So my Facebook wall did a weird thing today. Every single post, for about six hours straight, was the same video. Not a link to six different articles about the same story, the actual same 30-minute video, embedded over and over, from people who never post anything more substantial than restaurant check-ins.
That's the Kony 2012 video, in case you've somehow missed it (unlikely, unless you've been off the grid since yesterday). Invisible Children put it up on YouTube on Monday and by this afternoon it had eaten every feed I have access to: Facebook, Twitter, even my mom's email forwards, which is usually a two-week lag indicator for anything internet-related. Half my RSS subscriptions have posted about it and it's not even dinnertime yet.
I'm not going to pretend I watched the whole 30 minutes on my first sitting. I watched about 12 minutes on my phone during lunch, got pulled into a meeting, and came back to find the view counter had visibly moved in the time I was gone. That's the part that actually stopped me — not the content of the video, which is a pretty conventional advocacy documentary once you get past the framing device, but the sheer velocity of it. I've watched things go viral before. I don't think I've watched something climb in real time like a stock ticker.
A couple things about this that are bugging me as someone who spends too much time thinking about how content moves online:
The video is long. Thirty minutes is an eternity by internet standards, and yet that hasn't slowed it down at all, which kind of blows up the assumption a lot of us have been running on for years that attention spans online are strictly shrinking and anything over 90 seconds is dead on arrival. Maybe the lesson is people will sit through anything if the social pressure to have seen it is strong enough. Or maybe it's just that autoplay-adjacent embeds and phones make "long" feel different than it used to on a desktop browser in 2008.
The other thing is how uniform the reaction has been so far. I did a very unscientific scroll through my own feed around 3pm and counted maybe two people out of the first fifty posts pushing back on it at all, questioning the org, the "buy a bracelet and an action kit" model, any of it. That's going to change, it always does, the backlash cycle on something this size moves fast too. But right now, today, it's about as close to internet consensus as I've seen on anything since, I don't know, the SOPA blackout back in January. Funny how both of those ran through the same platforms and neither one needed a single traditional news outlet to break first.
Small unrelated thing I noticed buried in a TechCrunch post while all this was happening: Apple apparently crossed 25 billion App Store downloads sometime yesterday. Twenty five billion. I remember when 1 billion downloads was the milestone that got a press release and a party. Now it's a number so big it barely registered next to a video about a warlord in Uganda, which tells you something about how numb we've all gotten to App Store stats specifically, if nothing else.
And speaking of Apple, tomorrow's the big iPad event in San Francisco, 10am Pacific, "we have something you really have to see. And touch," which is either a hint about a Retina display or the single worst tagline Apple's marketing team has ever approved, I genuinely can't decide which. I'll be refreshing a liveblog like everyone else. Feels almost quaint next to today, honestly — a company controlling exactly what gets announced and when, on a stage, with invitations mailed out weeks in advance, versus a nonprofit's video just detonating on its own schedule with no PR department steering it. Two totally different models of how information moves and they're happening back to back this week.
Anyway. My video count is still climbing every time I check it. I don't have a tidy takeaway about what that means yet. Ask me again in a few days once the backlash posts start outnumbering the shares.