The other day I was reading the cover interview with Eminem in Rolling Stone magazine. It's an interesting interview that delves into, among other things, Eminem's very real addiction to Ambien and other pills, and his very near death by overdose. The article mentioned that he'd had a pair of hit singles off his best selling new comeback album Recovery, including one called I'm Not Afraid(embedded below) that I'd yet to hear. So I hit youtube to check out the tune and at some point my eyes grazed across the number of hits that the video had had. I did a rapid double take. What? Excuse me!! 158,228,876. I immediately thought I'd must be reading it wrong, so I started to do those rudimentary math exercises where you start by noting that one hundred has two zeros, a thousand three zero's, ten thousand four and so on. Nope, by golly, by James, that really does say one hundred and fifty eight million!! Damn.
It's a hard number to fathom. It wasn't that long ago that you had to send a telegram by horse. Communication on this scale was inconceivable. Marx makes the point somewhere in the Communist Manifesto that before the invention of trains the integration/consolidation of the working class movement was very slow. After trains, and the communication they made possible, it advanced rapidly. Evolutionary biologists talk about how new information is regularly generated in evolution, and how information is a key component of communication, relationality and exchange. The sociologist and systems theorist Niklas Luhmann describes our "information society" as one that "communicates worldwide without a center and in a connectionist fashion through networks- a trend which in the foreseeable future will certainly be amplified by computerization". (1). What is this global brain that Eminem has surfed in on? And what information is he passing along the network?
Of course, this global brain sends around all sorts of information. Justin Bieber has the youvideo with the most all time hits after all. You can see the top ten list here, which includes, among other things (like a kid biting his brothers finger), Eminem's song I'm Not Afraid at number ten. Which begs the question of why is it that so many folks are resonating with this particular song. It's definitely (in my mind) an inspirational epic on par with his other classic Lose Yourself, and given the context of global addiction that some have been writing about, it's possible that this (true) story of redemption is capturing a particular zeitgeist. At any rate, this whole scenario of explosive youtube hits in the global human communication network brings up further questions- what other opportunities does this collective network bring. And what else can we send down its wires?
(1) Moeller, Hans-Georg. Luhmann Explained: From Souls to Systems. Open Court: Chicago, 2006. p.236.
