How to be interesting
A couple months ago a video made its viral way around the internet as some videos do. It was a mashup of the Sesame Street movie Follow that Bird and the Beastie Boys’ song Sabotage.
Mashups aren’t uncommon. Afterall, that’s a huge lesson most of us already know about creativity. Great ideas are often the collision of a couple different disciplines, technologies, inventions, etc.
But is that all there is to it? Or is there something a bit deeper about that video and why it became so viral.
Why was it so interesting?
Murray Davis was a professor of sociology at Northern Illinois University. In 1971, he published an interesting paper. Literally. It’s called “That’s Interesting!”
Davis investigated why some researchers and their theories get people’s attention and others don’t.
He found that ideas don’t become interesting because they are simply true. “All of the interesting...