THIS summer, as in so many summers gone by, young aspirants to the creative class — would-be writers, musicians, artists, editors, comedians, performers, thinkers, provocateurs — are stepping off buses in Port Authority and trains in Penn Station, navigating their rented trucks and borrowed cars through outer-borough blocks. These new arrivals come to New York, first and foremost, to find one another, a flock of other young people like themselves. But they come also to seek success, to chase their “big break,” that vague but real moment when, as if by magic, one suddenly finds oneself on the opposite side of the glass from one’s nose print.
Is New York still worth the trip? Recessions tend to be hard on youthful dreams, but this downturn has proved especially dispiriting. Those in the print media have come to see their present fiscal woes as not merely cyclical but structural, and so their slashed workforce and diminished output seem unlikely to rebound any time soon. Galleries have closed. Foundations, their endowments devastated, have cut back on grants for the arts. Internships across the board are down by more than 20 percent. And those of us who still hold full-time jobs in creative fields are clinging to them for dear life, making it difficult for young people to pry any free for themselves.
Meanwhile, another destination beckons, a place that courses with all the raw ambition and creative energy that the hard times seem to have drained from New York. I am referring, of course, to the Internet, which over the past decade has slowly become the de facto heart of American culture: the public space in which our most influential conversations transpire, in which our new celebrities are discovered and touted, in which fans are won and careers made.
Wherever young creatives physically reside today, in their endeavors they are increasingly moving online: posting their photos, writing, videos and music, building a “presence” in the hope of winning an audience. Monetary rewards on the Internet are still scarce, it is true, but the cost of living is cheap and, more important, the opportunities for attention are plentiful. Every month more YouTube sensations emerge, more bloggers ink big book deals, more bands blow up through music Web sites and MySpace, and every day more young people seek their “big break” in the virtual megalopolis rather than in (or as well as in) the physical one.
The experience of moving online actually bears quite a few similarities to becoming a New Yorker. Disorienting and seemingly endless, the Internet conversation moves at lightning speed and according to unstated social rules that can bewilder outsiders. Also, like New Yorkers, residents of the Internet do not suffer fools, or mince words in belittling them, as anyone who has contributed a redundant post to Metafilter, or an earnest comment to Gawker, can attest.
In their scope, both the Internet and New York are profoundly humbling: young people accustomed to feeling special about their gifts are inevitably jarred, upon arrival, to discover just how many others are trying to do precisely the same, with equal or greater success. (For a vivid demonstration of this online, try to invent a play on words, and then Google it. You’ll be convinced that there is, in fact, “nothing new in the cloud” — a joke that a British I.B.M. employee beat me to last November.)
Moreover, the presence of an audience causes online residents to style themselves as outsized personae, as characters on a public stage. On the Internet, as in creative New York, everyone can possess a tiny measure of celebrity, and everyone pays attention to what everyone else is doing, all the time.
Six months after my own arrival in this city, when I began a brief stint in 2000 working in the Condé Nast building, I was surprised to see minor incidents from the elevators, or the cafeteria, appear in the pages of The New York Observer, just as a decade before they might have shown up in Spy magazine. Today, of course, that sort of mirthful over-scrutiny is everyone’s lot, as any misdirected e-mail message in any city or industry whatsoever is likely to find its way onto blogs and into the public domain.But online, when creative affirmation finally arrives, it takes a very different form than it has in New York. In the offline world, getting a “big break” is a matter of impressing a subjective intelligence, one person or a few people who look at work with an experienced eye and declare there’s something to it. Up until now, it has been intimate encouragement that has literally set the course of whole careers: a gallery offers a show, a record label dangles a contract, a prospective boss plucks one résumé from a sheaf, and a path forward is set.
Such moments of recognition, by individuals or small groups, have helped to decide not merely who succeeds but at what. A nice note from a famous poet can cause an amorphously creative young person to throw the novels and screenplays overboard and take up verse for life. Without intervention from The New Yorker, John Updike might well have been a cartoonist, James Thurber a journalist, William Shawn himself a composer.
On the Internet, however, it’s not one single subjectivity but a popular hive-mind that decides. The “big break” arrives when, with lightning speed and often to one’s own surprise, the inscrutable pack decides to start forwarding one’s content around.
Like the note from the poet, the viral blowup online is transformative: The Gregory Brothers, transplants to Brooklyn from Radford, Va., are a serious soul band, but ever since the sudden success, this spring, of their deliriously funny YouTube series “Auto-Tune the News” (which turns news footage of politicians and pundits into pop jams), they’ve been devoting ever more time to keeping their hundreds of thousands of online fans entertained. Talk to anyone who makes culture online and you’ll often hear a similar story — of the first Web site that took off, or the video or the new meme successfully disseminated.
And so the move online changes how we make art, but the road ahead there is uncharted and perilous. In the old model, young creatives dreamed of entertaining the millions, but in practice they could do so only by first pleasing a small group of gatekeepers: established figures who controlled access to the audience and, in doing so, protected young people from that audience, its obsessions and desertions, its adoration and its scorn. These old hands had to worry about the numbers, of course, but they rationalized the upticks and downticks through a certain set of professional values, which they themselves spent years imbibing and which they in turn pressed upon their wards.
Online, though, the audience can be yours right away, direct and unmediated — if you can figure out how to find it and, what’s harder, to keep it. What to you is a big break is, to this increasingly sophisticated and fickle audience, just one forwarded e-mail message in a teeming inbox, to be refilled again tomorrow with a whole new slate of distractions. “Microcelebrity” is now the rule, with respect not only to the size of one’s fan base but also to the duration of its love. Believe it or not, the Internet is a tougher town than New York; fewer people make it here, but no one there seems to make it for long.
Bill Wasik, a senior editor at Harper’s, is the author of “And Then There’s This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture.”
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