering were mostly corporations and Big Media. With Gen Y and its connectedness, that influence has trickled down and spread out. Social news and networking sites have democratized the process, making Generation Y the first generation where broadcasters can actually be the last to hear about newsworthy items.

The other day, I wandered into a 7/11 wanting chocolate. I didn’t know which candybar I wanted, I hadn’t decided. And so I stood there, in a colourful aisle surrounded by candy and snacks, looking at boxes and boxes of chocolate bars, mulling over my decision. I surveyed all the screaming colours and smiling cartoons, eventually deciding that I wanted a Kit-Kat.

As I was reaching for the candybar, I was blindsided with a flash of introspection. Out of all the options, why was I picking Kit-Kat?

It was as if all the candybars in that 7/11 were a million tiny marketing execs, dressed in suits in their candybar colours, all yelling at the top of their lungs, clamouring for attention like stockbrokers right before the closing bell. As my hand drew closer, the tiny red marketing men of Kit-Kat cheered and claimed victory, the losers threw a tantrum, moaned, and went back into a huddle to figure out how to yell louder at the next guy who comes down the aisle.

Consumers are horribly undermatched

So much time, energy and money is spent in our society to funnel consumer behaviour into a desired course of action. People devote entire careers to figuring out how to make people buy their candybars. Marketers are in meetings, watching people in fake shopping labs, staying late at work away from their families, so that they can learn how to make strangers think that Axe Bodyspray will increase their virility or that McDonald’s is an essential part of every childhood.

I became horribly sick at the thought that I was starting a career where my sole purpose would be to make people believe that they can’t live without Brand X.

It was in this moment that I realized marketing is evil. Whenever you step into a grocery store aisle, your wits are against the wits of millions of Marketers, armed with consumer tracking studies and pilot tests and multi-city research and loads and loads of statistics.

Soulless Commerce

Manipulation and fakery of the finest details takes place on a daily basis so that Jane and Joe Consumer will pick Brand X.

I thought about all the 30-second ads on TV, and all of the focus groups, rewrites and reshoots that go into them in an effort to exert maximum consumer influence.

I thought about all the billboards and posters on the street and in magazines and how incredibly manufactured it all was, how the models in the pictures were hand-picked from thousands, then tweaked and photoshopped, optimizing appeal for the target audience.

I thought about the creeping, unstoppable march of marketing into our personal lives, and how any blank crevasse of public domain is being claimed under the flag of Advertising. Those miniature yelling ad execs are not just in our grocery aisles, they’re on our gas pumps, in our tv shows, and even on our parking stripes.

I thought about how powerful brands have become, from Nelly naming his daughter Chanel to basketball teams named Burger King Whoppers.

I thought about how nothing is authentic anymore. Marketing has reduced everything to design-by-focus-group and popular culture is usurped to increase Brand Awareness and ROI. Everything wonderful and real became reduced to soulless statistics.

All I wanted was some damn chocolate and instead I got depressed about my career. I needed to take a step back.

The Necessary Evil

Marketing is a field of mercenary psychologists. We are people who are continually trying to figure out what makes consumers tick, so we can get more money. I thought: Is that really so bad? Isn’t that the essence of business?

Marketing is inevitable. There will always be competition and there will always be a need to prove your worth in relation to competitors.

Farmers in tribal villages, fourth graders battling for class president and entrepreneurs seeking funding all rely on marketing. The American health care debate is a fierce battleground of ideologies, and both sides need marketing. Marketing answers the consumer question: Why should I pay any attention to you?

If I lived in complete isolation from media my entire life and wandered into 7/11 looking for chocolate, I, as a consumer, will still use marketing to guide my decision. I may not have been exposed to ads, posters and billboards for the candybars, but I would evaluate packaging…shape…name…price… to make a choice. All of that is marketing.

The Root of Evil

The ugliness of Marketing is that it cheapens so many things, all for an extra dollar. Remember Chocolate Rain? Marketing execs found something that was popular, so they decided to throw money at Tay Zonday and make Cherry Chocolate Rain:

At 8 million views, I’m sure it achieved Coke’s marketing objectives. But there is something disheartening about taking something organic and authentic and slapping brand names all over it.

Gen Y and the Push-Pull

Marketing works when an intersection exists where the brands push and the consumer pulls. Generation Y is living in a time where for the first time, the consumer can control the corporate push. Tivo and Adblock are testaments to this ability.

This selective screening just causes brands and Marketers to yell even louder, causing an escalating arms race between push and pull. This is a strange battle because ultimately marketers and consumers need each other.

Is Marketing Evil?

