Influence in the Online Era

Today, we're seeing a new generation of street dancers influencing a worldwide audience outside of film, tv shows, and live performances. Those mediums are still incredibly powerful. But the past five years of the Youtube era, since the website's beginning in 2005, have allowed a skilled dancer who isn't in mass media productions to be influential on others. That is an incredible development. Now, a dancer can self-publish her own videos online and create an impression if she's reasonably skilled.

Most footage of old school street dancers that is publicly available today are usually from mass media productions: tv shows like Soul Train and Solid Gold, films like Breakin' and Beat Street, and recordings of live performances in the 1970s and 1980s. For this mass media, we relied on a small group of tastemakers - the producers and filmmakers - who determined which dancers would appear on screen. Perhaps these dancers had to audition to appear on the show or get a featured role in a film. But we lack a visual record of the street dance culture that existed at jams, sessions, and non-mass media occasions during these years. There's very little documentation of this scene, so we can only draw our own mental pictures based on impressions. In 2010, an ambitious dancer doesn't need to wait for MTV or a Hollywood studio to break their name to the public. She can do it herself. That's tremendous power for a dancer highlighting the potential that she has to chart her own career and control her public self-image. So today, dancers in mass media and those who are getting down in their garages can both influence a worldwide audience.

Of course, when video becomes a populist medium like on Youtube's platform, we deal with overcrowding and the proliferation of too many dance videos online. Every minute there is a considerable amount of footage being uploaded onto Youtube. Not even Google's search engine algorithm can uncover every valuable gem in its library. One could argue that an ambitious dancer today needs to be even more saavy and clever to break out from the crowd. But the ability to self-publish has already transformed our landscape despite the crowded space. Anyone can come out from anywhere and make a splash. And that is enough to mark a clear historical difference from the 1970s and 1980s.

The potential that lies in self-publishing runs deep. It suggests the possibility for street dancers to carve their own career opportunities independently from Hollywood studios and mass media. Some business-minded dancers have already done so. Even dance crews that appear on MTV's America's Best Dance Crew keep their reputations in the public eye by marketing themselves, booking gigs, and extending their popularity run from the show. Whether it's the Beat Freaks or Poreotics, these crews are prolonging the financial rewards of the show's exposure by self-publishing online: creating videos, websites, and blogs to satisfy their fans. No Hollywood studio or tv network is going out of their way for them.

What will be the result of this new movement? Will the history of our street dance culture become more complicated as there now our multiple media examples of our styles floating around? Possibly. Or we may just need to make a stronger, more organized effort to curate the media that's out there. It seems that's what's missing from today's street dance scene. We have an overabundance of visual material that's being shared online. But there's no one central curator or group that is making the connections among the material like a professor or cultural critic would do. We need them soon though. The rate at which we're uploading material online is growing exponentially and we need sharp minds to interpret it for a larger worldwide audience that wants to understand.