Best. ____. Ever. or creativity and the new economy of attention

By now you’ve probably seen this video. If not, I think it’s worth the 5 minutes. Go ahead.

Cute, isn’t it? And given the 11M views so far it seems that’s a majority opinion.

Eleven million views. At a running time of just over 5 minutes, that’s about 100 years of human attention dedicated so far to this video in the week or so that it’s been on YouTube.

Was that the plan? I think it sort of was.

When you share a video on YouTube, you’re sharing it with 3 groups of people. In ascending order of size (and decreasing order of social proximity to you in the context of the video) these groups consist of:

1. people you know who were there
2. people you know who weren’t there
3. people you don’t know who weren’t there

At this point, views of this video by groups 1 & 2 combined as a % of the total are probably small enough to be swallowed by a rounding error.

From the time it started showing up in linkblogs over the weekend it belonged to group #3. It’s us who’ve seen to it that this video was played for a century over a matter of days.

That happened because this video was made for us to watch. We didn’t need to be there to get it. The wedding procession is a story we all know. This one’s amusing because of the thousands of videos of other wedding processions that aren’t amusing at all. Those other videos were made for group #1 alone (and a small subset of it at that). We don’t want to watch these videos but invariably we occasionally do, knowing our attention is being wasted.

If 99% of everything is crap, then the emergence of a new category of crap — in this case the YouTube wedding procession video –  comes with an opportunity for those with the right kind of talent to seize attention on a scale previously unimaginable.

So let’s enjoy the 1% and be grateful for the tools and channels that let the tiny amusing minority cut through the crap like never before.

Yes, most social media is crap. But some of it is the Best. Crap. Ever.