Social Media According to Warhol

My brother Darryl is an avid tennis player. In fact, he prefers to consider himself a tennis player who works in IT to pay the bills. With a 4.0-4.5 rating, and several tournaments under his belt, very few could dispute the claim. For the sake of contrast, I'm a software engineer who enjoys playing soccer; I don't dare delude myself into thinking otherwise... but I digress. Darryl recently shot a customer commercial for Babolat - his preferred brand of racket - featuring himself on a practice court, and invited friends and family to the Youtube debut to generate a buzz. Watching the video of my brother on a global media sharing site brought to mind instantly Andy Warhol's famous 1960s prediction that everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.

To be clear, Warhol's statement was not so much an indictment of broadcast media, but a commentary on the fleeting nature of celebrity, and the tendency for the object of media frenzy to quickly loose luster when the attention of the masses is exhausted. A quick stroll down memory lane to the likes of MC Hammer, Star Wars Kid, and Chris Crocker (that "leave Britney [Spear] alone" guy) serve as reminders of this point.

That said, I have to believe that if Andy were alive today, faced with the awesome pervasiveness of online social media, his only words with be, "I told you so." Advances in communications, computing and software platforms such as Web 2.0 (soon to be Web 3.0 coming to an Internet near YOU!) are a trifecta converging to turn an ever shinking world into a shinking and collaborative one. The result is what marketing expert Seth Godin, author of the book Tribes, considers a major paradigm shift. In this shift, we are inevitably witnessing the fall of broadcast media, in which information is disseminated unidirectionally from an authority with the money to pay for airtime to subscribers; it's replacement is the highly collaborative, interactive Internet medium in which groups freely communicate amongst themselves. The new era brings the potential for all of us to be hyped to a level of fame unmatched by any common man in human history. Judging from the hideous death befalling one newspaper after another in America, I would say the transition couldn't come fast enough.

But the birth of the new order comes not without its own labor pains. Observe the case of the American woman who recently found her Facebook photo had been stolen, and was being used in an advertisement for a grocery store in Czech Republic. We can all agree she was fortunate. I don't consider myself a pervert, but I can think of far more sinister scenarios that did't get played out... yet. And eventhough the 2008 campaign was the first in American history in which regular citizens in mass were able to submit debate video questions over the Internet, the countless responses to Chris Crocker's "Leave Britney Alone!" Youtube video only serves to prove that one made instantly famous can, in equally short order, become infamous.

But these are lessons and heartbreaks for another day. For now, I'll simply take pride in my brother doing what he was born to do, in front of the world to see, without commercial interruption. If you don't see the video embed below, let me know and I'll fix it. If you see it and don't watch, I'll hunt you down and kill you like the worthless vermin you are.

And now, my shameless plug...