Twitter user Mitch Canter posted a TwitPic of his vision for a redesigned NBC logo combines the Twitter Fail Whales and the NBC peacock to reflect the Internet’s disgust with NBC’s late night fiasco as well as its support of Conan O’Brien. The fail whale was designed by artist Yiying Lu, and it has become something of a pop culture icon.
When she first designed it, she probably didn’t expect it to become very popular; after all, it’s an image that appears only when something isn’t working. However, a year ago Twitter was so unstable that the fail whale image popped up to hundreds of thousands of users almost daily, and history was made.
The image was quoted, linked to, used and reused so much that it became almost iconic. To capture how this motif, a huge, sleeping animal lifted by a flock of tiny birds – has been used in pop culture in the last year, Lu created a site with all of the Fail Whale related images she could find. It has become a huge line of collection: from tributes, to statues, to cakes, to beer labels: it’s everywhere.
That’s not necessarily a good thing when you consider that it only appears when something goes terribly wrong. However it clearly shows the power of popular culture in today’s society. Technology has allowed the diffusion in pop culture to be faster and more effective than ever before. The viral effect of such diffusion is almost threatening those who are likely to be the target, NBC in this case. It is interesting to see how something that was once the tycoon of cultural diffusion (broadcasting media) has now become the target of the new media (the internet). Popular culture always tends to stick its side with the non-mainstream as its source of diffusion. Now that Internet has become so popular and mainstream, I wonder if there will be a new alternative media for the popular culture to grow into.
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