Is marketing evil? Absolutely, but only in the same way that the gun or the printing press is evil. It is a tool that takes whatever form its owner wants it to take. Power is afforded to whoever uses it.

As the threshold of marketing and corporatization pushes deeper into our personal lives, the only hope I can have is that in my lifetime, I don’t see parents selling naming rights for their children to GoldenPalace.

photos by s2art, marketingfacts

Gen X-ers had a little more fun. They could’ve emailed each other over 28.8 or used their pagers to send 1-sentence messages back and forth.

Here’s what Generation Y uses to stay in touch.

To an outsider, it can be a confusing to understand how Gen Y uses those channels just to talk to each other. After all, Boomers just had three channels and they made friends just fine.

To put things in context, here’s what my communication habits are like and how I use the above.

Looking at that chart makes me envy my father’s generation. They didn’t have to worry about drunk texts. Or having personal information all over the internet.

Honourable mentions for Blackberry PINs and Twitter.

I don’t think Gen Y has an appreciation of the permanence of the internet. Once you upload a piece of your life — a blog post, a picture, a video of your cat dancing on YouTube — it’s online FOREVER. I’ve had a Facebook account for about 3 years now, and it only recently dawned on me that there are pictures of me that I’ll never be able to really delete, as they’re stored in a server farm, in a datacenter somewhere, backed up several times over several hard drives, housed in a building guarded with security and alarms. Mark Zuckerberg owns those pictures as much as I do.

The Three Horsemen of the Apocalypse

Dear reader, we have probably never met…but you can write my obituary. All you need is the login information for the sites that I use.

Let’s say you got your hands on my Google login. You would learn a ridiculous amount of information about me:

• GMail: who I know and what we talk about
• Google Search: things I’ve thought about and looked for
• Google Maps: where I’ve been
• Google Calendar: a detailed list of what I’ve been doing in the past year, complete with date and location

You could also have the following if you accessed my Facebook:

• Wall and Messages: conversations with people I know
• Photos: evidence of what I’ve done, where I’ve been and with who
• Events: date and location of events I’ve attended (can cross-reference with Photos)
• Relationship Status: who I’ve been involved with, the type of relationship and for how long
• Personal info: birthday, interests, activities, education, work history

Combine my Facebook data with my Google data and forget the obituary, you have enough to write a small autobiography complete with pictures and memorable quotes from friends.

the girl Riot recently got me thinking about signing up for Twitter, and in the process, made me realize the following information about me could be publicly available:

• What I’m thinking
• What I just did
• Where I am
• What I am going to do

Google and Facebook already have an intimate detail of my life up to the present. Twitter kicks things into overdrive and brings strangers into this surreal fifth dimension by letting them inside my mind, as they can read about what I’m thinking about to the second.

Get Over Yourself, Dave

I was one of those people who were vehemently anti-Facebook when it first became available. Like all anti-Facebook people, I eventually learned that resistance was futile and got an account.

My capitulation was fortunate, as Facebook has tremendous value in my social life. I quickly got over the hesitation of posting pictures and writing messages that could be seen by everyone. Once I realized that no, Nigerian scammers weren’t going to somehow use that info to scam my bank account, and no, my body parts weren’t going to be secretly harvested while I was asleep, I became more comfortable using Facebook.

It’s a weird lesson Gen Y is learning. Trade in your privacy for really cool social toys. Sooner or later, there’ll be no such thing as a private life, and things that rely on mystery will be dead. I am a firm believer that blind dates and high school reunions will cease to exist.

Despite all this, I’m giving Twitter a shot. I figure that as long as I make sure my boss doesn’t see my tweets while I’m supposed to be home with the flu, I should be ok.

My mind was too busy being shell-shocked at the concept of how quickly time passes to think of the obligatory Viagra joke.

Nineteen-ninety-eight. Viagra was still a fresh late-night punchline, 9/11 was nonexistent and I was in the middle of my formative teenage years. Along with the rest of Generation Y. The milestone events we saw in the media then provide the backstory to what we see and read about today.

Let’s take a look at what the world looked like in 1998.

There was no Google
Google was founded September 7, 1998. How did I ever live without having the world at my fingertips? I’m sure I’m not the only one who hops on Google whenever they want to randomly look something up, or to settle a bet.

My Heart Will Go On
One of the blessings of MP3 players is that you can tune out really obnoxious, overplayed songs. Back then, lucky for you if you happened to be walking around with a CD player, a MiniDisc, or even a Walkman, but they weren’t nearly as ubiquitous as iPods are today.

