The reign of Justin Bieber

On: September 8, 2010
About Sander Jansma
I am a MA. New Media student and part of the class of 2010. During my bachelor in Communication & Multimedia Design at the University of Rotterdam I started my own webdesign company and got acquainted with alot of things internet has to offer! Now, 3 years later and a BA in my pocket I not only want to know the practical side of the internet, but also the theoretical side. My interests are the great web, design, development, social psychology, technology, marketing, communication and mobile.

Website
http://www.intergalactisch.nl    

We’ve all seen him, heard him sing or heard the likes and dislikes of other people talking about him: Justin Bieber. Personally I am not really a fan: if you told me half a year ago that I would write a blog post about him, I would have laughed and called you silly.

But that was before I read this, this and saw this. I knew Justin had fans, but taking up 3% of all Twitter Servers, having an entire 4chan assault focussed on him and getting more than 104.000.000 hits on Google is out of the ordinary. Hence this blogpost: JB is officially an internetmeme.

Of course there is always some doubt about stories like the 3% Twitter takeover. There aren’t any hard facts and numbers displaying the 3%, we haven’t seen the JB-labelled servers for real nor have we seen the data on it, but it says enough that we DO think there is a possibility this is true. For instance it can be possible because:

““Every time Bieber tweets, his messages have to be delivered to more than five million people who then endlessly retweet it. Apparently, his account receives more than 60 @-replies per second for a while after he tweets…” (source: mashable)

If we look at the statistics being given here, it shows that JB allready has more than 5 million twitter followers, with an average of 18,824 joining in each day.  This combined with a total of 10.862.226 people liking JB on facebook, the number of hits on Google and the 1045540 on his Myspace, just makes you wonder. Not about the fact JB has claimed a big part of the internet, the media and of people’s minds…but about the question if we should be frightened by all this? If this “young, innocent” kid can allready leave his trails on the internet in this kind of way and in a relatively short time, isn’t this than also possible for someone with bad intentions and a global dictatorship in mind?

For now: let’s just hope Justin Bieber does have good intentions and sticks with the singing/dancing act.

Comments are closed.