"I Like Turtles" Boy - At the End of the Day, We Made Him Famous

   The power of media these days have become so great, that some were led to believe that the media is domineering people’s lives. Media truly is influential, to a degree that the powerful media corporations are trying to divide what is important from unimportant. Even well-renowned modern-day entertainers such as Jim Morrison have quoted, “Whoever controls the mind controls the mind.” Yet do media truly have overpowering impacts on people’s lives? One cannot say that the media totally controls the people, like a puppeteer playing a marionette, because the receptors of the media’s information-transportation system, the people, have wills of their own – while still “marionettes,” people can still think, perform things with volition, and cut off the strings if possible and necessary. It is the people who truly decide, out of the selective information pool that the media has created, whether a piece of information is meaningful or not.

  

   Then why has the “I like turtles” boy become such a viral phenomenon? One may argue that if people have wills to determine whether something is important or not, such trivial information would not have been so hotly debated and discussed. Yet the truth is what one deems “important” does not have to be the one with most practical information. May of the year 2007 was the day when the “I like turtles” boy had become on the broadcast. If the importance of something is calculated by the depth of information, people should remember the reunification of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad and the Moscow Patriarchate after their 80 years of division, which happened to happen in the same month. Yet the commoners’ history remembers more of the zombie boy innocently saying “I like turtles,” and less of the seemingly important religious cornerstone.

   Perhaps the reason lies in the very fact that it was out of the media’s intention to selectively choose what is important. This happening was more of an accident than a planned operation. A “desperate reporter,” as David Segal from Washington post remarked, collides with a zombie-faced kid who blurts three words that are totally random. This randomness worked as refreshment to the receivers who were practically fed up with the so-called important news. It is not because the boy was talented or untalented in a particular way. Simply, the very purity of the arbitrariness and its lack of precedence were what grasped people’s attention, because it was not of conduct, but of chance.

   One may never know why that boy became famous. Perhaps there was a boy who said “I like snakes” in the past and the history does not remember. Yet the very randomness of the words he said and that he became famous is what truly interests the people. At the end of the day, the people can only conclude one thing: “Whether the incident was funny or not, we made him famous – or infamous.”