This Sunday marks the fourth week of Advent; in a week, it will be the feast of the birth of our Lord. My mother has been blasting Christmas music. In between choir boys singing "Silent Night" and Bing Crosby, the radio DJ, told his audience that the number one performer of 2010 is Lady Gaga.
Lady Gaga is more than a manufacturer of pop music and catchy tunes. She came into the music scene two years ago, infecting the senses and causing a strong urge to move it-move it with her first single, "Just Dance"-- closely followed by more hits: "Poker Face," "Paparazzi" and "Telephone" (with Beyonce). She has become, in the most secular use of the term, an icon. Her image is a mosaic: outrageous, loud, provocative, creative and unabashedly out there. Just to get an idea of how culturally embedded Lady Gaga is, let's use the technology litmus test. Of her 21 uploaded videos on YouTube, the lowest viewed video has over 1 million clicks and her highest is over 319 million (the music video for "Bad Romance"). At present, the LadyGagaVevo channel has 342, 426 subscribers and over a billion total upload views. She has over 7 million followers on Twitter and almost 25 million people "like" her on Facebook.
Now let's compare Lady Gaga's popularity to, say, the Roman Catholic Church, who has over a billion members worldwide. The Vatican has its own channel on YouTube. It has 900 uploaded videos, mostly excerpts of speeches by Pope Benedict XVI, translated by a voice over. The most viewed video has over 105 thousand views; the lowest has a few hundred. The Vatican joined YouTube on November 21, 2005 but only has 26, 392 subscribers. On Twitter and Facebook, its fans and followers are collectively below 12,000.
