List of Internet phenomena: Difference between revisions

An Internet phenomenon (sometimes called an Internet meme) occurs when something relatively or completely unknown becomes hugely popular, often quite suddenly, through the mass propagation of media content made feasible by the Internet. Some Internet memes are short-lived fads, while others remain popular for many years. Sometimes Internet phenomena can gain popularity by being featured on certain popular community-based websites, which include, but are not limited to 4chan, Albino Blacksheep, b3ta, Digg, eBaum's World, Fark, GameFAQs, LiveJournal, Newgrounds, Offtopic.com, Slashdot, Something Awful, YouTube, MySpace, YTMND, IGN, Tribalwar, or The Best Page in the Universe. Often, Internet phenomena are started by a single user on an Internet forum.

In William Gibson's novel Pattern Recognition an interesting kind of Internet phenomenon—"the footage"—plays an important role.

This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. You can help by adding missing items with reliable sources.

People

• The Bus Uncle — As the name suggests, the incident took place on a bus. A Hong Kong middle-aged man reacted furiously after the young man seated behind him tapped his shoulder and asked him to lower his voice while speaking on the phone. His outburst spawned catchphrases in Hong Kong and Chinese communities around the world.
• Cory Kennedy — A video of this 16-year-old girl rocking out to a song on her iPod while eating Indian food becomes one of the hottest things on the Internet.
• Star Wars kid — A Québécois teenager becomes known as the "Star Wars Kid" after a video of him swinging a golf ball retriever leaks onto the Internet. Many parodies of the video are made and distributed through video sharing sites like YouTube and Kazaa.

Bands

• Beatallica — A satire band that played music combined from songs written by the Beatles and Metallica, and posted it online. The band was served with a Cease and Desist order by Sony/ATV Music.
• Hurra Torpedo — A Norwegian band that became part of a viral ad campaign by going on a coast to coast tour in the US that was paid for by Ford in order to promote the Ford Fusion car. As part of the ad campaign, a mockumentary movie called "The Crushing Blow" is being made. By the end of November 2005 a clip from The Crushing Blow was viewed more than 500,000 times in a couple of days from the web site iFilm. [1][2]
• Lemon Demon — A one-man band by Neil Cicierega. Cicierega's Hyakugojyuuichi was a web animation hit.
• JerryC — Taiwanese guitarist and composer who wrote "Canon Rock", a rock arrangement of Pachelbel's Canon in D. [3]

Videos

• The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins — A video of Leonard Nimoy singing the song that was uploaded to the site Video Bomb.
• Boom goes the dynamite — Brian Collins, a nervous and extremely awkward sports anchor attempts to call highlights for his college's news show, fumbling through most of the segment until finally uttering this now-famous catch phrase. [4]
• Bride Has Massive Hair Wig Out — Uploaded to YouTube on January 18, 2007, this video of a Canadian bride so upset with her hairstyle on her wedding day that she starts cutting it off drew 2 million views and received wide news coverage as viewers, and even film director Norman Jewison, pondered whether it was real or staged.[5] It has since emerged that the "bride" was a young Toronto actress, Jodi Behan, made to promote Unilever's Sunsilk Canada line of hair care products[6] and has since been removed from the site.[7]
• Brokeback Mountain parodies — The movie Brokeback Mountain inspired many online parody trailers. [8]
• funtwo — Guitar player (Jeong-Hyun Lim) from South Korea. The New York Times wrote an article about him. [9]
• Little Superstar — A video from the 1986 Tamil film Adhisaya Piravi, featuring a midget dancing scene.[10][11]
• (Do Not) Misspell Google — An unwitting user misspells Google.com and ends up on a site that fills his computer with spyware and worms. Although it's a fictional video, it plays upon real fears, as Goggle.com (one mispelt version of Google) reportedly triggered malware on machines. (read article here)
• Numa Numa — Gary Brolsma sings along to a Romanian-language dance song ("Dragostea din tei" by O-Zone).
• Peanut Butter Jelly Time - A dancing banana dances to the tune of a song created by the Buckwheat Boyz. This has been one of the most famous internet clips, making appearances in Family Guy, The Proud Family, and even games such as Dragon Ball Z Budokai Tenkaichi 2 and the MMORPG World of Warcraft.

