I wonder if it’s just “Jerry Springer writ P2P” — in other words, reality tv shows like Jackass, Fear Factor, etc., are aimed at a perceived taste for “extreme” & real shock and humiliation, so there’s clearly a demand for that kind of content — and if broadcast economics is mostly about capturing male viewers age 18-30, who have fled tv for games & the internet, maybe they’re getting what TV thinks they want, but through a different medium. The only thing I’d want to note is that just because that sort of stuff may predominate in terms of total numbers (hence it becomes a phenomenon), the “long tail” (as Chris Anderson is calling it) of P2P and amateur production may be more diffuse but more culturally significant. So the NYT story, I think, mischaracterizes the effect that amateur production is having on traditional media.

Chris Anderson’s blog here:
http://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/

Mark seems to be saying that the desire to see someone humiliated is what fueled the viral propogation of the video. Though that isn’t true for everyone, maybe that’s true for many of the people who forwarded this and for a great deal of viral content.

Of course, one can counter with the Badgers or any number of counter-examples, which don’t seem about exhibition or humiliation.

The Brolsma video came across my desk some time around 2 months or so ago, but I remembered seeing almost the exact same thing at least half a year earlier. A coworker of mine and I did some research and he came across this link:
http://www.djrotterdam.info/videos.htm

If you look at this video:
http://rotti.23c.de/Rotti_vs_Haiducii01.avi

…you will notice a nearly exact copy of the Brolsma video, with the exception that the guy actually sings, laughs maniacally and breaks a record over his head. I have also found newsgroup postings mentioning the video as far back as June 2003.

Perhaps the most perturbing thing is the sheer VOLUME of the videos; these are (probably) rehearsed to a degree and had multiple takes. So when you get bored with Numa Numa, you have something else to watch now…

It lies in how this video, incredibly uncool as it is, gestures toward ways that we might be able to find play in the machine.

Perhaps you confuse the concepts of “cool” and “hip” here. Sometimes, people don’t realise that those are fairly different. In fact, that which gets attributed with both terms is a rare cat. Most cases, real cool people ain’t hip, and vice versa.

I think it can be said that the guy in the video ain’t hip, by most definitions of “hip”, since most definitions of hip involve the element of “timeliness” as crucial. “Hip” is doing, saying, singing, wearing, exactly the right thing, at exactly the right time – to communicate a communally shared moment, a snapshot of the world, at the time of its sharing. The video’d performance under discussion here is doubtlessly characterised by a high degree of “un-timeliness”, in the sense that it’s possible to hypothesise that many viewers will regard it as silly at any time.

Potentially, this is cool, since cool is about being detatched from the moment. It’s not meant to communicate the moment – it’s meant to communicate a style that is persistent; a style that’s so personal, so characteristic, that the character identified with it becomes a universally used symbol independent of time: an icon. James Dean, William Burroughs, Donald Duck, are that way, in their respective markets.

The root of cool is nil admirari. Horace said it first, in Epistulae I,6,1: “Nil admirari prope res est una, Numici, solaque, quae possit facere et servare beatum.” Which translates to: “Not to be astonished is the only proper thing, my Numicus, which can make and keep us happy.”

Therefore, I’d argue that we can’t really know yet whether this guy is cool or not. To find out, we’d have to be able to observe him right now: if he’d be unfazed by his sudden popularity, and just went about his usual business, he’d be cool. Any information out on this?

The way the phenomena usually start is that there are a lot of bored people who sift through this nearly limitless pile of media to find things they find particularly funny. Sometimes they hit on something more amusing than usual, often with vague (or not so vague) undertones of ridicule directed at the discovered subject. I see dozens of these posts a day from people who’ve dug up something they think is funny, usually either from personal websites or some small forum that doesn’t expect outsiders to be reading what they post there. Occasionally something is funny enough to get passed around to enough people so that it reaches a critical mass sufficient to attract non-internet-dweller attention, at which point it’s labelled a “phenomenon”.

(Still, this one does not top the badgers…)

Except that the dominant discourse surrounding Numa Numa, particularly the NYT article, smacks exhibitionism down by playing up the embarassment and attendant stresses of putting yourself on display, turning goofy fun into shameful pathology and reinforcing the carceral nature of observation. Sad.