Branding, Culture, Politics, and Everything in Between

A few posts back I proclaimed the Star Wars mashup of the Whistle Tips Bub Rub to be the most obscure yet somehow relevant pop culture mashup I’d ever seen. Well, I think we have a new heir to the throne.

Three Wolf Moon is/was a rather ugly t-shirt that became a somewhat inexplicable viral phenomenon. It’s a somewhat kitch and unremarkable t-shirt that was on sale on Amazon. But when somebody posted this review on it…

Pros: Fits my girthy frame, has wolves on it, attracts women

Cons: Only 3 wolves (could probably use a few more on the ‘guns’), cannot see wolves when sitting with arms crossed, wolves would have been better if they glowed in the dark.

… all hell broke loose. In a very short period of time, it got more than 1000 similar “reviews” and spread quickly thanks to Digg and people sharing the Amazon link on Facebook. I’ve seen more than a few photoshops where famous people have been depicted wearing the shirt, including Barack Obama.

Well, fast forward to today and look what I found on /Film:

There’s just something about mashing up obscure internet phenomena with Star Wars, I guess…

This made me laugh and think:

It’s a mashup between Star Wars and a news clip that made the rounds a few years ago. It wasn’t the most popular of YouTube clips, but apparently popular enough that it inspired some people to mash it up with something more familiar. I’d like to think that this is sort of a new baseline for how obscure your references and mashups with popular culture can become while still remaining somewhat relevant. No reason to think that mashups like these will become increasingly obscure and weird, pushing our limits of both media and pop culture literacy.

Here’s the original newsclip:

Thanks for the clip, sir

Found this among my drafts. Apparently, I had forgotten to publish it. I had intended to publish this on April Fools.

Scott Brown on Wired: “Humor is the Lingua Franca of the Internet”.

Because “funny” is becoming a language unto itself, the lingua franca of the wired world. You can’t update your Facebook status without a self-deprecating quip. You can’t respond to a Gawker post unless you’ve got something equally snarky to add. Snark, of course, is Web comedy’s most renewable resource. [...] And if you’re still worried about bombing in what is, basically, the world’s biggest, cruelest comedy club, don’t be. I assure you, you’re getting funnier all the time, simply by dint of being plugged into the collective e-conscious and keeping up with the high-bandwidth badinage.

Marshall McLuhan’s first and second laws of media ask what does the new medium enhance or make obsolete in a culture. An instant and participatory medium like the Internet has replaced jokes of the traditional variety (“a Finn, a Norwegian and a Swede walk into a bar…”) by something more instant, more contemporary. Today’s jokes are YouTube clips, PhotoShop manipulations, Facebook comments and the like. In the old days, jokes could be retold over and over, some jokes were deemed “classic” because they were more general and based on timeless notions. But now, jokes have a shelf-life that is measured in weeks, even days.

Granted, “reactionary” jokes are not a new phenomenon (just think of political cartoons and talk show monologues), but the Internet has made them common currency among us regular folk. A good “snark”, as Brown calls it, will not be limited to the cocktail party it was uttered, it can catch on and become sort of the joke of the week. Internet memes are a great example of this. But as said, these kinds of jokes don’t last long, and because of their contextual and contemporary nature, they rarely if ever become classic jokes that stand the test of time.

/Film reported that there’s a movie in the works based on an article in GQ called “Will You Be My Black Friend?” There was a link to the original article, which was a fun read with a good eye for detail and reflection.

But this especially caught my eye (emphasis mine):

There’s a psychological term that’s used to explain why white people and black people aren’t friends: homophily. It means that people are likely to be friends with those who are similar to them. (There’s an aphorism about homophily: “Birds of a feather flock together.” One of the peculiar duties of social scientists is to prove the most obvious things, make them seem complicated, and then reconstitute them as simple. For examples, see the work of Malcolm Gladwell.) I would argue that the modern world is, in many quarters, dominated by increasingly extreme homophily. If you don’t want to, you’ll never have to talk to anyone whose jeans are different from yours. And there’s the trend toward so-called cultural cocooning, where you only have to listen to people who have the same opinion as you, be it on Fox or MSNBC or Lou Dobbs, depending on if your philosophy is galvanized around conservatism or liberalism or angry people with wet piano keys for teeth.

I’ve seen many a presentation or blog post that raves on how the Internet and especially social media will make us more informed readers. The reasoning goes that if you’re interested in something, say like the current economic crisis, you can use social media to read about it from a variety of different sources and from different viewpoints. Compared to the Average Joe who only gets his news from the evening news and the local newspaper, this social media reader and his pluralistic worldview is painted as almost an “undupable” force of nature that will save society as we know it from the manipulators (and killing traditional journalism along the way).

The truth is, as you might have guessed, somewhat different. Media technologies are always cultural and social systems; the possibility of some kind of behavior with a media technology doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily going to happen. For example, you already see worrisome examples of partisanship in the US where conservatives and liberals only listen to their favorite talking heads and get their news and the interpretation of the news from like-minded folk online. This makes mutual discourse with people outside of you’re “cocoon” increasingly difficult as the shared understandings are eroded.