The multiple explosions of teenage web ‘celebrities’ did not happen by accident. So here’s my prognosis; Australians aren’t doing enough work.
At all.
According to a recent poll, over 70% of Australian workers use use social media during office hours, despite nearly half of their workplaces having officially banned it. That makes us one of the procrastination capitals of the world, with Facebook and Twitter having higher saturation in our offices than anywhere else. It also helps explain why in the last week, Australian Facebook users found out the biggest news of the day well before news media did.
Cooper’s 16th Birthday and Heynes’ bullying video don’t rewrite the rule book. They simply represent two more points on the upward trajectory of peer-sharing culture fueled by the twin human impulses of intrigue and boredom. It’s something Aussies, many of whom spend up to eight hours a day chained to a desk and computer, are particularly proficient with. Cooper’s party notched up over 100,000 virtual guests in less than 24 hours simply by word-of-mouth, as smart-ass punks saw the event pop up on their friends’ feeds and investigated it for themselves. Similarly, the video of Heynes striking out at his tormentors circulated social networks thousands of times before his school even knew or decided to do anything about it. What this means is Cooper and Heynes, like Corey Worthington and American counterpart, Rebecca Black, are entirely our creations.
Let’s be honest; there are millions of fake parties on Facebook and just as many violent schoolyard beat-up clips on YouTube. But we found these particular instances interesting, largely because our friends and networks did too. So instead of doing their jobs, Aussies welcomed the opportunity to hyperlink, wall post and retweet this stuff faster than any newspaper journo could hope to keep up with. By the time it hit the evening bulletin, it was already pre-historic to anybody with an Internet connection. You can almost count on reading something on the back page of Sydney Morning Herald that ceased being relevant the day before.
Everyone I know was ‘on the door’ for Cooper’s party. If you’re reading this, there’s a chance you and everyone you knew were on it, too. In this past week, you’ve pissed yourself to Black’s ‘Friday’, debated the morality of suspending a fat kid who was only standing up for himself and wondered what the hell Jess Cooper plans on doing when a crowd forty times the size of Rihanna‘s recent stadium shows rocks up at her doorstep. We may work in banks, law firms, PR agencies, design firms or the retail sector, none of it really matters. The only thing that’s getting our undivided attention is what pops up next on the Eternal Feed of Life, and whether or not we can be the first ones to share it with our less savvy mates.
