Pop Culture Playdate

Last night the world received its yearly pop culture injection known as the MTV Video Music Awards.

In all the years since this award show has been televised never did it feel so obvious that MTV no longer had the cultural permission to be the MC of this pop culture playdate.

The show itself was bubbling over with the energy and angst of youth but there was this lingering undertone that the real show was playing out somewhere else. That what we were all watching was really the stimulus for a hundred other channels namely the social streams of the personalities on and around the VMAs.

Let’s start with the host.

Miley Cyrus is a human animated .gif and has the ability to keep our attention for about 3–5 second interval loops that she has somehow mastered as a performance art. She just loops.

Which brings me to what is now actually fueling this once all powerful cultural phenomenon… The Internet!

Everything was just fodder for the internet, the skits, the language the behavior all seemed to be focused on one thing. Social media.

It was as if everyone’s attention was elsewhere, snapping pics and videos, uploading and hash-tagging to their social streams, on TV.

Some of the performances were pretty good and the fashion and drama were ever present but MTV had no part of it, it was like these kids crashed a party at a rich dude’s mansion and didn’t even bother talking to or about the host.

Social media reigned and not your mama’s social network.

Both Twitter and Facebook were outdone by their junior networks Instagram and Vine as people shared clips and pics of their favorite moments. Words took a back seat to images and those images said a lot.

Facial expressions, eye movements, who was sitting with who and nuances that were captured and shared without any editorial or contextual set up needed.
There was even a skit of how Miley Cyrus should compose her Instagram pictures so that they have “meaning”. The kids take this stuff very seriously and as marketers so should we.

The way the whole thing unfolded like a dorm room collage, pictures on top of pictures next to pictures of people who are also taking pictures.

This is how the world now communicates. They find micro moments in time that can be expounded upon, pontificated against and misinterpreted to be or mean whatever the viewer gleans out of it.

These are stories told in moments.

Commercials were hardly noticed, aside from a blip of emotion from Clean & Clear the ad space was dominated by Samsung Phones and Apple Music. I think Rhianna was trying to tell us about a new Puma shoe but that was not noisy enough to make its way to the top of the decibel food chain.

What was also interesting was that MTV as a brand was completely devoid, it willingly took a back seat to Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and whatever else people were posting to.

MTV had no personalities present, because they have no more personalities, no Downtown Julie Brown or Kurt Loder no Nina Blackwood or Kennedy. No Carmen Electra or Adam Curry and no Martha Quinn or Pauly Shore like objects helping us focus our attention through all the noise and to show us how we should be applying what we are seeing to our daily lives.

MTV simply supplied the platform and the venue, the TV time and the trophy that no one seemed to care for. It was all just a moment for the performers to pose for selfies and groupies, subliminal posturing and passive aggressive threats towards one another. There was no recognition of peers, it was recognition of self and they were there for one purpose, to create content for their own personal social channels.

Not unlike how we as regular people go places just to check in or snap a pic to prove we were there, to show who we were with and to establish our own personal brands.

This is the new New.