The Power of Social Media
March 23rd, 2011 • Uncategorized
As I was going throughsome of my classmates blogs I was’t surprised to find an article on Sean McNulty’s blog about Rebecca Black. In about the span of two weeks Rebecca has gone from an unknown singer with mediocre (very mediocre) talent, to an internet sensation. All of this was due to her music video entitled Friday, which is currently zeroing in on 40 million views on YouTube. This video has been a topic of discussion across news stations, Facebook, Rebecca was a trending topic on Twitter and the single itself is now available on Itunes. In spite of all the attention that the video has received, the video itself is exeptionally bad. Rebecca sings lyrics that could have been written by fourth grader in a nasal autotuned voice that is almost painful to listen to. This prompts the question, if the song is so awful why have so many people seen it? And why am I writing a blog about it? That is all explained by the power of social media and the internet. The video was produced by Ark Music Factory, which was an unknown, low budget music producing company and from what I can see got zero promotion other than being posted on the company’s website and YouTube. I’m not exactly sure who discovered the video, I just remember seeing it posted on my Facebook one day, then about a day later it was everywhere. I assume that the video just spread exponentially across social media sources like Facebook and Twitter to the point where most people with a computer had seen it. This goes to show how powerful networks like Facebook and Twitter are at dispersing information. Unfortunately for Rebecca, it wasn’t due to her lyrical content and vocal ability, it was due to an audacious lack of it.