That blog post that I wasn’t going to write about Balloon Boy, was written by Urlesque. They did a wonderful job at tracking the fastest meme in recorded history. Check it out.
This brings us to that conversation about how fast information travels. The last “fastest meme of all time” happened after Kanye said “Beyonce had one of the best videos of all time.” Clips of the incident were available online before the Video Music Awards even aired on the west coast. Within two hours of the Kanye disturbance, a mash-up combined his outburst with the other popular outburst of the moment. During the week that proceeded, hundreds of images cataloged the events of Kanyegate. It was an astonishingly quick and pervasive meme, but the joke faded quickly. On September 22nd, I’mma Let You Finish [dot] com, posted its final picture, just nine days after the naissance of the Kanye meme. Today, four weeks later, that meme is ancient history.
I predict that the Balloon Boy meme, which has already run its course, won’t be popular next week. I send my condolences to everyone who was banking on this story sticking around. (Especially to that duder, who hoped he might score a Balloon Boy book deal from his Twitter account). Your work day was longer than the life of this meme.
Why are we seeing such haste in the creation, proliferation, and decay of memes? I’m going to suggest there are two major factors at play here.
- Twitter, has sped things up. An idea goes viral in real-time. Before your mom got on Twitter (six months ago) memes disseminated themselves much slower. Elite communities of bloggers would know what was trending, weeks before the meme hit the mainstream. When it became mainstream it stayed popular for weeks.
- Television plays to the success of memes. It makes a lot of sense, for television producers to play viral videos during news shows, because they can fair-use YouTube clips. They know these clips are popular, so people will watch. When you take a video like JK Wedding Entrance Dance that already had several hundred thousand views online, and then air it on Good Morning America the video goes pandemic. People watched it on TV, then showed their friends online, and the hit count skyrocketed. The echo chamber gave that video 12 million hits in ten days. That video, now with 28.6 million views, was (tastefully) appropriated by NBC’s The Office last week. This speaks to the future of entertainment.
The “boy in the balloon” as front page material will die shortly. But I think as evidenced by the present “Yo Balloon Boy” Twitter trends, remnants of this concept will stick around. “Balloon Boy” will join the pantheon of memes, standing in line right behind Kanye West.
“Yo Balloon Boy, Imma let you finish, but Anne Frank had the best attic hideout spot of all time.”
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Read Urlesque’s coverage of the Balloon Boy meme.
More wrtings on the Kanye meme from the Current blogs.
- Kanye versus Obama at the VMAs and the speed of the meme-o-sphere
- Kanye West vs Taylor Swift, could twitter equal ratings?
- Kanye goes to Venezuela
- Quick note to the internets are forever great blunders in Twitter
- More on the Kanye memes
(Just a reminder, Meghan McCain’s boobs lost out Balloon Boy, as the big story of the day.)
October 16th, 2009 at 3:07 am
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October 19th, 2009 at 12:17 am
Suckers! All suckers! Next time before letting your imagination run away, going berserk and gaga over certain incidents, weight events carefully with a grain of salt. To all the millions of suckers who got excited over nothing and carelessly wasted their attention on this vicious joke that cost taxpayers good…you look silly! You have been had!