Re: Pardon Me

What makes a "meme" go viral?

(Translation: why does a thought, idea, song, picture, whatever, strike a chord in people so that it becomes one of the "right things" to talk about?)

Whole lifetimes have been spent contemplating, studying, and writing about why an idea like Christianity, for example, hit at just the right moment in human history for it to "catch on." The ideas themselves weren't necessarily new, but for some reason the moment was right for people to truly hear and accept them. Likewise the Enlightenment (which spawned more than one revolution based on the need to be self-governing, a massive departure from the feudalism that preceded it, at least in Western culture), feminism (which made several attempts but didn't really capture our imaginations until the 60s), or an interest in vampires (this one has come and gone a few times, but right now it's serious fiction fodder). 

About two weeks ago, a web-scourer posted a video on the web culture/tech site, Boing Boing. It was a dreadful but also funny video of a woman (Maxine Swaby) singing a song called "Pardon Me." The production values are horrific, the song itself is trite and silly, and her performance is, what shall I say, amateur at best. But for some reason, it was also worth passing along to friends.

When I first listened to it on YouTube, it had about 300 hits.

I forwarded it to my friends at work, who immediately embraced it - passing it along, and even learning the song and playing it on guitars, or bursting into a chorus randomly during the day.

Soon the "re:'s" started appearing on YouTube.

A "re:" (which is also used in the verb form, as in, "We can re that.") is basically a video that comments on another posted video. Sometimes the re will expand on an idea, sometimes it will pick apart another video. Recent res also include a shot of the original post - as in, the new poster sits in front of his computer screen, plays the original video, and then does his commentary or expansion while the original plays in the background.

In the case of "Pardon Me," we literally sat and watched as this video went viral. Within an hour or two, the hits were in the thousands, then the hundreds of thousands. Even more impressive, though, was the number of re videos that have been posted. Other people singing along with the, er, performer, Maxine Swaby; people who do acoustic version; remixes; and re:re:re posts (a video within a video within a video, sort of).

So why this particular song? Why did the Star Wars Boy go viral (remember him? the kid who shot himself performing, in an endearingly uncoordinated fashion, Jedi Knight moves using the school's video equipment, and then lamentably forgetting to destroy the evidence)? 

We get the technology - passing an idea along is now so easy. No need to travel to distant lands and preach on a street corner. All you have to do is hit "forward," and you've passed your new, funny, exciting, scandalous, or challenging idea along to perhaps a thousand people, ultimately. (In the case of "Pardon Me," I passed the link to about five people, who, if they each passed it to five more, expanded our little meme pool to 31 people in two strokes.)

Or maybe Marshall McCluhan was right, and the medium is the message. Without the technology to make it easy, ideas or bits of bad theater like this would go unremarked. I might mention it to someone over a drink and laugh, but it wouldn't go much further than that because it wouldn't be, unlike a big idea, like Christianity or Democracy, worth the effort.

Anyway, whether it was the way she intended it or not, Maxine Swaby has certainly had her 15 minutes of fame, and then some.

Glad I could help.