Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Your 15 minutes is 15 seconds: Susan Boyle Edition

Fascinating article by Henry Jenkins about the Susan Boyle phenomenon and her meteoric flash to fame.

(For those of you who haven't seen Boyle's video: click here)

More interesting to me is Jenkins' dissection of the relationship between ownership and content in the Internet age. A person might come across an article or video like the ones linked above and do a myriad of things with it: share, save, comment, etc. With one YouTube video you can say 'I love you' to one person or 'You remind me of this jackass' to another.

And very quickly this video of Susan Boyle's ascendancy isn't about her at all, it's about two people sharing an experience through her video. Just as music as become a more personal medium with the advent of albums and iPods, the Internet allows us to personalize our interactions with our culture, media, and society at large.

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