It is not blue and black, it is not white and gold. It is green. Dollar green.
A young woman takes a photo of a dress to be worn at a wedding and without knowing or trying, creates an optical effect that makes some people see it in one color, and others a different hue. After a few friends have commented on this, she decides to post it on her Tumblr. A BuzzFeed journalist, Cates Holderness, sees the entry, is surprised, and decides to write an article called “What colors are this dress?” The rest is history.
History that has its absolute peak in the more than 670,000 concurrent visitors at the page of the article on BuzzFeed, while the color of the dress has been discussed at length on Twitter, as well as in bars, classrooms, and even on the news. But the really important thing about this isn’t the color of the dress, what matters here is the ability to turn something as anodyne as a photograph of a dress on a web pages into a global phenomenon. In the pre-internet age, this photograph would have been seen by at most a couple of dozen people, friends and relatives of the woman who took the snap. We might as ourselves who can take the credit for this event, could it be repeated, can BuzzFeed really take the credit, setting itself up as the key to web culture, the site with the Midas touch?
BuzzFeed seems to believe it’s found the holy grail of viral content, and that if it weren’t for Cates Holderness, nobody would ever have heard about this dress. And therefore, the site is the surefire route to virality, and that all you need to do is give it your content, and in return for a fee, the company will turn it into viral gold.
This is precisely what companies like Facebook are trying to offer content creators: give us your content and we’ll turn it viral. We will multiply your viewing options, we will show it to the right people, and we will make it circulate like you’ve never seen. If you want virality, we’re the web that will make it happen. Now, thanks to the famous dress, BuzzFeed are trying to show that they too are players: that they can make waves, even with content they haven’t created and just had the good luck to find out there.
Can somebody own virality? Is web culture something that can be commercialized and prefabricated, sold to the highest bidder? Would the dress have gone viral if another website had posted it? Does the merit lie with the content or with whoever discovers it, or a bit of both? If BuzzFeed is able to get the message out that it is the reason 40 million people around the world have seen the photo, then it will be in the perfect position to repeat the phenomenon and that it could be sold to anybody prepared to pay for it.
If, on the other hand, this whole thing is simply happenchance and that any other site could have spread the story, albeit a little more slowly, then BuzzFeed or Facebook are nothing more than content distributors like any other, hoping that on occasion they hit the jackpot.
So while we wait to see just who really has the power to create and sell virality, let’s settle the question of the color of the dress: it’s the color of money.
(En español, aquí)
