Need your help making my Boss video break the Internet
Have you ever seen a 66-year-old man crowd surfing?
I hadn't, until Tuesday night. That changed during Bruce Springsteen's concert at the United Center. During "Hungry Heart," he walked off the stage along a cordoned-off aisle and ended up behind the so-called "pit" area where the most rabid of the Boss' fans stand ear-splittingly close to the stage.
Because I have a smartphone and can get caught up in the excitement of social media as much as the next teenager, it was only natural that I shot a 21-second video of Bruce falling back into the crowd, which dutifully carted him on their hands back to the stage. (For our online readers, I have attached my video; for those of you reading this the old-fashioned way, here's all you need to know: During my video, Springsteen shouts out, "How'm I doin'?" and "I can't see a thing.") I posted this gem on Facebook, got some likes, a few shares and some comments. ("'He's gonna break a hip,' Jim Davis thought to himself," one sage observer noted.)
But imagine my surprise when, before the concert ended, my video had been viewed a few hundred times. The numbers grew before settling in at 834 as of Friday afternoon. This unparalleled personal success prompted me to brag that my Bruce video was going viral and no doubt ready to break the Internet. A confession: In the early days of social mediaizing,I honestly thought a video had to hit a certain number of views to cross the viral threshold. I was too embarrassed to ask for the particulars. Now, I'm hip enough to know that when they say something "breaks the Internet," it doesn't mean the Internet actually breaks; it just kind of overshadows everything else.
There really is a more serious - and important - side to all this social media fun. This past week, it came in the form of a missing elderly couple from Wood Dale, both of whom suffer from mild-to-moderate dementia. They were in their car, and without cellphones. Police, of course, notified the media, which dutifully posted stories ASAP. Those stories were shared across Facebook, and resulted in numerous tips on the couple's whereabouts. In the end, they were found by an alert Deerfield cop who spotted their van.
More examples abound of people helping people, but this activity is important to us as well. Today, 20 percent of all our page views on dailyherald.com come from social media referrals, and 90 percent of those come from Facebook. So it behooves us to give this new phenomena our full attention.
As I was researching - on the Internet, of course - the uniqueness of my Bruce video, imagine my surprise when I discovered the Tuesday-night concert wasn't the first time he'd crowd-surfed. He apparently started when he was in his early 60s, and often during "Hungry Heart." And guess what: There are all sorts of videos, shot from much better proximity than mine, including one where it appears Bruce is handed onto the shooter's camera-phone. My quick online tour showed one such video had been viewed 16,576 times. That's nothing compared to "Gangnam Style" by PSY, which has been viewed more than 2 billion times, a YouTube record, according to my good friends at Wikipedia.
Now that's viral.
So, help me out, Facebook friends, readers of this column and fans of the Boss: Take a look at my video, pass it along, tell your friends to share. Together we can make Internet history.
Only 1,999,999,166 views to go!
jdavis@dailyherald.com