Captain Charlie Rocket

This fit pretty nicely with last night’s discussion of memes.

Proliferation of Internet memes makes it difficult to stay current

By Monica Hesse
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, February 5, 2010; C01

Consider this two-part law of how stuff ends up in your inbox:

(1) There are people out there who have never seen some moldering viral video, say “JK Wedding Entrance Dance.” They were not among the video’s 41 million-plus YouTube viewers, they did not see it replayed infinitely on the morning shows, they did not visit the couple’s hyped Web site, they missed the “Divorce Entrance” spinoff, and they were oblivious to the tribute on “The Office,” which garnered 9 million viewers. When they eventually find it, they assume they have discovered a brand-new thing.

(2) They forward it to you.

They say, OMG so cute. Have you seen this?

You have seen it. You spent the latter half of 2009 seeing it. You are perplexed as to how your friends, who are normally not cave dwellers, managed to miss it. Yet miss it they did, and now they want to talk about how great it was, and whether Chris Brown’s song was appropriate, and how the bride was the best part, and meanwhile you are mentally dragged back to last July, which means that your current viewing hours are going to be wasted, which means that you are going to miss something that everyone else is watching, and in six months you’re going to be forwarding your friends “Pants on the Ground.”

OMG, Have you seen this?

“My dad sent the wedding video to me last week,” sighs Emily Quail, a recent college grad in the middle of planning her wedding. “The subject line said, ‘For your consideration,’ ” and the only thing in the body was a YouTube link. When she clicked on it, she thought it might be an idea for a father-daughter dance. It wasn’t. It was just Jill and Kevin, boogieing down the aisle yet again. “I haven’t had the heart to break it to him that it’s really old,” Quail says.

Why be mean? Someday soon Quail will be the one who falls behind.

Falling behind is the permanent state of being online. There’s too much stuff. No one can see it all. (Or should — becoming a pop culture connoisseur in the age of a bazillion memes would require such relentless viewing that you couldn’t be a connoisseur of anything else. Like bathing.)

A movable feast

The things we do see, we don’t necessarily see together. Our communal cultural timeline is gradually dissolving. “Most water-cooler moments used to come from television,” says Jeffrey Cole, director of the University of Southern California’s Center for the Digital Future, speaking of the universal viewing experiences in which everyone used to see the same programs at the same time, from their living rooms. Now, we program our own viewing schedules, saving up “Glee” episodes to watch on Hulu, then getting annoyed when someone reveals “spoilers” for an episode that aired in November.

Operating on our personal entertainment timelines means that “my water-cooler moment might have occurred two weeks ago,” Cole says, “and it might not occur to you for three weeks.”

On the Internet, there is no viewing schedule and no expiration date. Nearly everything that was ever put up stays up. It’s possible to spend your entire life catching up online, asking yourself, “Is this real life? Why is this happening? Is this gonna be forever?” (“David After Dentist,” people.)

“What is all of this ‘pants on the ground’ business?” Kevin Maxwell wondered on his Twitter account. “Is it a military reference? Like boots on the ground?” Or perhaps, he speculated off-line, it was a ticket-sales reference, like butts in seats?

Pants on the Ground (noun): The first meme of 2010, a rant against low-slung trousers written and performed by 62-year-old “American Idol” hopeful Larry Platt. The song was later covered by celebrities, including Brett Favre and Jimmy Fallon, who performed the song as Neil Young and was really pretty great.

Kristine Schachinger also came late to the joy that was “Pants on the Ground.” When she became aware, she also tweeted a mention. “DUH,” a friend wrote back. “We have been talking about it in the office for a week now.”

Maxwell and Schachinger are normally immersed in the online world — he is the director of technology for an insurance company; she works as a social media consultant and Web designer. They have the Twitter feeds, the social networking accounts. They have no excuse for this lapse in pop-cultural knowledge. “I just missed this one,” Maxwell says. He fell behind.

Meme detectors

“What we need is a metric,” says Jamie Wilkinson, some sort of mathematical measurement that would help you figure out how late you were. “It would tell you how many of your friends have seen it — or maybe say something like ‘X of your friends have posted this on Facebook.’ ”

Wilkinson is a founder of KnowYourMeme.com, a database dedicated to cataloguing memes — viral videos and other cultural ephemera spread via the Internet — in a searchable format. There is the “JK Wedding” and “Pants on the Ground” and nearly 2,000 other memes you may not have seen, including “Joseph Ducreux” (Google it) and “Chubby Bubble Girl” (don’t bother).

“I’ve discovered that a nice trick for forwarding is to preface everything with ‘I’m sure you’ve already seen this,’ ” Wilkinson says. Even if you’re sure the recipient hasn’t seen it — even if you personally just made it. It’s better to flatter a friend’s media-consuming prowess than risk receiving the one-word response in return: “OLD.”

The typical viral video on YouTube receives 43 percent of its annual views within the first 10 days of its launch, according to research firm TubeMogul. The rest of the clicks are spread through the remaining days of the year, discovered by tag-alongs and come-latelies. KnowYourMeme is just one of several sites that exist solely to prevent you from looking like an idiot and blasting your entire address book with “Surprised Kitten.”

Unruly Media’s Viral Video Chart ranks the top 20 viral videos of the week by view counts (which YouTube also provides) and charts the rising and falling popularity of each one from the time it was introduced. You can see, for example, that “Worker looking at nude photos in background” is “spreading across the interweb like wildfire.” However, “Hitler Responds to the iPad” is “well past its viral peak” at 3.7 million views.

Other savvy individuals look beyond the numbers and employ their own methods for deciding whether to be embarrassed over not having seen something. “If it’s Megan Fox, I totally discount those numbers, because I know it’s just dumb search traffic coming in,” says Marc Hustvedt, founder of TubeFilter.tv. Any rube online could stumble across a Megan Fox video. “But if a crazy kid flips out because his mom cancels his World of Warcraft subscription, I feel really bad about not knowing about it.”

In the world of Internet geekery, there is a hierarchy of cachet when it comes to knowing about viral videos.

It’s silly, of course. In the list of important things in life, whether you have seen a certain video ranks exactly nowhere. And yet, in a splintered society of splintered personal beliefs and splintered media consumption, sometimes the only thing that binds us together is knowing exactly what someone is talking about when he says, in a squeaky British accent, “Ow! Charlie bit my finger!”

So we keep clicking, and forwarding, attaching deferential messages to the links: I’m probably way behind, and feel free to delete, but this is really cute, and have you seen this?