Virality Is On Facebook

We are living in the era of people power.

I know that's confounding, in a world where the President is whipsawing the country, but the truth is we've seen a transition from a top-down to a bottom-up world, and institutions cannot fathom this. It's why Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the Hillary campaign could not understand the ascendance of Bernie Sanders. It's why the media keeps complaining about fake news. The truth is the lunatics have taken over the asylum, and we're the lunatics.

And it all happens on Facebook.

While the music industry can't stop bitching about YouTube, it has failed to realize that YouTube is passe. Forget revenue streams, the issue in music is breaking and building acts. And that is now happening on other platforms. Which embed YouTube videos. Like Facebook. The story doesn't get started on YouTube, it gets started on Facebook.

Now youngsters skew towards Snapchat and Instagram and...those are different platforms. Kind of like Twitter.

Twitter is for newshounds. It's where you go to find out what's happening right now. And when you hear people bitch that it's too hard for them to use, forget them, they are not interested in breaking news. And if someone is posting to Twitter their everyday movements laugh hard and tell them to get back to Facebook. And if you're bloviating on Twitter and you're not famous forget it, no one cares. Twitter is a top-down medium, where the in-the-know and famous pontificate and the minions spread the word.

But on Facebook, the minions rule. Facebook is not for stars, it's for you and me.

Facebook used to be about bragging, and to a degree it still is, but that's moved on to Instagram, where it's so much easier. I won't quite say that Facebook is for truth, but it is the central square, the commons house that we thought disappeared but did not.

So if it happens in the "New York Times" and it's not spread on Facebook, it's like it did not happen at all. Same deal for the WSJ and the WaPo too. They may do the research, write the stories, but it's a dead end unless their work is shared on Facebook. Which is why the press is meaningless, why the NYT's anti-Trump stories did not bring him down, they were not shared on Facebook!

We've been used to sitting at home and letting the big boys control our game. But the big boys became inured to the bucks and started to wallow in their power and we didn't like it anymore. As for the Trump victory, that's a rearguard conclusion evidencing the disdain the population has for the powers-that-be, they're sick of being ignored. Think about this, the twenty first century is an endless march against those who thought they were in power. From the music industry and Napster to politics today.

Standing Rock, the Women's March, the airport protests, these must not be seen in the context of the sixties but through the lens of now. The people have power. And they organize and spread the word online. Did you see what just happened in Romania? The government thought it could get away with decriminalizing corruption but the public said no way and the officials backed down.

This happened in the Middle East, with the Arab Spring.

And now it's happening in America.

And it's not only politics, it's culture too.

We keep hearing how big these stars are but they're not. They're just being propped up by an archaic system. Whereas if entertainment companies could get the word spread on Facebook, they'd make more revenue than ever. But the music industry is appealing to niches and the movie industry is appealing to the lowest common denominator and therefore it's all push and no pull, no one wants to spread the word. But people are hungry for information to spread.

Did you see Melissa McCarthy as Sean Spicer on SNL?

I find that show creepy. Because the writing is so bad. I actually watched half an hour last night and didn't laugh once.

But today the NYT featured the McCarthy clip from later in the show. When I told Felice about it, sent it to her, she said it was old news, she'd already seen it multiple times on Facebook.

Are you getting this? This is where most of older America gets its news, its information, its talking points.

There were no other SNL clips in Felice's feed, because people have an incredible quality detector, they only want the best. But if you ring their bell...

So it's only the completely out of it who are getting their news from traditional sources, whether it be SNL or Fox or MSNBC. They're for junkies. But it's mass we're interested in, it's mass that moves mountains.

And you build mass on Facebook.


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