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From Joanna Weiss’ “Yes, more thoughts on Susan Boyle” on the Boston Globe’s Viewer Discretion TV blog:
I was discussing the Boyle phenomenon this morning with MIT professor Henry Jenkins, an expert on pop culture and fandom and the author of “Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide.” He says the reaction might have been smaller without Twitter, a new way of spreading news more quickly than ever to communities with shared interest. (I personally first heard about her from a poster on our weekly “American Idol” chat.) And he thinks the YouTube video of Boyle’s “Britain’s Got Talent” audition—100 million views and counting—wouldn’t have the same weight on this side of the pond if we didn’t already know Simon Cowell. Part of the thrill, he contends, is watching Cowell’s reaction shift from trademark sneer to deep appreciation. He also notes that “Britain’s Got Talent” has a tradition of finding true underdog talents; before Boyle, after all, there was Paul Potts. “You have a feeling that that show has a ‘genre expectation’ of finding that story,” Jenkins told me. Boyle worked because “she was just so quirky and so good.”
