For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Earnest Pettie, and I’ve worked in the viral web for over 15 years. I currently lead trends research at YouTube on the Culture and Trends team. This site is my “Rough Draft,” where I am writing weekly mini essays on the internet and culture. The goal is to just get things out of my head instead of letting them die a slow death, waiting to be perfected.
I’d like to send you these posts in a newsletter for a few reasons. Because these are new and emerging ideas, I’d love feedback from other people who are interested in the internet and culture. I don’t want those conversations to be mediated through social media platforms. In the long run, I’d love to develop a community of like-minded trends folks.
This newsletter will be:
- Free, always.
- Weekly, mostly. Except when it isn’t.
- About the internet and culture, primarily.
If this sounds like something you’d be interested in, please subscribe!
Previously on “Rough Draft”
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The Monoculture: hiding in plain sight
The monoculture isn’t dead; it has simply moved to venues like gaming and social feeds where traditional metrics fail to look. This is the final part of my series on the architecture of culture.
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The Evolution of Community
Social connection hasn’t disappeared; it has migrated from physical villages to hyper-specific virtual communities that now act as the incubators of culture. Part 2 of my series on the new architecture of culture maps this landscape and explains why we misunderstand the cultural gravity of the niche.
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How to Understand “Relevance”
The internet has reorganized relevance into three distinct layers—Personal, Social, and Cultural—rendering the old “trickle-down” funnel obsolete. Part 1 of my series on the new architecture of culture explores how to navigate these new paths to cultural ubiquity.
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How to deal with the feeling of too many “trends”
There’s an opinion becoming dominant in the world of “trends” that the Internet is generating too many trends too quickly for anyone to keep up with, that the word itself is becoming meaningless as a result. I think this perspective is the antidote.
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How Coyote VS Acme and Alicia Keys connect to my favorite corner of the internet
The NFL’s altering of Alicia Keys’s Super Bowl performance and Warner Bros. cancellation of Coyote vs. Acme call to mind one of my favorite corners of the internet, Lost Media.
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Flowers: Chicken Noodle Soup (a personal reflection)
It’s 2006. You open YouTube in Firefox and see the Flash-based video player showing low-resolution footage of kids…