I did not…have…sexual…relations…
The Clinton sex scandal. Ten years ago, Americans had a president with a 73% approval rate, despite being impeached. Today, they have one with 31%. Looks like Dubya needs to find some extramarital nookie.
And who would’ve thought the female cuckold would be running for prez?

Friends, Not LC and the Gang
The aspirational TV show of twentysomethings in the nineties was undeniably NBC’s Friends, a group of friends living cool lives and enjoying casual relationships in the big city, with the occasional inter-group drama. Today, we have The Hills, a show about a group of friends living cool lives and enjoying casual relationships in the big city, with the occasional inter-group drama.
And they say there’s no originality left on TV.

McGwire and Sosa
The Roger Maris chase brought baseball back in the spotlight. I’ll admit, this drew me in, big time. I hated baseball until I started following The Chase, and even today I’m still a casual baseball-watcher. It’s too bad that it turns out everyone was mixing ‘roids in their Wheaties.

Windows 98 and 56k
Windows 98 was a smash hit and hinted at the slow, inevitable approach of computing dominance in our lives. The internet was starting to steamroll and the pre-dot-com-bubble era was an exciting time for everyone in tech. Today, everyone is putting their lives online, everyone has an email address, websites exist for virtually every subject, and people everywhere can’t live without their crackberries.

Ginger Snaps
The Spice Girls were at their peak, influencing young females to dress provocatively and sing along to songs about sexual intercourse (I remember my then 6-year-old neighbour singing along to “2 Become 1″ and my being really, really creeped out).
Geri then leaves, starting the slow demise of the group’s popularity. Lucky for them, they reunite ten years later and make an obscene amount of cash on their tour.

Sex and the City, Round 1
SATC debuts, inviting Gen Y females everywhere to emulate women who view sex as fodder for weekly gossip with their girlfriends (thank you, SATC). Millennial teenager girls also learn a lot of one-liners and tricks to keep guys on their toes (eff you, SATC).
Like the Spice Girls, SATC “reunites” ten years later and wishes to make an obscene amount of cash with a movie.

Postscript: Starbucks somehow gets a nod for being a cool place to do work.

The New Reality
Reality shows were gearing up. A&E Biography, True Hollywood Story, Behind The Music, Blind Date were constantly on the air. Survivor would not hit the airwaves 2 years later, but the public had clearly developed an appetite for reality shows. Fast forward to today, and you have the channels dedicated to reality TV, as well as TMZ and Perez Hilton, media which are essentially blatant paparazzi porno.

These are the things that my generation will joke about when we’re 30, 40, 50 years old, and beyond. Looking back on these things, it looks like technology and sexual liberalism will be the hallmarks of Generation Y.

Which is fitting, I guess. After all, we’re the generation that takes pictures and videos of each other while having sex, post them online, then get outed when someone types our names in on Google.

Photo props to normanack.

Some Gen Y-ers are forming communities to celebrate anorexia (pro-ana websites). Pro-ana people have even coined their own buzzword for the lifestyle, calling it thinspiration (thinspo for short). Videos are shared on YouTube, blogs are plentiful and discussion forums are only a search away.

I was amazed when I came across the NYT blog linked above. In previous generations, pro-ana people could not assemble so easily and empower themselves. Today, they can gather online and have open and honest dialogues with each other. Parents and guidance counselors be damned, they have found people who like them and understand them. Together, they can celebrate their lifestyle proudly.

I like how pro-anas can share their experiences and advice to help each other. The part that scares me is that oftentimes this advice is how to harm yourself quicker and easier.

With great power comes great responsibility.

photo from [C]appry

After snapping a particularly good photo, I showed a friend my work on the preview screen on my camera. The next thing I heard:

Great pic! That’s profile-picture-worthy!

I’d heard this before, but never gave it much thought. However, since I was the DD last night, I had the opportunity to take a step back and think about what that meant.

Profile pictures and the ideal self
Your ideal self is who you you want to be. It’s the way you want to be remembered, the way you would want to be described if your name was going to be passed on in legend. Contrast this with the real self, which is the way you actually are. Imagine describing yourself without hiding or embellishing anything, and then having an accounting firm objectively verify your description.

Profile pictures — and your profile pages, for that matter — are a reflection of your ideal self. The details you choose to fill out your interests, favorite artists list, your “about me” section …these are manifestations of the way you want people to perceive you.

So a profile pic is “Facebook worthy” when it aligns with the way you want to be viewed. Your picture is much more than a photo to identify you; if this were the case, we’d scan our driver’s license pics and never change it. That would be broadcasting your real self, and nobody wants to do that.

