Hen­ry Jenk­ins (right) mix­es up the names but has good com­men­tary on the Susan Boyle phe­nom­e­non in How Sarah [Susan] Spread and What it Means. I’ve been quot­ing lines over on my Tum­blr blog but this is a good one for Quak­er read­ers because I think it says some­thing about the Con­ver­gent Friends culture:

When we talk about pop cos­mopoli­tanism, we are most often talking
about Amer­i­can teens doing cos­play or lis­ten­ing to K‑Pop albums, not
church ladies gath­er­ing to pray for the suc­cess of a British reality
tele­vi­sion con­tes­tant, but it is all part of the same process. We are
reach­ing across bor­ders in search of con­tent, zones which were used to
orga­nize the dis­tri­b­u­tion of con­tent in the Broad­cast era, but which
are much more flu­id in an age of par­tic­i­pa­to­ry cul­ture and social
networks.

We live in a world where con­tent can be accessed quick­ly from any
part of the world assum­ing it some­how reach­es our radar and where the
col­lec­tive intel­li­gence of the par­tic­i­pa­to­ry cul­ture can identify
con­tent and spread the word rapid­ly when need­ed. Susan Boyle in that
sense is a sign of big­ger things to come — con­tent which wasn’t
designed for our mar­ket, con­tent which was­n’t timed for such rapid
glob­al cir­cu­la­tion, gain­ing much greater vis­i­bil­i­ty than ever before
and net­works and pro­duc­tion com­pa­nies hav­ing trou­ble keep­ing up with
the rapid­ly esca­lat­ing demand.

Susan Boyle’s video was pro­duced for a U.K.-only show but social media has allowed us to share it across that bor­der. In the Con­ver­gent Friends move­ment, we’re dis­cov­er­ing “con­tent which was­n’t designed for our mar­ket” – Friends of all dif­fer­ent stripes hav­ing direct access to the work and thoughts of oth­er types of Friends, which we are able to sort through and spread almost imme­di­ate­ly. In this con­text, the “net­works and pro­duc­tions com­pa­nies” would be our year­ly meet­ings and larg­er Friends bodies.