Viral popularity on the internet can run on hatred, not admiration

Evidence

The internet’s chaotic nature, however, ensured that virality wasn’t always a product of calculated campaigns. Hate clicks remained just as powerful as genuine admiration. On February 10, 2011, thirteen-year-old Rebecca Black uploaded the music video for “Friday,” a song her parents commissioned for $4,000 as a birthday present. The track, with its shrill vocals and banal lyrics—“Yesterday was Thursday / Today is Friday”—became an object of instant ridicule. Comedy Central’s Tosh.O turned it into a meme, and music blogger Lyndsey Parker observed that its popularity stemmed not from any redeeming qualities but because it was “so unbelievably BAD.” For a brief moment, Black’s “Friday” eclipsed even Bieber’s view counts, showing the internet’s power to elevate even the most reviled content into cultural phenomena. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 294

Categorization

• QUESTION: Does the hate-click dynamic undercut Marx’s omnivore-monoculture thesis, or is it a separate parallax mechanism — attention regardless of valuation? Worth chasing.
• CANDY: Rebecca Black’s ‘Friday’ outranking Justin Bieber on pure hate clicks is a fun, self-contained pop-culture fact.