Image by Getty Images via @daylife  Kurt Badenhausen’s story here on Forbes about Jeremy Lin’s selection for the Time Asia front cover, after only five games for the New York Knicks, is perhaps less surprising than Lin’s social media dominance over the past seven days.  Kashmir Hill, also on Forbes, says Lin was social media prepped before stardom came his way.Was this a story waiting for its star to show up?  I don’t think Lin was more or less engaged with social media than many people of his generation. Even after the past week he is less connected online than many of his sports star competitors. However, the Lin story does illustrate how the news is becoming the news, how trends and trending are now the story.  First a look at young people’s social media habits.  The youngest app-creator in the app store is 12 years old. An AVG survey late last year showed that most kids have reached “digital maturity” by the age of 11 (in fact about half are active on Facebook and Twitter by age 10). How AVG define “maturity” is open to question. They simply mean “active”, when in fact in theory they should not be. My 13 year old has been posting YouTube videos for two years now and was a regular on the Club Penguin cheat scene at 10.  These kids see a form of online stardom as part of their future experience. They experience entertainment as participants. It’s about the closeness of celebrity rather than distance.  I think something else is going on with the Lin story – and I don’t mean to diminish Lin’s achievement or to doubt his new post-frenzy valuation for a second but part of the frenzy is trivial, another part is best described as sociological – and then there’s the story itself.  Young audiences, those Lin’s age and lower thrive on triggering power law dynamics. That is getting news to scale with comparatively little effort. To get the Lin story to scale, requires very little investment. Marketers call it going viral but we know it is not at all like a virus or contagion. Most “viral” activity doesn’t actually spread node to node in a network. It is far more spontaneous than that.  Now amplification can be done in 140 characters, or images on Pinterest or on fan pages, why not join in? Young people are part of the celebrity machine. They have a role.
The explosion of the Jeremy Lin story illustrates how news is becoming .... the news. Read how social media turns a trend into a story and what it means for your daily diet of information.