Cool Guys Don’t Look at Explosions

Um, how does a video on YouTube get 5,000,000 hits? That just stupefies me. I just subscribed to the Lonely Island channel (Andy Samberg and his two co-writers), and he has videos up there that have been viewed 71,000,000 times. THAT’S CRAZY. I think my own website is doing amazing if it gets 200 hits a day. I haven’t updated it in two weeks, so I would guess it’s probably down to like 50 hits a day. SEVENTY ONE MILLION? I can’t even calculate how much more interested the American public is in Andy Samberg than my own thoughts. And it’s not just me. This fantastic video of Stephon Marbury dancing to Barbie Girl only has about 100,000 views. The world wants to see Cool Guys Don’t Look at Explosions far more than they want to see Steph Marbury Imploding and Eating Vaseline: they want to see it roughly 710 times as much, apparently.

But they will still watch Steph, for we live in a voyeurist’s paradise, a society where weird times are mediated by small screens. Tell me: right before the fall of the Roman Empire, did they have a You Tube equivalent? A Twitter equivalent? Were the Christians getting mauled by lions in front of huge laughing crowds their equivalent of watching Stephon Marbury succumb to mental illness in front of a pixellated web cam?