In order to go global, these YouTube generationals need to get out of their bedroom and get into the real world. That was the message shared by King Kapisi at a recent amateur rap battle he hosted in Ōtara, South Auckland, in an effort to promote young people to share their talents to a live audience. I couldn’t help but think however, that in fact in society now the reverse is indeed true; sharing with a local audience will only get you known to a local audience, whereas as long as that bedroom has an internet connection, your audience doesn’t cap until at least 3 billion. But perhaps this is not the right way to look at it, for despite personally agreeing with the fact that getting out into the ‘real world’ (a term I am sure will fade quickly in response to a blending of the real and the digital) is healthy, there might be more to it that just views. Manuel Cebrian, a researcher part of the ‘Social Physics’ group from MITs Human Dynamics Lab, aptly informs us that viral actually isn’t enough. That despite known social movements that have experienced success through social media (to the point I do not see the relevance in listing them here), it still remains largely unpredictable and ultimately ineffective; a virus that in many cases goes without symptoms. Whilst many may disagree, I challenge them to consider the motive behind the majority of viral media snippets, their legitimacy, endurance in our conscious thought, and the network of enterprises that have been developed and sustained to manufacture a high view count for the purposes of gaining advertising revenue for their clients. Indeed as the globalisation of media relentlessly continued, the dilution of relevance will undoubtedly do so given the vast volume of content we are exposed to. Therefore authenticity will, I believe, become increasingly produced through the ‘local’ scale and not the ‘global’ scale, through connections to real people and real places. Then perhaps, this authenticity can be the thing that drives it to the global scale, but only if it’s relevant to people in other places. So for now, I’m with King Kapisi - sure we can reach out to millions by staying in a single room with just a screen, but how strong will that connection be when we are competing with so much? If indeed quality is better than quantity then let’s make a few local connections that represent a virus with symptoms - it may be small but at least it does something.