Grant McCracken: Will Digital Culture Ever Invent A Homer Simpson?

First Observation:

Entertainment Weekly recently gave us the “100 greatest characters of the last 20 years.” The list includes Buffy, Jack Sparrow, Rachel from Friends, Harry Potter, John Locke, Miranda Priestly, and Ron Burgundy.

Second Observation:

In his latest book, Clay Shirky suggests that we now have around 1 trillion hours of creative surplus at our disposal. We use this time variously, offering Lolcats and, yes, blog posts.

The question:

Will Shirky’s surplus ever create a character that will appear on the Entertainment Weekly list? Will we ever create our own Homer?

Some thoughts:

I am not being argumentative. This is an open question. The answer could be “soon” or it could be “never,” and I’ll be happy. However we answer this question, we will have improved our anthropological understanding of contemporary culture.

There is a general presumption, I think, that we are sitting on a gusher. Shirky’s surplus is so vast, so inexorable that the creation of an EW “100 winner” can’t be far off. And it’s not that we are talking about the proverbial 100 monkeys. It won’t happen by evolutionary accident. It will happen because our use of the Shirky surplus gets better and better. This argument says “soon.”

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