Flash: Notoriety, Celebrity and Obscurity

In the attention economy, where media notice is a form of currency, we are beginning to ascertain some trends that speak to the impermanence of such achievements. And one of them is that fame is even more fleeting in cyberspace than it is in the physical world.

You can have tangible and intangible celebrity separately, each without the other, though the two are more often connected. Factors reminiscent of Einstein, energy and speed, have become ascendant, though probably not in the way that his theory of relativity posited.

The challenge is that notoriety - or even notice - can be achieved on a truly global scale, but then lost almost immediately. This brings into play Einstein's third variable, mass. The sheer of volume of noise in the system (only some of which will be information to most individuals)means that the new is constantly pushing out the old, while the rapidity and quantity cause us to acknowledge only fragmentary bits of it. In a financial sense, high frequency trading has become a perfect metaphor for our times because vast sums can be wagered and won on infinitesimal sums of data, many moving too quickly across the screen to be noted by mere humans.

For business, this means that care on both ends is warranted. Today's embarrassment can be forgotten tomorrow. But the impact can be greater than might appear possible - and that can have implications for the future. JL

Brian Stelter reports in the New York Times:

I don’t remember how old I was when I first climbed up to the roof of my family’s home in suburban Maryland. Eleven, maybe? Twelve? But I do remember what I saw up there. It was the night of the Fourth of July, and it was turning dark enough for the fireworks.

Today, this is what our news culture looks like to consumers: individual bursts of light that appear out of nowhere and disappear just as fast.
What else can we call a story that generates 100 million views on YouTube in a matter of days, garners outrage among young people across the country and spurs several resolutions in Congress — and then practically vanishes?

The YouTube views were for a video produced by Invisible Children, a small nonprofit group that was trying to draw attention to Joseph Kony, the head of the Lord’s Resistance Army, an African guerrilla group that has mounted attacks against civilians for more than 20 years. But his name probably needs no explanation now. “KONY 2012,” as the video was dubbed, became an international news sensation in early March, “rocketing across Twitter and Facebook at a pace rarely seen for any video, let alone a half-hour film about a distant conflict in Central Africa,” as The New York Times put it in a front-page article on March 9.

The video succeeded in making Mr. Kony famous, which was the first of the group’s stated goals. Maybe a year from now he’ll be arrested, as the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, has vowed. “Now we have the citizens of the world pushing for that, and that is helping a lot,” he told The Associated Press earlier this month. “It will be the end of the Joseph Kony crimes.”

But in the United States, at least, Mr. Kony is no longer in the news or on Twitter’s ever-refreshing list of trending topics.

Fireworks like “KONY 2012” burn more brightly than they would have in the past, but for better or worse, they tend to be extinguished faster than ever, too. Just ask Jeremy Lin, who’s no longer a source of “Linsanity,” or Karen Handel, who’s no longer a top official at the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation, or Michele Bachmann, no longer a presidential candidate. Or Rick Perry. Or Herman Cain. (If you can remember why they were newsworthy at all.)

In a few days, ask Hilary Rosen, whose comments about Ann Romney sparked a brief but furious “mommy war” last week.

These flash-in-the-pan episodes have long been evident in the entertainment universe. The breakup of a marriage like Kim Kardashian’s or the death of a superstar like Whitney Houston prompts instant heehawing and told-ya-so-ing, and a month later we’re hard-pressed to remember that it happened at all.

But now, the same overreactions happen with political news — when Sarah Palin hints again at running for president or Rush Limbaugh insults a law student on the radio.

Except now, instead of asking “Where were you” when a news story flashes before us like a firework, we ask, “Who told you?”

Users of social networking Web sites flit from one story to another, attracted by what their friends are saying and what the omnipresent lists of trending topics are stressing. There’s a law that might harm the Internet! Click. Beyoncé’s having a baby! Click. There’s pink slime in our hamburger meat! Click. You can almost hear the shells bursting in the nighttime sky.

“The news itself has become so ubiquitous, so constant that our eyes only pop out when a really shiny object comes flowing down the river,” said Jim Bankoff, the head of Vox Media, which operates the sports Web site SB Nation and the technology site The Verge. “People don’t just consume it, they ‘like’ it, retweet and e-mail it. All this sharing leads to more sharing, which sets off a trend, which sparks more coverage.”

Sometimes this can be distracting; sometimes, even suffocating. And yet we seem to gain something from it — a common online conversation. A common ground. Or at the very least, a currency for jokes.

AND then, just as suddenly, we switch over to the next big story.

Google search rankings, video view records and Twitter trending topics tell users when the crowd has moved on. Then the joke becomes: “Kony who?”

Of the 7.1 million page views of Wikipedia’s article on Mr. Kony so far this year, 5 million were racked up in the three days when the video was a hot topic online. Now it’s viewed fewer than 15,000 times a day.

Perhaps this flitting from story to story also reflects the sense of accomplishment Web users feel when we think action has been taken against the day’s injustice. Certainly, there was celebration online when Netflix reversed itself on its plan to break up streaming and DVD services. And there was celebration among Mr. Limbaugh’s critics, too, every time an advertiser distanced itself from his show.

It may be true when it comes to more serious subjects as well, like Mr. Kony’s decades of brutality. Vivian Schiller, the chief digital officer for NBC News (and a former executive at The New York Times Company) credits some of the intensity of the news cycle to both the access to social media and “the sense of empowerment that social media has generated.”

The February shooting of Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old in Sanford, Fla., may have never received national media attention were it not for the initial bursts of Twitter and Facebook buzz.

The same is probably true of Mr. Kony, who is believed to be in hiding in Central Africa. Two weeks after “KONY 2012” was released, I asked a group of 12 students at the University of Memphis how many knew who Mr. Kony was. Eleven students immediately raised their hands — and then the 12th student meekly raised his hand, too, probably out of fear of being an outcast. Four said they had watched the video in its entirely. Yet none of them had heard anything about Mr. Kony or his army in the days since.

Some of the students had also heard about another viral video — this one courtesy of TMZ, showing the Invisible Children co-founder Jason Russell pacing a San Diego street, unclothed, in what the media described as a breakdown. It ignited no new burst of Kony coverage, however. Traffic for the “KONY 2012” video barely budged.

The group called its next video “Part II — Beyond Famous.” Released on April 4, the video defended the group against critics and previewed plans for a night of action on April 20. It has been viewed over 1.6 million times — impressive on its own, but a mere bottle rocket compared to the fireworks a month earlier. The group had its moment — and now the dazzling flashes of light are elsewhere.

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