Candace's E-learning and Digital Cultures site

This is an interesting tracking of an online meme and rather funny for BBC News to be musing over what makes something cool. The article certainly considers this to be a global and cultural phenomenon, and highlights the importance of making your own video (rather than, as in Gangnam style, mainly consuming the video or its spin-offs)…does that mean there is a Harlem Shake community?

It was apparent that this couldn’t have been possible without corporate backing, however obliquely. YouTube is pretty ubiquitous, but it was a combination of the original song’s producer and collegehumor.com that actually got the meme started. And the article argues that mainstream media attention tends to feed rather than kill ‘grassroots’ fads.

Case to consider: the Guardian posts a video of the English National Ballet’s attempt…

My ethnography has hit a bit of a snag, all apparently down to twitter’s indexing policies. I already knew that mobile apps only showed a selection of tweets versus the ‘All’ option on a browser:

Mobile feeds (iPod and iPad)

Browser feed (‘All’)

…but I wasn’t aware that searches only display ‘All’ tweets from the past week ‘or so’: Twitter Help Center | I’m Missing from Search!

I’m sure I’ve mentioned similar frustrations with Facebook in that (as Mr Darcy might say) a post, once lost, is gone forever. No search mechanism at all–apart from the facility to find new friends whose posts you’re only interested in as far as you can scroll a newsfeed…

Personal annoyances aside, I’m wondering what effect this might have on a [potential] community. I did think that, if I ever needed to go back for the link to someone’s presentation, or the timely article they posted during the conference, I’d be able to do so for the magic two-hundred-and-something days (which a quick spelunk around seems to suggest is not the case anymore, if it ever was…?) True, the presentations were made available to conference-goers afterwards, but it’s the more ‘communal’ stuff–the connections between ideas, the pithy summaries, the incidental info–that such a community would seem to feed on, and which seems endangered to me.

And I’m not sure if I buy the argument that it’s the same as f2f conversation, that nobody transcribes the coffee chat so why should they enshrine a few tweets about dogs, cupcakes and castles, because the conference attendees chose to tweet, not say (or to tweet as well as saying), and as we had the choice of both media, our choice of twitter is meaningful. Individual perceptions of twitter, of course, might have been different; but the fact that we chose what we did to text on twitter and what we did to say f2f is not insignificant. So people who knew more about the life of a hashtag than I might have perceived their tweets as more transient; some people might have felt like they were tweeting to the world while some felt that they were tweeting to the room; but they all chose this medium for some reason or other.

So perhaps this is the angle I’ll take with my ethnography then…perception, transience…and the dogs and cupcakes too.