People of Walmart: Mean Photoblog Inexplicably Triggers Class War
If you haven’t yet seen viral viral People of Wal-Mart, you can either click on that there hyperlink or envision this: a sky blue, bare-bones RSS stream of a blog that features strange-looking and/or poorly-dressed people in and around Wal-Mart across the country. In the lingo of the site, “Wal-Creatures.” Unlike most out-of-nowhere web trends — who could really get upset about Hot Chicks With Douchebags or Keyboard Cat? — People of Wal-Mart seems to have really touched a nerve and offended many of its readers. And it’s gotten even more traffic in the process.
Though its traffic seems to have since cooled a bit, it was “Volcanic” yesterday, rivaling the various “gmail down“-related queries of the day. Most of the site’s tweets of the past few days have been apologies for the frequent traffic-driven crashes.
The Awl’s Choire Sicha was all over this site way before it got big — which is to say, five days ago, when it was merely a Digg phenomenon. Sicha’s well-reasoned, three-part takedown culminates like so:
“This is purely for entertainment purposes and strictly limited to the outrageously bad / ugly / creepy / crazy shoppers,” says their About page. Yeah, well: so is going outside anywhere in the great swath of space between Hell’s Kitchen and Eagle Rock. But their photo captions are slightly off, and cruel, in the manner of people who have never written a blog about other people before, or at least have never done so by thinking about other people and how they’d read about themselves.
Many other bloggers agree. In The Awl’s comments section, the always-insightful Abe Sauer writes, “This and Cintra’s JC Penny thing differ in no real way (the latter being this blog with a thesaurus) in that they choose to target what they see as the visual failings of others.” People of Wal-Mart is “a sad example of a world gone retarded,” writes pamil-visions.net.
In light of this, Monday’s Time profile of the site (in the Arts section of their website) comes across as weirdly toothless. Time‘s Claire Sudath did some capital J Journalism and interviewed two of the young Indianan brothers who founded the site along with a friend. It’s taken as a given that the site is edgy and hilarious, except for the throwaway line “People of Walmart’s founders expect some people to take issue with the site’s tone.” Huh? You don’t have to agree with Sicha and his counterparts, but you should at least take their criticism into account. Maybe this is all a part of Time‘s misguided mission to establish a totally different presence on the Web, but it comes across as pandering and forcedly carefree, like an employee who laughs a little too hard at his boss’s jokes.
In this Bright Lights, Big Internet era, it’s easy for a cultural phenomenon to emerge without the support of the kingmakers of the past. But when fallen kingmakers like Time laugh and uncomfortably play along, it’s just sad, and it leaves bloggers to do all the real work.
