Viral Marketing: How the Internet Hasn’t Revolutionized Anything At All
Posted by lorraine on 19th February , 2010
For the better part of last year I was obsessed with this question:
“What do people do?”
It’s a most confusing question; go ahead, ask somebody and he’ll most likely look befuddled for a moment before he begins to formulate some kind of answer that he, himself, doesn’t feel very confident about. Thankfully, I kept this pondering mainly to myself and didn’t alienate any of my friends.
Rewind to: 10,001 years ago.
The number is figurative, not meant to mean 7989 BC, but rather one year before the Agricultural Revolution began. Remember that from school? It was half a page in your history textbook and toted as the moment humanity’s hands were freed up to begin to accomplish bigger and better things. I have a very different view of the agricultural revolution, and I chose to write about it now because I’m guessing a sizable percentage of you have seen Avatar, which (for the most widespread and successful time ever in popular media) describes indigenous populations not as primitive and blind to what they’re missing out on, but rather content with their very sustainable and gratifying way of life. I think the defining piece of script was something to the effect of: “We have nothing they want, they won’t give up their way of life… for what? A light beer and a pair of blue jeans?” Here is a sentence, and I dare you to try and find the lie contained within:
“…the ‘First Agricultural Revolution’ (about 10,000 years ago), which formed the basis for human civilization to develop.”
That’s from wikipedia, and it harbors a glaring untruth. I’ll give you a moment. Can’t find it? Two words: human civilization. To this very day, not all humans are engaging in our totalitarian form of agriculture (if we can’t eat you we won’t put any effort into not killing you off, or if you eat something we eat we will put every effort into killing you off), so in no way can every person on earth be lumped into the definition of the Agricultural Revolution. Tribes of humans all over the globe still exist living the same way they did 10,000 years ago. I’ll rewrite the sentence so it is not lying to you:
“…the ‘First Agricultural Revolution’ (about 10,000 years ago), which formed the basis for a few tribes scattered in various parts of the world to convince their neighbors, usually by force, that totalitarian agriculture was the way to go, and enabled them to assimilate indigenous people into their way of life or kill them off, making way for global expansion.”
That process is still going on today, so the Agricultural Revolution isn’t something that “happened”, rather it is something that “began to happen” and is “still happening.”
So, what do people do?
As a species, we haven’t evolved much to speak of physiologically for at least 100,000 years. As a species, any activity an individual engages in can be put into one of four categories. 1) We eat 2) We hang out with each other 3) We teach 4) We heal. You could rearrange and dissect that to be five our three categories, but for our purposes we’ll leave it at that. Accountants, secretaries, electricians, dentists, truck drivers, beauticians, salespeople, construction workers, business owners, computer programmers, and teachers are all, in neolithic terms, hunting for food because if you don’t have money you can’t buy food. (Dentists and teachers bear the lucky distinction of having occupations that include things that people actually do. All the other professions are a spin-off of having more non food gathering time and food surplus with which provides the resources to engage in “higher” activities.)
So, in less broad terms, what do people do on the internet? We share experiences, opinions, and information, and we sell stuff to each other. Those things were going on for thousands of years before the internet existed. The internet didn’t revolutionize anything, it simply provided a new place to do the same things faster and without having to go anywhere. This is not to say the internet isn’t a super cool tool and quite an amazing invention. Viral marketing existed before the internet too, we just recently diagnosed it and gave it a name (kind of like ADD). Jenny listens to a record she really likes, so she tells her friend Joey who immediately runs to the store to buy it and proceeds to tell Johnny and Jimmy… viral marketing.
This post was brought to you by Ishmael, a talking gorilla. Google it 
MuseZu… and be heard! Ryan
Image courtesy of Kentoh @ Dreamstime.com
