Even back in the 1990s, when the internet was young and today’s interns were yesterday’s zygotes, people liked looking at cat videos. The internet did not invent this phenomenon. But they used to be much, much harder to find.
Instead of aiming to have the most widely-shared footage, back then, you put a lot of effort into ferreting out what you wanted to enjoy – music taped off the radio, ’zines, one-off screenings of movies that were long out of theaters. Communities sprang up around people who sought out the same obscure stuff. If you came of age during this time, it can be really weird to wake up and see that suddenly, in the same instant, everyone you know is watching the same video of dancing chicken ladies.
My thing, personally, was collecting sketch comedy shows on VHS – I had all four seasons of MTV’s The State plus the CBS Halloween special on badly-redubbed videos bought off eBay. So my first thought, when envisioning the spread of culture in Olden Times, is invariably the fake advertisement for the “Underground Tape Railroad” from HBO’s cult comedy hit Mr Show with Bob and David. It opens with college students gleefully listening to an audiotape of a botched kidnapping – a tape that one girl says she got from her father, who’s a cop. Everyone loves underground recordings, says the voiceover, but “you always have to know someone” to get access to this kind of comedy gold. The Underground Tape Railroad counters such elitism by having a college student deliver you one scandalous tape per month, featuring highlights like “Paris Airshow Disaster 1987”, “Paris Airshow Disaster 1991” ... and “Dick Cavett Lights Fart”.
It’s a strangely prophetic thought experiment: what if someone took our rude, celebrity-obsessed, reality-based viral culture and found a way to professionalize it? This idea was funny to me in the 90s, but it’s a little sad now. Yesterday’s Underground Tape Railroad became today’s internet.
You no longer have to know anyone to get a copy of a tape. Now you can find any Paris Air Show Disaster, from any year, instantly, on YouTube. That broadening of access hasn’t really changed the fundamental culture – instead of Dick Cavett farting, we have Whoopi Goldberg farting. But it’s changed the way we use culture to interact with each other.
Now, instead of trying to find the most underground work and choosing our friends based on the camaraderie of appreciating the same obscure videotapes/art/music/books/zines/sketch-comedy shows, we’re scrambling not to be the last one to watch and share “Too Many Cooks”. Always-on internet and primed-and-ready social media networks (and the blogs that amplify them) can push anything out to millions at internet speed, and missing out on the Thing du Jour means you’re shut out of the mainstream. Cultural capital used to come from being in on the joke. Now it comes from not being left out.
It makes a difference, not just for how we deal with media on a personal level, but also for how we talk to each other, and how we situate ourselves relative to people in our immediate social sphere. Viral culture creates a large community in which the goal is to see and be seen by as many people as possible, and develops a lot of shortcuts (cats, choreography, outrage or alternately Restoring One’s Faith in Humanity) for triggering people’s desire to share.
The alternative to this kind of culture – let’s call it “silo culture” for the way groups isolate themselves in private structures – aims for something more like a secret society, with purity tests for entry and advancement. (As an example, I have a very nerdy tattoo. Anyone who recognizes it is, in a sense, a member of my community.) Silo culture sets passwords; viral culture sets a vocabulary.
If you’re accustomed to silo culture, viral culture can look dumb – although rest assured, people who are accustomed to viral culture probably think you’re elitist. Fandoms, the canonical example of silo culture, often come across as insular and self-obsessed – or, at best, boring – to people who prefer to cast a wider net. (If you’re not choosing your friends based on their ability to have a minutely detailed conversation about which songs Sherlock would put on his gym playlist, or whatever, you’re unlikely to see the appeal.)
Meanwhile, the mania to go fully viral, to adopt the vocabulary that will ensure widespread recognition, can lead to unsavory behavior – or, at least, unsavory to someone accustomed to setting up shop in a silo. Flash mob marriage proposals are a good example of this; they’re often wildly popular, shared by millions of people all saying “best thing ever”, but you can always find a curmudgeon (usually me) saying, “Ugh, I can’t get past the way this is clearly calculated to create attention from strangers.” This isn’t a fundamental flaw of the flash mob. It’s a cultural incompatibility, a difference in what kind of attention and acceptance we each consider valuable.
Like any dichotomy, viral culture facing off against silo culture is an oversimplification – nobody is totally in one camp or the other. Consumers and creators of culture tend to straddle the divide. But when we disagree over the value of a work of art or television or literature, a marriage proposal or a dancing chicken lady video, some of that disagreement might be because we’re judging it from the wrong perspective.
Ultimately, the difference between viral culture and silo culture is in scope and audience, not quality. A lot of works that use the “viral” vocabulary – crowd-pleasing elements like flash mobs, catchy songs, calculated everyman humor like in The Oatmeal, or those rubber animal masks I really don’t get – are terrible, but only because a lot of things are terrible.
But liking things that appeal to a narrower population doesn’t automatically make you more sophisticated. You may just be sitting on the couch with a few carefully chosen, rare footage-enthusiast friends, watching your obscure underground tape of Dick Cavett lighting his farts.
