Your Fifteen Minutes Begins Now
A Japanese-based file-sharing site, 4chan, has been responsible for focusing the interest of their members on different YouTube videos.
If a video becomes popular on their site, the number of viewers of that video (and of subscribers to the poster's other videos) rises. Seriously. Other YouTube viewers, not members of 4chan, will pile on; the number of viewings and subscribers skyrockets. The original videos spawn scores of imitators: Some better, most worse.
I Can Haz Shoot Me Now So No See The Catz
This is the definition of viral video. Frequently, they're innocuous and absurd; 4chan is the source of interest in such bizarre viral time-wasters as the LOL Cats and "Rickrolling" -- the more absurd, the better.
This time, those scamps in Japan latched on to a series of videos made by a plus-sized kid, somewhere in America, who is about seven years old and posts under the monicker of Lukeywes 1234.
(Full Disclosure: I was an amazingly overweight, geeky, introverted; babbling on about, you know... geeky introvert stuff, when I was his age.)
There's absolutely nothing wrong with Wesley. He's like a large number of seven-year-old American boys: A little geeky; likes Star Wars (or WOW or P2P), and ghosts, and has technical ability in creating and uploading videos to YouTube. He's kind of like the overweight cousin you knew as a child who was painfully unaware of how self-focused and embarrassingly boring they could be -- you know; walks up to you and goes on and on and on about, youknow... stuff -- but geeky, introverted stuff.
But that was just the sort of postmodern, ironic/absurd cachet 4chan wants: Wesley would be the new LOL Cats. After 4chan 'discovered' Wesley, his number of subscribers went from single, to double, to triple, to... nearly 13,000 subscribers!. Wes watched that number climb into five digits and was.. well, stunned, amazed and proud; possibly for the first time in his life. Wow; lookit what I did!! Me!!
Lukeywes Explains Tinfoil Hats And Ghost Hunting
Yeah! So what if he was overweight and introverted and spent entire weekends watching all six episodes of Star Wars over and over, and knows stuff about Jar-Jar Binks that not even George Lucas understands? That he was continually teased at school; so what? That doesn't matter any more: How many of you cool, jock assholes can say you've got thirteen thousand YouTube subscribers? Huh? Huh? Who's Da Man, Jerkwads??
And the content in Wesley's videos was actually pretty cool for a seven-year-old. Remember when you were a kid and thought, if I could just make my own movies? And how scenes and play appeared in our imaginations as children? Vibrant, lucid, amazing visions. And if any were ever captured on film or video, and we see them as adults, we're amazed that this isn't how I remember seeing it when I was that kid, man. It's... fun, in a cheesy kinda way; but, God; I hope nobody else sees this.
And, that's the reason 4chan picked Wes to go viral.
Lukeywes 1234 received so many subscribers, in fact, that YouTube closed his account and pulled his videos. Bummer! However, that spawned a huge number of YouTube tributes, some just as geeky, and others tongue-in-cheek, demanding that YouTube Bring Back Lukeywes 1234!!
So, now -- in an odd twist of fate, the chunky, geeky Wesley... who appeared as the epitome of babbling, non-hipness... became cool.
I think he did all right. Good for you, Lukeywes 1234.
* Ontogeny is the growth (size change) and development (shape change) of an individual organism. Phylogeny is the evolutionary history of a species. "Otogeny Recapitulates Philogeny" means that each successive stage in the development of an individual represents one of the adult forms that appeared in its evolutionary history.
While this theory has been largely discredited as applied to modern biology, it actually may apply to the evolution of entertainment on the modern Intertubes. Or not. I don't really care; it's all about having a snappy, overly-intellectualized title for a blog post, and if you were showing up because you though I was going to talk about -- I don't know; vaginas or something; forget it. This is a damn family show.
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