from Clay Shirky's newsletter: Networks, Economics, and Culture
The Three Phase Reaction to BlackPeopleLoveUs.com
Jonah Perretti, professional meme-hacker (no, really), launched
dedicated to the earnest expression of a white liberal couple's
acceptance by their black friends. As usual with Jonah (who brought
you the "Nike/Sweatshop" meme of a year or so ago), the entire thing
is done with a straight face.
What interested me about it was that the site made not one but two
first was a few weeks ago, when the blogosphere discovered it, and the
second was this week, shortly after the NY Times Style section in the
Sunday paper ran a story on it.
This is a sort of amplifier/echo chamber effect, where the first
blogdex wave amplified the signal enough to attract the attention of
the mainstream media, who in turn legitimated and publicized it in a
better fashion than the blogosphere itself could (as well as
legitimizing it for other outlets, such as NPR, who interviewed the
Perretti's this week.) This was followed by an echo chamber effect,
where a second wave of blogs posted it _because_ it appeared in the
Times.
I wonder if this is the beginning of a stable three-phase pattern: the
early weblog entries act as a kind of weak-signal detector, amplifying
a few signals out of the many, followed by some mainstream publication
lifting the work out of the blogosphere and broadcasting it widely,
followed by further by blogs that follow mainstream media rather than
leading it.
And if so, I wonder if it would be possible to find signature news
stories where there are both leading and trailing blogs (the current
debate on John Poindexter's 'Total Information Awareness" DARPA
program springs to mind), and I wonder if there is a group of blogs
that are consistently in the leading group? [ shirky.com]
10:19:43 AM 
|
