Bob Krumm has an excellent post showing how the gatekeeper function of the traditional media is defunct. No longer does an event need validation by the mainstream media to become a phenomenon, he points out. Instead, it’s the mainstream media that needs Internet phenomena to seem relevant. Two examples are the Tea Party Movement and the recent Scottish singing sensation Susan Boyle:
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, two events have leapt into America’s consciousness this week. The first was the Tea Party protests involving hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans in hundreds of cities all around the country.
The second was the sudden and stunning success of previously unknown church choir singer, Susan Boyle, who wowed judges and the audience in an audition for Britain’s Got Talent, the Anglican version of American Idol. …
What these two seemingly unrelated events have in common is the internet.
To show how the Internet affected Boyle’s fame, Krumm links to the video below. It’s an audio recording that Boyle made in 1999 for a charity CD. It’s every bit as good, maybe better, than her appearance on TV recently, but there was no YouTube to make her internationally famous.
