By annie shum | May 7, 2009
May 7, 2009, From the Desk of David Pogue, NY Times
I’ve been thinking a lot about Internet culture lately. Or, rather, the culture *of* the Internet.
A peculiar chain of events unfolded on Twitter a couple nights ago. I sent my followers a link to a hilarious sendup of Internet comment culture, a music video spoof called “We Didn’t Start the Flamewar.” (It’s at http://bit.ly/16NZLH, and it contains a ton of bad language, plus parodies of offensive, juvenile comments).
Then I made the tragic mistake of mentioning, in a subsequent tweet, that that song’s lyrics mentioned something I hadn’t heard of: Rickrolling.
DOH!
My followers’ scorn poured down like rain. “For shame! You’ve never been rickrolled? You don’t deserve your job!” “Welcome to 2006, dude!” And so on.
Rickrolling (as *everyone* knows, obviously) is an Internet prank where you send a Web link to someone, promising something exciting—but you’ve actually linked to a YouTube video of Rick Astley’s 1987 music video, “Never Gonna Give You Up.” That’s it. That’s the joke. Ha! You fell for it!
(Eventually, Astley himself Rickrolled the entire viewership of the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade last year, live on TV, as you can see here.
So how could I have missed it? Don’t know. Just did. Nobody ever Rickrolled me, and I’d never heard the term. So sue me!
But the episode got me thinking about Internet culture. What, exactly, is the syllabus for Internet culture? What are the videos and memes do you have to know to qualify as a Web-savvy person?
The “Star Wars” kid, of course. The Exploding Whale. The Mentos and Coke video, probably. “Where the Hell is Matt,” for sure. Dancing Baby.
So I asked my Twitter followers to supply a list. Their suggestions poured forth for hours, numbering in the hundreds.
To save you a lot of scrolling, I’ll just pass along a couple of links that they suggested. First, at least one person has carefully compiled a list of the 99 videos he thinks you need for a basic education (as he puts it, “unless you’re a loser or old or something”): www.youshouldhaveseenthis.com.
As you’ll quickly discover, if you didn’t know already, an awful lot of what makes a video a classic is mean-spirited humor. My favorites are, instead, the ones that are hilarious through sheer brilliance. The OK GO music video with the treadmills (#88 on the list), the ingenious fake movie trailer for “Shining,” the romantic comedy (#26), Matrix ping-pong (#84), Daft Hands (#90) and so on.
OK, the animal ones get me, too. I can’t stop laughing at Zero-G Dog (#93) and Dramatic Chipmunk (#16).
Anyway, that list is mostly videos. (It does have a couple of links to important Internet-culture Web sites like ICanHasCheezeburgers.com and WillItBlend.com. Oh, and #50 was my introduction to a screamingly funny Internet art form called “literal lyrics,” where someone records new lyrics to an existing video that refer literally to the action or the filming of the video itself. You’ll see. Another great one is at http://bit.ly/LamZ.)
But what about Internet “memes”—viral ideas—like, well, Rickrolling?
Seemed like www.KnowYourMeme.com would be the perfect place to boost one’s WCQ (Web culture quotient), but I was a little baffled by it. There’s no ranked list of memes to tell you which are the biggies, and searches for big ones like “ninja cat,” “will it blend” or even”rickrolling” produced no hits at all.
I got more, frankly, out of the Internet Meme Timeline, which puts the world of viral Web stuff into a historical perspective.
In any case, it’s clear that in certain circles, you’re nobody unless you’ve got a certain basic awareness of key Web videos and concepts. Consider this document your study guide.
Class dismissed!
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