ABSTRACT
In late 2012, the video for the Korean rapper Psy’s “Gangnam Style,” a song that provides ironic commentary on the lavish lifestyles associated with the South Korean elite, became the first video to receive one billion hits on YouTube. In the popular media, this quintessential twenty-first-century milestone was greeted with great fanfare for the way it showed not only the global popularity of the entire “Gangnam Style” phenomenon-the song, the original video, the dance moves contained in it, the memes, the hundreds of versions and parodies created by YouTube users-but also the remarkable power of social media itself. If CNN’s live coverage of the 1991 Gulf War had served as a declaration of how twenty-four-hour cable news was taking over the news industry, the transnational success of Psy’s video confirmed the remarkable ascendance of YouTube and other social media platforms, particularly their ability to act as distributors and multipliers of cultural content and cultural trends.
