BUZZ NEWS

The Susan Boyle Phenomenon

Posted on May 5, 2009
C. Werle

If you haven’t heard of Susan Boyle yet, you missed the most successful viral video of all time: the scene in which Susan Boyle sings "I dreamed a dream" has been viewed over 120 million times in the past 3 weeks. The embed code is no longer available, click on the photo below to be redirected to the YouTube page and watch the video.

The success is so huge that it has already been dubbed the "Susan Boyle phenomenon". In fact, a number of people question such a great success considering that she in no way profited from any promotion. Moreover, the viralisation of this video has not created any financial gain for the television station on which this originally aired.

This video plays on the counter-intuitive: spectators are used to believing in appearances, and do not expect a brilliant performance by someone who does not fit the ideals of beauty and youth, two fundamental criteria of media. Additionally, the video was pushed by a classic media (as it is an excerpt off the television program "Britain’s Got Talent"), and has the advantage of being in English, meaning that it can be viewed around the world with relative ease. On top of that, the song is easy to understand and is a popular favorite.

We can also ask ourselves if the "discovery" of the singer was by chance or if the entire thing was staged, as they often are in these types of programs. It is clear that the woman really can sing, but there is something unnatural about the body language of the judges. Did they feign surprise? Because of this, viewers wonder if it’s a fake, and watch it numerous times to attempt to find out. The "fake or not fake" question has generated a deal of success for other viral campaigns for such companies as Samsung, Nike, and Converse. Mini just recently parodied the fake phenomenon through a viral video of their own.

Finally, the key factor, along with all the aforementioned ones, is that Susan Boyle is a "normal" person like we are, who has lived through sad events in her life, just as we have. Her example gives us hope, especially in this present time of crisis when many of us are worried and disoriented. She is the personification of a dream, much like Barack Obama personified the American Dream during the last elections. It is truly a combination of factors that contributed to the enormous popularity of this viral video.