Homework #11A
I use various social media platforms daily, and my feed is always filled with different memes, videos, posts, photos, etc., and it’s never the same thing day to day. I’ve seen the rise and fall of many different memes and trends, including viral videos and livestreams. One of the videos that was really interesting and relevant to what I have observed on Tumblr was Dao Nguyen’s “What makes something go viral?” video. She talked about a livestream where they pranked one of their coworkers by putting livestock in his office. This was expected to take 10 minutes with an audience size of roughly 100 people, those who knew the inside joke at the office regarding this coworker. However, due to various delays, it ended up taking much, much longer and accrued around 90,000 viewers. Nguyen believes, after analyzing the 80,000+ comments, that it was the “shared anticipation” of what was going to happen that lead to the large amassment of viewers that caused that livestream to go viral, and I completely agree.
One particular event that comes to mind immediately is when I watched a game release livestream with some of my friends. We’re all big fans of the company and the games they release (Nintendo), so we all waiting eagerly for the livestream to begin at its designated time that day, along with hundred of thousands of other viewers around the world. On my social media platforms, the viewing link was passed around and shared from person to person to come and watch. Everyone was anticipating new characters to be added to a game that was being released within a few months, as well as ports of other games to the current console and new games to be released in the coming days, weeks, and months. In the livestream chat, people were referencing all the memes that were created before the livestream aired, excited for some of their predictions (or jokes) to come true. It was that “shared anticipation” that brought all those viewers together to watch a single livestream, including myself and my friends.
Another instance that isn’t a livestream, but nonetheless viral: Bongo Cat. A video was uploaded on Twitter in May that was an edit of someone else’s animation of a simply drawn cat slamming its paws on a table repeatedly. It had been edited to make it look like it was playing bongos to a fast-paced Mario song. I don’t believe it was immediately popular then (compared to now), but gradually remixes of that cat were uploaded on Youtube. Eventually, it got super viral fairly recently, with dozens of remixes made with different instruments, songs, and even a custom generator that would let you make your own Bongo Cat memes. Though it didn’t gather the masses all at once, it was still passed around to hundreds of thousands of people and shared to hundreds of thousands more. I actually saw a very simple analysis post on Tumblr about the Bongo Cat meme that changed my views on how memes evolve and change to fit the modern era, and it was simply: “bongo cat is literally the same thing as keyboard cat”, referencing the popular video released in the mid-2000s of a cat “playing” a keyboard. Many memes of today have similar preceding counterparts that could be argued to be their true origins, which reminded me of how we discussed in class that creativity does not spring from nothing and is often a remix of something that came before it.