Distributed Centralization

Cybernetic loops, anxious movements, random patterns, professionaland amateur-made content, multiple browser tabs, viral propogation: all of these mark the use of Web 2.0 sites. Online, users move fluidly from one Web site to another. A user who enjoys a Lolcat video on YouTube can "like" it, thus producing a post in his Facebook stream. That user might then change tabs back to Facebook to read comments his friends posted about the video. A particularly snarky comment by one friend is so funny, the user tweets it in Twitter via TweetDeck. While in Twitter, he sees a Tweet for a Wikipedia article on Lolcats, so he clicks on the link. After reading up on the history of Lolcats, he notices a reference in the Wikipedia article to a Colbert Report skit about politician’s cats, so he clicks on that and is sent to Hulu. He finds that video so entertaining that he "likes" it, starting the process all over again. This activity is noticed by one of this user’s Facebook friends on her iPhone; she happens to be a reporter for the New York Times and writes a piece on viral digital culture and the production of a new Lolcat app for the Apple iPad. In the course of her reporting, she researches Lolcats with Google searches, feeding new search strings into Google’s growing database. Once her article is posted on a Times culture blog, readers can log in to Facebook and notice that their friends are all reading that article, and they can start new threads of comments, "likes," Diggs, tweets, and maybe a new Internet meme.