I was browsing through the articles at Salon, which the start of spring semester has kept me from visiting, and via Alex Pareene's almost obligatory takedown of David Brooks's tribute to Jeremy Lin (a pro athlete is a devout Christian -- how unusual) I followed a link to an interesting piece by Andrew Leonard, Jeremy Lin’s social media fast break. What made me open a diary page was his contention that the hype, which Occam's razor suggests should be explained by the Madison Square Garden effect, isn't that at all:
Jeremy Lin is the latest example of how our socially-mediated, always-on world can churn any data point, any outrage, any act of heroism or moment of despair into a full-scale world-wide frenzy in less time than it took me to write this sentence.
In short, he says, social media is now driving the mainstream media. Interesting take, and now we get to wonder if this could be what Andy Warhol meant when he said "In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes." More below.
If this isn't a paean to social media I don't know what it is:
We’ve seen this before. The same forces — social media, digital publishing tools, smartphone ubiquity — that are giving us Linsanity just blitzkrieged the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure Foundation. They torpedoed Hollywood’s attempt to force SOPA and PIPA through Congress and blew up Bank of America’s plan to charge a $5 fee for debit card use. They fueled the Occupy Wall Street movement, magnified every Tebow prostration before God into a worldwide religious orgy and are ever-more ready to pounce on any misstep by a Mitt Romney or a Newt Gingrich and explode it into an instant political crisis.
We really helped this, fellow Kossacks. Susan G. Komen/Planned Parenthood? Check. SOPA and PIPA? Check. #Occupy? Damn, didn't we play a major part in blowing it up? Mitt and Newt's missteps? Check, check, check. And that's before we share, facebook or retweet stuff. Leonard is REALLY hot for the twittersphere, especially as it relates to the two major events for Asian Americans this week:
It’s a tricky, tricky world. We get pissed off when we learn that an HTML jockey has labeled a Chinese woman “yellowgirl” [code for the Hoekstra ad] but we grin when see Lin dubbed “yellow mamba.” Or maybe not; maybe we get mad at both. The tweet-stream moves too fast too tell for sure. It’s just one non-stop improv jazz riff frenzy.
No, it's not about the improbable (because of racism) career of Jeremy Lin, who was just human tonight, and may or may not have staying power. It's about the nature of celebrity, and the fact that the balance between the old media and the new media may have changed irretrievably while we were blogging or tweeting or updating our status on facebook. All those news people on twitter? That's research now, and it's what will appear in your morning newspaper tomorrow.
and FINALLY, the power of New York to control the content of news might be over. Probably not, but its 60 year reign as media capital of the world might have to be shared with the world at large.