Taking Three Wolves to the Moon
By:
June 4, 2009
We know, we know: the Three Wolves Moon T-Shirt thing is old news: snarky hipster posts an Amazon “review” of one of those silk-screened t-shirts of the trippy druidic sort — others sport dragons, dolphins, and fey, buxom mermaids — and a few days and hundreds of reviews later, it’s the most popular apparel item on Amazon.
It’s the texture of the phenomenon that’s interesting to us now. Amazon allows customers to post not only reviews, but also photos. At this writing, 137 customer photos appear on Amazon. While many of them show customers wearing the shirt, others seek more creative ends:
Photo posting presumably originated with the expectation that customers would share their uses of Amazon products, enjoying the frisson of appearing online while contributing their few calories of advertising power to the product-spewing gastrointestestinal system that is Amazon.
With its ever-evolving set of reviewing, photo-posting, and other social networking offerings, Amazon is the prototype of the social media. It’s a publishing platform on its own, and its authors are neither independent of nor precisely parasitic upon the consumerist leviathan. Posting at Amazon, customers become like the remoras that clean the skin of sharks or the birds that purportedly feed from the mouths of crocodiles.