The reason I've decided to jump back on to the internet is Susan Boyle, newest internet mega-pan-flash and YouTube sensation. If you've been living in a cave for... well, really anything more than about 72 hours in this country, you'll have no idea what I'm talking about.
The 48-year-old, who is an unemployed charity worker from a small Scotland town, has gained fandom globally in less than half a week thanks to Simon Cowell's real job, Britain's Got Talent. The we-did-it-first equivalent to America's etc. etc., BGT has pumped out a few of these surprises over the last few seasons, and has filtered them onto the internet with greater success each time. It needed a real spark, though, to finally reach a worldwide audience, and Boyle is that spark.
I'm linking here to a very obscure little UK site, Deadline Scotland, which gives a day-after perspective to Susan Boyle's success. To her friends and neighbors, she is a quirky, unpretentious bit of playful lunacy -- a character in every sense of the word, as if she'd stepped right out of a British sitcom. She drinks lemonade at the bar, keeps her savings in empty whiskey bottles and lives alone. The children around her even sometimes call her a witch, further convincing me that she's blasted her way into reality using magic akin to Last Action Hero. I guarantee she has at least one insanely flowered bonnet in her possession, possibly with fake birds on it. And her voice, so new and apparently inspiring to the rest of the world, has echoed through the walls and the churches of her small town for over thirty years. To them, she is simply Susan.
My trend-o-graph spiked when I saw her video on Sunday morning, but being a lazy sonofabitch, I ignored it until I realized I could have been about 10 hours ahead of everyone else on this lady. (Full disclosure: the trend-o-graph is actually something I just made up. I know. Disappointing.) It doesn't matter, though, because I'd probably be writing roughly the same things about her. Boyle's importance doesn't so much lie in the realm of pop culture as it does societal self-examination: Susan, who is decidedly one of the more comely-looking faces to draw over 10 million YouTube views, is finding a nice, quiet spot in the global subconcious as a very pure example of fulfilling a dream.
Her life doesn't seem particularly difficult or particularly happy -- much like our own lives. Our daily routines almost definitely share some common banalities with her own. And, like Susan, many of us have The Big Dream -- the culmination of our greatest talent, or our most sincere love. The affirmation that of all of the things you do, there is at least one thing that you do fantastically. The show gave such opportunity for affirmation to one of the more humble, more lovable, more charactery characters the public has ever come across, and Susan Boyle fulfilled her dream and way more.
We've been lucky enough to live in a time when there is virtually no delay between live airing and viral internet spread, but her talent could very well have uncovered a sort of tipping point. Yes, South Park had their YouTube episode, and stars are blurring the lines between mainstream and internet success every day. But with a few notes and a few wistful glances from each of the judges on BGT, Susan Boyle's performance may flash across more computer screens than anything on YouTube has before. And that's saying something. This is international p0pcult, and now that Viral Video is reaching pandemic levels, worldwide Pop Culture may start to become pretty commonplace -- a concept as important to humanity as electricity was once. Or telephones. Or airplanes.
It's a small world, but it really is a big world, too. And when the smallest of us finally has a chance to be seen by everyone -- literally everyone -- in just the blink of an eye, it's time to consider that we might just be moving into some unfamiliar social territory. And it might be awesome.
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