~Current Events Commentary~
Eclipse
On Monday we all talked about the eclipse all day. I traveled home to be in the path of totality and it was incredible. Once you’ve seen a total solar eclipse, a partial just doesn’t do it for you anymore. It’s cute that everyone outside the path of totality talked about the eclipse like it was anything worth discussing. Totality upends your understanding of light, of night and day, of all human behavior. Anything else is just a crescent moon. The colander photos were fun though.
Earthquake
There was also an earthquake in North Jersey, Philadelphia, and most importantly, New York City on Friday. I had already made my way north to the path of totality and had taken two Benadryl the night before so I slept through it, as I have slept through almost every earthquake in my life. I woke up to “NYC Earthquake Twitter” a pale imitation of something I grew very familiar with in my time in California, “Los Angeles Earthquake Twitter”. Los Angeles Earthquake Twitter is good because it is almost a silent acknowledgment of what just happened. It is the online equivalent of making eye contact and nodding. It’s fun because it's wholly informational. An almost clerical process we all go through together. An under-discussed part of what bonds people together is the paperwork we all must file together. New York Earthquake Twitter is a trauma bond. It’s millions of people trying to insist that they weren’t scared and actually have a pithy line that sums up the whole thing. It just doesn’t hit the same.
~🌪🌊🔥~
Be mindful of why you were invited to the section
This is the kind of video that people make fun of as a reflex. The second someone attempts to tell anyone how to behave the internet puts out their claws. Especially when it comes to “acting like a lady” or dreaded “pick me” behavior. It's going to be a long summer of “Be mindful of why you were invited to the section” Instagram captions. Right now it is something that is simply a part of the ecosystem, neither good nor bad.
Kelsey Plum Eating Popcorn
Memes do not necessarily have a one-to-one relationship of cultural impact on their source. There are plenty of memes that come from underappreciated and under-seen sources. However, sometimes memes are a helpful marker for something gaining popularity. This meme only exists because enough people were watching the UCONN Iowa game for this clip to be worth mentioning on Twitter. Enough people saw it live that it garnered discussion. It went viral beyond the circle of people who care about The Women’s Final Four. This clip going viral does not equate to the number of people caring about Kelsey Plum and her college records being broken by Caitlin Clark but it does point us in the direction of the popularity of the sport growing. It’s not a direct path of virality equating to growth but another step on the hero’s journey of popularity. In addition to the storylines and characters this season was able to produce, women’s basketball was also able to add a meme. This is what Title 9 was all about.
Big is Moving To Paris
A classic form of Meme is when someone on Twitter makes a really good joke and everyone wants to imitate it. They see the phrase that made it funny and think they can endlessly repeat it and work it into their own version. “Big is moving to Paris” is a great punchline and works well on its own, out of context. It can get a chuckle out of me in an otherwise unfunny tweet. It’s best when someone is not trying to recreate the form from the original tweet and instead removing “Big is moving to Paris” further and further from its original context. I don’t want to see Carrie and the girls in every universe. I want to see in how many different contexts we can say the phrase “Big is moving to Paris” and have it still be funny. I love most instances of “Big is Moving to Paris” and I’ll be happy to keep saying it until it stops being funny.
Horse Picture
We talk a lot about the scourge of “I’ve only had an iced coffee today” as a phrase and behavior but never really revel in the pleasure of it. There have been plenty of times in my life when all I did was subsist on caffeine, purposely or accidentally drank 64 ounces of coffee in an afternoon because I was bored and it was free at my office. The horse picture captures the feeling of being so hopped up on coffee that you’re losing touch with reality. To quote an old Tumblr post “I am beautiful and fast.” Only having 1 iced coffee is a problem. Having 4 is an experience. This meme is reminiscent of a 2017 style of posting that I have to admit I am nostalgic for. I haven’t seen a new image in a while that captured the magic of that time for memes. Not that everything since then has been bad but this image does contribute something I would like to return to. We need to be contributing as many different kinds of images as we can to the ecosystem and this is a varietal that I think has been missing for a while.
TikTok
Rizz Party
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The TikTok Rizz party is an example of right place right time. The song Carnival by Kanye West and Ty Dolla $ign begins with men shouting the lyrics. It almost makes you ask How did they get a recording of the song being sung in a frat house basement before it was even released? Some songs I can only hear with the accompaniment of dozens of people shouting the lyrics. Carnival has this aspect built-in, making it a kind of instant classic. This video of these boys in a way puts faces to the voices of those chanting these lyrics, even if they aren’t the literal voices of these boys. They complete the universality of this experience. Now even if you’ve never been at an eighth-grade dance with boys shouting the lyrics of a Kanye West song, you’ve experienced it. These boys are the conduit for the experience and this video from the photo booth company being posted publicly for all to see lets us all be a part of it.
That’s why these boys have a magnetic charm. We have their universality that allows us to dive into the specific. If you’ve ever danced in a circle with people and taken a second to observe what’s happening outside yourself, it’s fascinating to watch the dynamics at play. It is almost never depicted in media as a group dynamic to break down and almost impossible to depict because it only makes sense if you are in the circle. Here we are in the circle, as the camera. We get to see the dynamic between these boys play out as never before. They play to us but also play to each other for approval. The deep dives into their interactions come about because we are all hungry to see something we’ve all been a part of play out without our personal feelings involved. It’s getting to see another friend group’s drama without having to be an active participant. It’s also getting a peak into the group dynamics of teenage boys which leaves most of us perplexed. We as a culture are always searching for vulnerability and self-expression from teenage boys. If we understood that, we could solve a lot of the problems facing our society or at least market to them more easily. The TikTok gives us a glimpse into their world and lets us be a part of the friend group for just a moment and just a moment is all we need.
Donghau Jinlong
It’s so fun to be in on the joke. All it takes is saying yes. I spend ten million hours a day on TikTok so I see everything. I am one of the people who gets the videos first. I am one of the people who see the video before the user who posts it on Twitter. This means I get every joke and do not need them explained to me. If you’re consistently asking “What does this mean” and “Where does this come from” you need to put in the hours and decide to become someone who gets the joke. Donghau Jinlong is people who have all decided to get the joke. They saw this video when it was an AI voiceover of the Red Scare hosts talking about the quality of the glycine and decided to be in on the joke. You can tell just by looking at everyone making the joke that this is not their first rodeo. Donghau Jinlong is yet another thing we all decided to be funny about and it’s not that we decided to keep you out of the joke. It’s just that we were there and you weren’t. You either understand that Donghua Jinlong makes high-quality food-grade glycine or you don’t.
Woo Pig Season
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It’s college acceptance season! That means we’re going to get a lot of videos of girls in the South excited to go to their SEC schools and decorating their school uniforms with creative and fun designs. We’ll also get people in the northeast making fun of them because they are jealous of their lighthearted easy excitement. I love this cycle as an anthropological study. It's been happening long enough that the kids who are seniors this year were freshmen when it started online. Do you think this year’s graduates from the tony New England private schools look forward to it as much as the kids in the South? Could their ironic detachment have turned into genuine excitement? Every one of these kids wants to be excited about their college acceptance and these videos give them a space to do that. The ones who come to this tradition making fun of it need plausible deniability the fervor of the southern kids allows them to do that.