The Increasing Velocity of Sharing Tools

An article by Ayelet Noff    3 Comments

When Connie Talbot (age six) got up to sing in Briton’s Got Talent back in 2007 the judges were no less wowed, the audience no less thrilled and production no less stage-managed  than Susan Boyle’s performance a few weeks back. Connie Talbot’s audition video was uploaded to YouTube the day after her audition was broadcast and as of today has a very respectable 40+ million views. Yet somehow all of Connie’s videos put together have far less views after 2 years than Susan Boyle’s main audition video has after three weeks. Clearly something in the last two years has changed the dynamic of how we share media.

Once upon a time to attain the level of (positive) fame and recognition that Susan Boyle now enjoys you would have had to be a president or a movie star. Now an anonymous, middle aged, Scottish spinster who possesses a stunning voice is arguably one of the most famous people on the planet.

The first and easiest argument to be made is that Simon Cowell, Piers Morgan and the rest of the Briton’s Got Talent crew have brought reality TV to a new level of audience manipulation. However, this argument doesn’t hold up when you look back at previous videos such as Connie the wonder kid and Paul Potts the unlikely opera tenor. The production value in those videos is nearly identical to those in the Susan Boyle video and the contestants just as unlikely (I would argue that Paul Potts was an even bigger surprise) winners as Boyle.

So what has changed in the last two years?  The sharing tools available to all of us. In 2007 I wrote a post about “The New Tribalism”, influenced by Stowe Boyd’s explanation of how Web 2.0 tools help online communities form “tribes” of people around the same vertical. Now with increasingly powerful sites for link sharing such as Digg, Facebook and especially Twitter (with is its ability to find and display trending topics), these tools have given the Web the power to accelerate the exposure received by a single event far faster than ever before. These tools will only get more and more powerful as time passes, crossing tribes, communities, networks and entire countries with increasing speed. In the future it will only take 15 minutes to get your 15 minutes of fame.