We live in fickle times, but this is ridiculous. New York, suddenly, has gone nuts over Jeremy Lin, an Asian-American, Harvard-educated point guard who has played only two good games for the NBA’s hapless Knicks. And that’s just the beginning: In China, Lin’s name was among the top-10 search terms on Monday on Sina Weibo, the Chinese equivalent to Twitter. Last Friday, most of the world hadn’t heard of him. Today, you could make a case he’s the most famous Asian-American athlete since Tiger Woods. Which is just kooky. No question, Lin played really, really well against the New Jersey Nets and Utah Jazz over the weekend, but that hardly makes him the second coming of Oscar Robertson.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’ve got nothing against Jeremy Lin. He was a high school phenom in Palo Alto, Calif., and I know some Asian American kids out here in Berkeley who worship the ground he walks on. Lin didn’t make the NBA because he’s freakishly tall, like the 7-foot-4 Yao Ming (Lin is “only” 6″3′). He’s there because he can play ball, because he has a wicked fast first step when he drives to the basket, and he knows how to deliver the rock to the big guys (a skill a surprising number of “legitimate” NBA guards show little interest in mastering). He’s a triumph of will over genetic endowment, a fact that makes him inspiring to an entire generation of Californian kids restless with their model minority shackles.
But you can like Lin, and you can root for him, and yet still find his instantaneous, Tim Tebow-like ascent (in more ways than one!) to pop-cultural phenom — LINSANITY! — to be more than a little disorienting. Jeremy Lin is the latest example of how our socially-mediated, always-on world can churn any data point, any outrage, any act of heroism or moment of despair into a full-scale world-wide frenzy in less time than it took me to write this sentence.
We’ve seen this before. The same forces — social media, digital publishing tools, smartphone ubiquity — that are giving us Linsanity just blitzkrieged the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure Foundation. They torpedoed Hollywood’s attempt to force SOPA and PIPA through Congress and blew up Bank of America’s plan to charge a $5 fee for debit card use. They fueled the Occupy Wall Street movement, magnified every Tebow prostration before God into a worldwide religious orgy and are ever-more ready to pounce on any misstep by a Mitt Romney or a Newt Gingrich and explode it into an instant political crisis.
And the crazy thing is, we’re figuring this out as it goes along — and giving the phenomenon more power. As we understand this new world, and submerge ourselves in it, we are beginning to take our cues from it.
Just want every one to know that I wrote about #linsanity this morning long before it became “hip” this afternoon: bit.ly/Apjdq4The mainstream media now seems to be adapting its coverage of events on the basis of whether something blows up in social media as much as it does from the perceived newsworthiness of the event itself. It’s startling, but also natural: When you see a fire start to blaze, you run to cover to it. And so Linsanity breeds more Linsanity.
— Jon (@viewmyseats) February 8, 2012
by Andrew Leonard, Salon | Read more:
Photo: AP/Kathy Kmonicek
