This isn’t a blog post to criticize the video posted above; rather, using this video, I would like to illustrate a point I have been wanting to address about a trend I have observed in the social media world nowadays.
There has been much criticism toward this music video created by Ark Music Factory, an independent record label based in Los Angeles, for their bad taste in song writing and music making. When this video was first featured by a couple of YouTube celebrities a while ago, it started receiving attention; it took only one day to jump from 2.2 million to over 6 million views as of today. In other words, it has gone “viral”–just like that.
And this is only one of the plenty of examples of (distasteful) things that had gone viral at a rapid speed. A recent one: Groupon’s poor Superbowl 2011 commercial.
People are curious and people love to share. Information is available at almost any time, anywhere.
Sometimes, it is scary to think about the power of social media, the high level of interaction between individuals using social media, and the speed at which information is now shared with others. Information now travels at the speed of who-knows-how-many light-years per second, far exceeding what we used to be amazed at back in the days when we simply had “Internet” and when we were impressed by news on the TV and the radio.