And Then There's This (English)

Due to the rise of YouTube, blogging, and Twitter, Bill Wasik has noted a correlation between the decreasing lifespan and the increasing irrelevance of the news stories which capture our attention. Wasik, a noted practitioner of "viral" events such as "flash mobs," reports that the Internet has irrevocably displaced the ability to create news, allowing almost anyone to instantly transform a freakish cultural phenomenon into a significant event worthy of attention. According to Wasik, the inexorable accumulation of forwarded e-mails and the universal popularity of websites such as YouTube and Facebook have essentially reduced our clichéd portion of allotted fame from 15 minutes to 15 seconds or less. The fact that any examples of this phenomenon that I cite (a baby squirrel trying to climb a wall, Kate Gosselin refusing her daughter a drink of water, Susan Boyle) will likely have been long forgotten by the time this review is published attests to Wasik's compelling argument. minimize