This misses a key part of the Ken Bone saga, his downfall, spurred on entirely by him using his personal reddit account for an AMA, through which we learned he was thumbs down on Trayvon Martin and thumbs up on sex with pregnant women
you're right -- I cut that part for length, since I wanted to focus on the audience response to the debate/the whole ritual stuff. But I might make a YT video essay on the topic. So what do you think is important to say about the downfall? Was it the inevitable end of his viral rise? What does it say?
Like all good theater, we can broadly divide viral sensations into comedy and tragedy. In 2016 we still understood virality as comedy, a moment that ends on Ellen, although I would argue it was already tragedy in practice.
The tastemaking parts of the internet skew the same way tastemakers skewed before the internet. Urban, wealthy, educated, dedicated to gossip, yes also white. Ken Bone was put on national TV because he had literal median political opinions, he went viral for being cartoonishly normal. He was not prepared for what modern fame meant. He couldn't hang, he never even meant to hang.
Tragedies are also entertaining. They're fun! He was a good laugh, and then we had our second act where we could boo and hiss. Pixelated Boat made the Milkshake Duck tweet like four months before. We knew what would happen. He had no chance.
"When public figures are famous for being “authentic,” people feel there’s a baked-in accountability: you know that, as a listener, you made them. You don’t get that sense with most politicians, because somebody else made them — namely, the people who run the TV."
I'm very interested in the authenticity-accountability tension. In my book I talk about how audiences want you to both "be yourself" and "be what they want you to be."
Your take here makes a lot of sense to me -- that audiences understand that "being yourself" is meaningless, and that they prefer the creator/creatures that they have themselves created rather than those that other audiences have created.
I just get so hung up on calling any of this "authenticity". We're clearly post-authenticity....why can't we let the dead concept die?
This misses a key part of the Ken Bone saga, his downfall, spurred on entirely by him using his personal reddit account for an AMA, through which we learned he was thumbs down on Trayvon Martin and thumbs up on sex with pregnant women
you're right -- I cut that part for length, since I wanted to focus on the audience response to the debate/the whole ritual stuff. But I might make a YT video essay on the topic. So what do you think is important to say about the downfall? Was it the inevitable end of his viral rise? What does it say?
Like all good theater, we can broadly divide viral sensations into comedy and tragedy. In 2016 we still understood virality as comedy, a moment that ends on Ellen, although I would argue it was already tragedy in practice.
The tastemaking parts of the internet skew the same way tastemakers skewed before the internet. Urban, wealthy, educated, dedicated to gossip, yes also white. Ken Bone was put on national TV because he had literal median political opinions, he went viral for being cartoonishly normal. He was not prepared for what modern fame meant. He couldn't hang, he never even meant to hang.
Tragedies are also entertaining. They're fun! He was a good laugh, and then we had our second act where we could boo and hiss. Pixelated Boat made the Milkshake Duck tweet like four months before. We knew what would happen. He had no chance.
The medium is the message. Shoutout to Marshall McLuhan. Great read and great analysis!
"When public figures are famous for being “authentic,” people feel there’s a baked-in accountability: you know that, as a listener, you made them. You don’t get that sense with most politicians, because somebody else made them — namely, the people who run the TV."
I'm very interested in the authenticity-accountability tension. In my book I talk about how audiences want you to both "be yourself" and "be what they want you to be."
Your take here makes a lot of sense to me -- that audiences understand that "being yourself" is meaningless, and that they prefer the creator/creatures that they have themselves created rather than those that other audiences have created.
I just get so hung up on calling any of this "authenticity". We're clearly post-authenticity....why can't we let the dead concept die?