By Griffy Vigneron (Contributor) – Email
Print Edition: March 20, 2013
For a while now, my YouTube page has been dominated by videos of office workers, students, regular people, shaking and shimmying it up. The Harlem Shake videos has been one of the latest videos in an incredibly long and lengthy line of videos to go viral. And just like a majority of viral videos, I may have had a bit of a laugh at the first one, but the repetition gets old fast.
Aptly named, viral videos are a cultural obsession of our modern fast-moving ADD-afflicted generation. Within often hours, these videos hijack our cultural consciousness and spread like wildfire through the forest of social networks.
But they usually die out just as quick. Those that stick around get old quick (the Harlem Shake has infiltrated my feeds since last month). They’re kind of like that joke your friend tells you every time you see him. You know, that one you don’t even laugh at anymore – or wait, did you even laugh at it in the first place?
Viral videos are also a representation of our culture’s colossal ability to waste time. You have to have time to watch a music video about dancing Koreans, or sneezing pandas, or something else that’s obviously not relevant to anything productive going on in your life.
Some videos are less a result of obvious planned time wasting—like rick rolling or screaming Taylor Swift goats—but even in those cases, the ones perpetuating the trend have too much free time.
Now, I’ll admit, some videos to have gone viral, may have done so for a potentially good purpose. While it’s debatable, such videos may have not been an entire waste of time. Kony 2012, while controversial, pushed for a cause, and Susan Boyle was an impressive show of talent. If you’ve got a talent and you go viral, that’s an impressive feat. I’m certainly not against supporting talent.
However, I have one qualm with these kinds of videos. It’s hard to tell how exactly where the views for these videos come from. How many views are earned versus paid for? As the marketing website Reelseo puts it, “[t]his is the essential question behind what most people refer to as viral videos.”
Many videos, especially music videos, are spread via paid advertisements instead of true, honest-to-goodness, word-of-mouth social networking. Meaning, while you may be thinking you’re watching something that everyone else enjoys, you may instead be simply wasting your time on a video with “bought” views.
Really though, while I may not personally appreciate the overabundance of whatever the latest viral video is, who am I to make claims on their existence? While I sit here pondering the reason and meaning in wasting another 30 seconds watching the latest Harlem Shake video, you perhaps, simply enjoy it (though seriously, it really should have gotten old for you by now). And perhaps for some people, that’s all that really matters.
