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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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 dancing to a song called Chicken Noodle Soup. It feels like that day’s bit of Internet fun. You have no idea that those few videos represent Black culture preparing to forever shift how the internet and music
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2024: Year of the Billionfluencer
The rise of billionfluencers marks a shift as billionaires are now seen as objects of fandom, wielding great influence through social media, directing discourse and attention.
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Why music is memes and we make the hits
In today’s landscape, the popularity of a song is often less about a song speaking to you and more about a song speaking for you.
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Is Everything Fandom?
As the things that traditionally bound us together have receded in our social lives and the internet is increasingly that social glue, have we allowed fandoms to replace institutions in our lives?