This comment from Scripting News: 6/8/2005 sounds totally off, and it amazes me continually that Dave Winer manages to continually sound this far off when he clearly has some sort of clue. It’s just really distorted:
Okay, Steve Gillmor is going to like this chain of logic. John Lennon said the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. No argument, it was true, they were. Well, even though the vast majority of people have never heard of Steve or myself, we’re more influential than John Lennon or Bob Dylan ever were. We’re media hackers. It’s true they led a media revolution in the 1960s. But we’re hacking media in the 21st century.
So many things are wrong in this chain of logic that it baffles me. I think that there’s a huge bit of confusion between popularity and influence going on here. Some of the most influential people in the world are unknown by 99% of the people in the world, which Dave seems to get. But, even then, I don’t think Dave Winer is one of the most influential people in the world. Maybe in the top 10%, but every 1% closer you get to that 99 percentile the influence grows dramatically, almost chaotically, and the other top ten are left in the dust as time ticks on.
The Beatles in their time were most likely more popular than Jesus was in his time simply because popularity right after the B.C. to A.D. switch-over didn’t exist in the same way it does in the 20th-21st Century, and Lennon’s claim, as Dave’s, is clearly being made from a present-minded bias clouded by a moment of success.
On the other hand, Jesus is an archetypal figure that crosses a huge expanse of time and multiple cultures. The Beatles may have the multiple cultures down, but I doubt they’ll last the amount of time that Jesus has (and will continue to just because of the aggregate of history that followed upon him). But, in cumulative time respects, no. Lennon was wrong. More 20th and 21st century people who come from the same culture of popularity as Lennon know about Jesus than they know about the Beatles, although those out of the know will say pretty much the same things about both: “Oh, yeah. Jesus is the guy from the Bible, right?” or “Oh, yeah. The Beatles sing that whatever song, right?” And Jesus has had more influence on everyone living because of that large expanse of history between him then and us now. Think: the Crusades.
And, no matter how you spin it, there is a definite hierarchy of the archetypal at play here. The media isn’t the golden nugget of the world, as much as it would like to think it is and as much as it spins itself as being such. Podcasting isn’t the golden nugget of the media world. It’s neat, but it’s not the thing that makes the media spin. Content does. People do (and people, btw, are the content of the non-media world and why blogging and podcasting, etc., are so neat).
People like Bob Dylan and John Lennon are pop-archetypes with wide-arching influence on a large number of people in our current popularity-geared world. Dave isn’t even close to that influential, because only a small number of people who are clued in to the Internet are clued into him. There are people living in the farthest reaches of the non-western world with very little technology who have heard of Michael Jordan, Michael Jackson, Elvis, the Beatles, and Dylan. I remember seeing some news snippet of an African kid in some remote and rural tribe jumping up and down with joy in front of the camera shouting “Michael Jordan, Michael Jordan” over and over again, even though he didn’t really know what basketball was.
This is a scary artifact of our time; knowledge of celebrity affects everyone to some degree. Neither podcasting nor blogging have that reach. Neither does film or television or any other media. Not yet. I doubt ever.
I think I veered off from my original point somewhere here, but, oh, well. I’m blogged out.
Leave a Reply