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Every Wednesday, Ryan Carey tackles a different topic relating to the contemporary pop culture scene. This week he takes on the End of the World, which could be happening on Saturday ...
After hearing about Saturday's rapture on two separate, somewhat polarly opposed Philly-area radio stations (93.3 WMMR and 103.3 WPRB Princeton, which should give you an idea of how far spread the rapture-matrix has permeated), I did a search for the hashtag #rapture on handy-dandy Twitter. That's when it occurred to me...
The predicted May 21 Rapture is getting — what must be — many thousands percent more publicity from the snark-o-sphere than those good-hearted folks at Harold Camping's Family Radio Worldwide who sold their houses to drive mobile billboards around the country to tip us off about their very important event. The most common type of joke is, "what are you going to be wearing for the rapture?" followed by "x sports team beat y sports team, it really will be the end of the world." These are a variety of pseudo gallows humor, which seeks to create congruity between the extremely important, and the extremely un-important. About 60 percent of my search feed looked like this.
Another 38 percent was on the logistical implications of rapture belief. "Camping was wrong about his early '90s claim of pending rapture, his followers are gonna wish they still had houses on Sunday", or "If you're going up to heaven, could I get your collection of Hummel figurines?", or "If all the Christians get beamed up, who's going to be in all the sex scandals!" The remaining 3 percent (generously) of people are having some sort of serious, actual debate about the upcoming event.
Is there a way for advertisers to capitalize on the chain reaction of intellectual scorn, the great pan-cultural eye roll? Snakes on a Plane did it in 2006, but that was because the essential product was a movie, intended to be so-bad-it's-good. Camping's campaign was — despite the intentions of the volunteer army of new participants — a thorough success. Can you deny that you've been made aware of the rapture on May 21?
But the living organism of meme-marketing is something that has been repeatedly observed, without definite blueprinting for re-creation. There are certain things that, in hindsight, we see that EVERYONE will talk about. Justin Bieber is not so much a singer, but more a concept, spontaneously realized for the purpose of fueling its own ubiquity. I wouldn't be able to explain the Justin Bieber phenomenon to an unfrozen caveman even if he mastered Rosetta Stone English and took four years of college media-studies. If I said, "Kid sings songs on guitar, young girls find him cute," that explanation would satisfy only the most primal, categorical comprehension of what it means to be living in the Justin Bieber Era.
This tells us something important. Camping's ability to turn some billboards into the pan-American dinner table discussion for the week leading up to May 21 is only the latest demonstration that viral marketing will always be an art, not a science. Period. It's not the purest case study, because it involves the culmination of stark, widespread religious beliefs. But the fact remains, there's simply no sure formula. However, this doesn't mean marketers should ditch their social media budgets, because art has been rooted in science ever since the first crushing of berries yielded cave-wall pastels in, roughly, 3600 B.C. depending on which edition King James Bible you have.
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