Animation-based

• Charley The Unicorn-A computer animated cartoon about Charley and his other unicorn friends and their visit to a place known as "Candy Mountain."
• Dancing baby — A 3D-rendered dancing baby first appeared in 1997 by the creators of 3-D Studio Max, and became something of a late-'90s cultural icon, featuring a lot in the show Ally McBeal. [12]
• Hampster Dance — A page filled with animated GIFs of hamsters dancing, linking to other animated pages. It ranked #1 on CNET's Top 10 Web Fads list and has spawned a fictional band complete with its own CD album release.
• JibJab — This website's Flash animation "This Land" became wildly popular for its satirizing of the 2004 Presidential Election. The film was downloaded over 18.4 million times in July 2004 alone..
• Neurotically Yours — A series featuring a Goth and her pet squirrel.,

Images

• Little Fatty — A Chinese high school student named Qian Zhijun had his face superimposed onto various other images and created an Internet fad.
• The Saugeen Stripper — An 18-year-old female resident of Saugeen-Maitland Hall at the University of Western Ontario performed a striptease at a birthday party, and dozens of digital images of the party ended up on the Internet. The incident briefly attracted widespread media attention and was the subject of articles by a number of Canadian and American media outlets. The controversy sparked a discussion about just how much control, or in reality how little, institutions of higher learning have over what goes on in their residences.
• ORLY Owl-an image of a snowy white owl with the phrase O RLY? superimposed on its picture.

Films

• Snakes on a Plane — This 2006 film starring Samuel L. Jackson became an Internet meme due to the film's title and premise a year before its planned release, and before any promotional material was released. Producers of the films responded to the wide Internet buzz by adding several scenes to the film which catered to the fans. [13] The Internet buzz surrounding the movie has been featured several times by Keith Olbermann on his MSNBC news show Countdown.

Websites

Personal sites

• Mahir Çağrı (i kiss you) — A resident of İzmir, Turkey, Çağrı became an Internet celebrity in 1999, when his picture-laden homepage, which exclaimed in broken English his love of the accordion and travel, was visited by millions and spawned numerous fansites and parodies, one featured on Fox's MADtv (season 4, episode 20). Mahir was ranked #2 in CNET's Top 10 Web fads (July 15, 2005). [14] He was flown to the U.S. and fêted at a dot-com party later that year, at the Hamm's Building, in San Francisco.
• Maddox — Claiming to be a "pirate", Maddox is the online pseudonym of George Ouzounian, author of the popular website, The Best Page in the Universe, with over 100,000,000 visits. Maddox has also authored the New York Times Best Seller The Alphabet of Manliness. The individual articles from this site often spread memetically.
• Randy Constan — He posted pictures of himself on his website wearing self-made Peter Pan costumes.
• Million Dollar Homepage Million Dollar Homepage sold off 1 million pixels for a dollar each.
• Chuck Norris Facts An excessive list of humorous "facts" about the actor Chuck Norris, purporting his virility, invincibility and power to roundhouse kick any enemy for the win.

Audio

• I Want My Western Barbecue Burger! — An irate woman places a 9-1-1 call demanding the police enter a Laguna Niguel, California-area Burger King and force the employees to make her and her kids a "Western Barbecue Burger". [15] [16]
• Atomic — A song by Newgrounds artist Khuskan, it gained popularity when a flash game "Lars' Adventure" by Raitendo, was put on the website Digg. The song went double platinum on Newgrounds and it's lyrics, quotes from a PSA from the Cold War era [17] , became highly quoted. [18]

External links

• Memes on the Internet Article regarding the spread of Internet memes.