Word: viral
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There are two kinds of people in this world: those who have never heard of the Swedish folk-rock band Peter, Bjorn and John; and those who already find their 2006 hit single "Young Folks" incredibly passé. Today's viral culture moves from one niche or fad to another with such fleeting attention that bands, people, websites, video clips - basically, anything made popular by the Internet - can rocket from nothing to everything and back again within months...
...book And Then There's This, Harper's senior editor Bill Wasik tracks Web fads, viral marketing campaigns and the flash-mob phenomenon - which Wasik himself created - to determine just how little staying power trends have when faced with our fractured, hyperactive attention spans. Wasik talks to TIME about his findings, and why he can't stop looking at his RSS reader. (Read about how the Internet changed music...
...which quietly appeared in February as part of a viral campaign, has attracted little notice thus far, but because it comes from a highly respected American brand, it seems to mark some kind of cultural tipping point, where pornography has soaked so far into the fabric of mainstream culture that it's no longer seen as a stain. The phenomenon, known as porn creep, is also evident in ads from such companies as American Apparel, Carl's Jr. and Quiznos. This is a family website, so you can Google those ads on your own. (See the best and worst Super...
...proliferation of communication-gadgets-cum-appendages has profoundly increased the speed at which we all operate. With the aid of our ubiquitous laptops and cell phones, the viral circulation rate of cultural memes never ceases to amaze (within four days, no less than 21 million viewers had paid witness to Susan Boyle’s on-stage coup d’état). The more fundamental change, however, has come in the content, volume, and sources from which we glean our information. The scope and depth of answerable academic questions has broadened dramatically with the advent of digitized databases...
Read "That Viral Thing: Play Him Off, Keyboard...