Profile pictures are vital pieces of our online identities since they can influence others’ perceptions of who we are. It’s one of the many ways we Gen Y-ers manage our reputations.

…bar nights are so much more intellectual when you’re a DD.

I was having a convo about P2P with a Gen X friend who can’t bring herself to download music. It’s just something she can’t do; whenever she considers about doing it, guilt takes over and she feels that something is inherently wrong with it . It’s guess it’s like the feeling I get when I think about trying to watch Fox News.

To satisfy her music fix, an exchange of money has to take place. She has to go to a record store, Amazon or iTunes so she can sleep at night.

Not me. Here’s how music gets on my computer/iPod:

1. I hear about music. The primary way I discover music is through friends who tell me that I have to listen to an artist. If I’m away from my laptop, I take a mental note or input it on my phone so I can follow up later.
2. I sample it somewhere first. Even though all it takes is a couple of clicks to get an entire album (or in some cases, entire discographies), I still want to see if it’s worth my time. I’ll head to YouTube to check out a few tracks, or use a service like Songerize.
3. P2P. If I like it enough, I’ll head over to the P2P site of choice and download.

If I’m already online when I hear about the artist, this process takes maybe 5-10 minutes from recommendation to download. I’m willing to bet a lot of Gen Y downloaders follow these three steps.

I miss the process of buying CDs. Downloading takes all the mystery and excitement out of stepping in a music store and thinking about the potential of awesomeness that awaits you. I miss swearing at the shrinkwrap that refused to come off, I miss playing the CD and hoping track one would blow me away and I miss the weird plastic smell of the album booklet.

In the time it took for my friend to hem and haw about how downloading music relates to her moral compass, I’ve already seen a few music videos, downloaded an album or two, and reminisced about the good old days.

Antonella Barba from American Idol, Disney’s Vanessa Hudgens and “Hannah Montana” Miley Cyrus. Celebrities designed to be wholesome, talented role models. Celebrities whose reputations were tainted by having sexually explicit material from their past leak to the media.

It’s a sign that the tides of sexual attitudes are changing. Indiscretions are willingly being captured. In fact, some sex scandals are entirely manufactured with the intent of drumming up PR (why, Screech, why?).

Us normal, every day folk may not have our dirty laundry aired on Entertainment Tonight — but we’re choosing to put last weekend’s bar shenanigans and other potentially incriminating pictures on Facebook. It’s the inevitable inflation of sexual message thresholds that occurs in every generation.

The stakes are raised with every generation. Some Boomers grew up to the sight of Elvis’ hips being censored. My kids won’t even blink at a sex tape being released.

Unfortunately, you and I have been gravely misled.

Some researcher, somewhere, decreed that since Gen Y grew up with advertising, they have grown thick-skinned to marketing. This made sense to journalists and media agencies everywhere, and thus began the wave of articles about how Gen Y was some kind of superintelligent consumer. These consumers are apparently like an antibiotic-resistant viral strain. Substitute where needed to make that analogy work.

Exposure does not make you an expert
I moved to Canada from the Philippines when I was ten. One of the first ads I saw on Canadian soil was in Pearson Airport, where a Toronto Maple Leafs player was posing in a “got milk?” poster. Hockey, I would soon find, was everywhere. Someone was always talking about it, every third commercial seemed to relate to it and my street was always home to pickup hockey.

The mere exposure to hockey did not make me hockey-savvy. I knew that whoever had more goals won the game, but I didn’t know anything about the strategy or tactics involved. I knew that Doug Gilmour was one of our best players, but I didn’t know what he did that made him “the best”. All I knew was that my friends liked him, so I also liked him.

Similarly, if someone grows up surrounded by advertising, does that make them advertising-savvy? Do they know the psychological tactics involved, the purpose of brand messages, and all the work that goes into making an ad say “you need to own this product“?

Generation Y is a bunch of marketing suckers
Gen Y’s lifelong exposure to media hasn’t “thickened their skin” to marketing. Lifelong exposure makes them accept advertising as a normal part of their lives. We were introduced to brands so early in life that they’ve contributed to large parts of our childhood. This exposure has taught us that it’s normal to become emotionally attached to brands. Hell, just writing about my childhood reminds me of McDonald’s Playplace and Happy Meals.

As advertising continues to slowly permeate every piece of our lives, kids are implicitly being raised by corporate logos and “brand experiences”. My two-year old nephew can’t even pronounce his own name, but whenever someone mentions “Toys R Us” he loses his mind.

The archetypes and values of this generation are embedded in commercials, slogans and marketing. Young, aspiring golfers don’t look up to Tiger Woods. They look up to Tiger Woods as sponsored by Nike.