Online revolution

Viral videos spread Internet culture to students through addictive clips and catchphrases

By: Ivy Tan

Posted: 11/7/08

Pete Delaney and Chad Walz spend a lot of time on video sites. So much that they have become part of Delaney and Walz's everyday life.

Delaney and Walz, both juniors in the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, have used catchphrases - or Internet memes - in conversations with each other, with other friends and well, anyone who gets the joke.

"Let's say some friends and I are at the mall, and a girl walks by," said Walz. "We're not really sure how old she is because she looks 20, but may be 13. A lot of times when that happens, guys who know "It's a trap" will say (about the girl) that 'It's a trap!'"

"It's a trap" is a catchphrase which first appeared on a popular Internet video involving "Star Wars'" Admiral Ackbar and has since crossed into pop culture, or at least to the culture of those who get the joke, said Delaney.

Internet memes have very much become a form of entertainment for people who regularly surf the Web. Recently, the "Internet Meme Timeline" from the Web site Dipity.com, which shows the evolution and progress of this Web phenomenon, has become a meme
itself.

An Internet meme is any video, image, concept, catchphrase, or any combination of those that gets virally passed around online from user to user.

Sometimes a meme is so popular virally that
it becomes a part of mainstream pop culture.
For example, Chris Crocker's "Leave Britney Alone" YouTube video had more than 2 million views within the first 24 hours after it was posted, and was then covered by several media outlets and talk shows.

Tay Zonday's "Chocolate Rain" crossed over from cyberspace into mainstream entertainment. Due to the popularity of his video, Zonday secured a deal last year with the soft drink company Dr. Pepper to do a similar video about the company's new flavor, Cherry Chocolate Diet Dr.Pepper.

Other times, it's a catchphrase that is first popularized on the Internet, and then uttered by those who use the phrase when confronted by that same context in real life.

Robert Thompson, professor of television and popular culture at SU, said that because the Internet is a medium that allows everyone to access all kinds of files, not just on a national scale but an international one as well, there will inevitably be a few things that get passed around through this medium.
They will get a large enough audience to be referenced by other forms of media and those who are commenting on the material.

Referring to the popular YouTube video of the boy who went wild with excitement after opening his Christmas present to find a Nintendo 64, Thompson said, "The Internet has found a home movie that would have had no distribution outside the kid's family and ends up jumping from an incredibly viral video to VH1's Web Junk 20, to mainstream broadcast, late-night talk shows and finally, to an advertising of a luxury automobile."

BK Gupta, who created the Internet Meme Timeline on his Web site Dipity.com, said there really isn't an Internet meme business where people are trying to gain money or fame through sharing their videos or posting their captions.

"It's not like the first person who put up the catch "I can has cheezburger?" on top of the image of a cat was trying to make a million bucks. They were just trying to entertain their friends," he said.

The meme "icanhascheezburger" is now a popular Web site, icanhascheezburger.com, that lets the general public put up their favorite pictures of cats, known as "LOLcats," and post phrases with poor grammar and deliberate misspellings on the images.

It was reported last year in BusinessWeek that icanhascheezburger.com was generating around $5,400 per month from advertising and traffic and has about half a million daily page views.

Thompson said maintaining a Web site like icanhascheezburger.com is not as difficult as getting a particular meme, in this case a particular LOLcat image, to become virally successful so that everyone knows about it.

He said the key to Internet videos and Internet memes is not that they are good quality and may be remembered for a long time, like the case with television or film.
Rather, the appeal with this kind of entertainment is through quantity.

He compares enjoying Internet memes to laughing at a number of jokes on a television show, as opposed to the meme being analogous to the entire TV show itself.

"It's more the sense that there's an infinite amount of these kinds of things, and each little module that you consume is only a drop in the bucket of your total Internet experience," Thompson said.

Delaney separated Internet memes into two categories: The ones that are funny and the ones that are "so bad that they're actually funny."

Referring to the latter type, Thompson said,
"It's a thing I call masterpiece stupidity. For every one of those Star Wars kids that everyone likes to make fun of and watch because it's so goofy, there are millions of other people being stupid that are no fun to watch. There's a certain kind of skill even though most of the time it's stumbled upon."

Gupta said that social media like the Internet have always had it hard when it comes to getting advertisers. He said advertisers want to control who sees their content and the surrounding space in which their content is presented; of course, the Internet rarely allows them to do that.

"Let's say you go on my MySpace page and there are pictures of girls in bikinis all over it. The Christian Coalition doesn't necessarily want their caption on there, but they can't really control what it's going to be put against," he said.

Thompson added that the traditional advertising method used on other media outlets like television and radio does not work on the Internet. He brought up that with such a massive number of viewers, the audience is extremely segmented, which makes it hard for the advertisers to decide which sites to go to and how to acquire the data and statistics needed in order to find out how to earn revenue.

He gives the scenario that if YouTube had 30-second ads before its videos, people would find it not worth watching whatever silly little spoof they had originally planned to watch.

The issue here is longevity in a medium that, as Thompson said, "appeals to quantity, not quality," and finding a way to make money from these Web sites and the memes featured on them.

iatan@syr.edu