Overnight Teen Idol 'Alex from Target' Was a Fake Corporate Meme—That's Not Viral, It's Offensive | Alternet

Cynical corporate marketers try to tap the energy of the Internet.

 

Photo Credit: via YouTube

November 6, 2014  |  

 

 

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Thursday 6 November 2014 06.45 EST

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I get annoyed when people scoff at stuff that’s meant “for teenage girls” – young adult novels, for instance, are great, and “teenage girl” culture is surely no dumber than a lot of the stuff that’s marketed to grown men. But I confess I am totally uninterested in mop-topped, Bieber-esque teen dreamboats. So the “Alex from Target” meme was entirely off my radar until Tuesday afternoon, when a marketer tried to take credit for instigating yet another viral phenomenon. This upset a lot of people. It appears we don’t like it when companies try to approximate the self-replicating, emergent energy of the internet from the top-down, instead of the bottom-up.

If Alex was off your radar too, the short version is: On Sunday, a tweeter found a picture on Tumblr, of a One Directiony-looking young man working the checkout at a Target department store. The people who usually like One Directiony-looking young men – namely One Direction fans, a weirdly and wildly powerful social-media demographic composed mainly of teen and tween girls – picked up the image and drove it to  the type of success that now accompanies viral hits. There were the copycat photos, the fan fiction, the tearful tweets of love and hate. 

Then, on Tuesday, some entertainment company called Breakr  said it had orchestrated the whole thing for reasons not immediately apparent. Among my demographic – cynical, hunk-neutral adults – the eye-rolling, the disgust and the frustrated announcements that everything on the internet is a lie spread almost as furiously as Alex’s picture had spread amongst the tweens.

We’ve seen the appalling fake meme happen before – see, for instance, the  role of marketing companies in the thankfully-vanished “Harlem Shake” fad. And even when, as with the Harlem Shake, the thing itself is annoying as all balls, we tend to be even more  irritated – even betrayed – at the news that the would-be phenom is actually the hideous progeny of corporate interests.

I don’t think corporations really understand how the creative power of the internet works – or at least which direction it runs. Memes are grassroots, organic, democratic – they bubble up from a community and become its linchpins. Marketing, by contrast, is imposed, unnatural, manipulated. Memes are handed around from person to person; marketing is handed down to people by companies. Trying to replace the former with the latter is irritating to users and, frankly, embarrassing for brands.

I’m a literate person with a functioning moral compass; obviously I think Richard Dawkins is a dillhole. But the original concept of a “meme” is not bullshit; it comes from Pre-Bullshit Dawkins in his Pre-Bullshit Days. The defining characteristic of a meme is that it acts like a gene, but for ideas. Memes are the DNA of culture.  Internetmemes are the DNA of the internet.

That’s why it feels so uncanny when such a brilliantly natural process gets hijacked by even the shrewdest of marketers. It’s like if the best and brightest from some corporate giant proudly announce that they’ve built a puppy in a lab. On the one hand, it’s still a puppy, right? On the other, its genes were spliced by the surgical-gloved Invisible Hand of the Market to appeal directly to the puppy-loving demographic. The lab-made puppy is real, just as the enthusiasm of tweens for a Target hottie is no doubt real. But nobody really wants to find out they’re playing with a Frankenpuppy. And nobody wants to be handed an advertisement, then told it’s part of a grassroots phenomenon. That’s not “viral”; it’s just condescending.

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