by Linda Holmes
Now that the Susan Boyle-lash is well underway, it's a good time to look back on how we got here and what's likely to come next.
In the first stage of a phenomenon based on warmth, public affection begins to grow as people discover something like, say, a surprisingly nice performance of "I Dreamed A Dream."
In the second stage, some major party — here, it was Ashton Kutcher on Twitter most of all — publicizes the nascent discovery and creates an enormous and sudden growth of interest.
And that sets up the next phase, where things go differently.
Three more phases and how this all relates to cat calendars, after the jump...
In the third stage, acclaim soars right up to the Cat Calendar Tolerance Level. This is the mass-public equivalent of the limited number of times an individual can look at the same picture in a cat calendar before being sorely tempted to rip it off the wall. There is only so much adorability a person wishes to see, and when something soars to this level, everything changes.
In the fourth stage, affection for the emotionally affecting doodad at issue briefly continues to rise, but far more slowly, until some black-hearted cynic points out, "People, we are way past the cat calendar level, and many of you haven't even noticed."
At this point, public affection drops precipitously until it hits the Line Of Ironic Resistance, at which point the thing has become so unappreciated that it becomes someone's idea of a status symbol to be the person who still likes it. Everything uncool is now, briefly, cool again.
After a brief renaissance, our phenomenon suffers the fatal blow when the next big phenomenon makes its appearance. Distraction is the true enemy of the flash in the pan, and as soon as Ashton Kutcher comments on his Twitter feed about something else that made him cry, the rise and fall and rise are over, and obscurity beckons.
This, for what it's worth, is essentially what happened to Hands Across America.
And Vampire Weekend.
categories: Internet
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