The collective imaginary: some anecdotes and scholarly events

This Halloween, my daughter and several friends continued their tradition of coming up with a group theme for trick or treating. The group is much bigger now, and included older and younger kids, so their efforts to decide by consensus were interesting to observe. They finally settled on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and picked their roles, came up with costumes, and gathered to get ready together at the friends' house that has become Halloween central. The book, and both movie versions were deemed acceptable sources of inspiration, and several kids had fun with the Ooompa Loompa possibilities. There was a Charlie and a Willy Wonka, and a few minor characters that the public might not have recognized, but that the kids knew very well. It was extraordinary to watch their process of coming to an agreement about the theme: first there were phone calls, email, and playdate consultations to brainstorm, then they all called a meeting to which their parents brought them. We, the parents, drank wine, yakked, and walked in and out of the living room, but basically stayed out of the way as they sat around and negotiated. When there was an impasse, smaller groups would split off and run upstairs to the attic to caucus. The objective was to figure out which shared literary and film combinations they all knew and could relate to: they'd already done Harry Potter and A Midsummer Night's Dream in previous years, to great success. This year's choices included Alice in Wonderland or Miyazaki anime films. The littler kids didn't know the Miyazaki stuff well enough to get excited about it, and one girl objected violently to Alice in Wonderland because in the book, there was a disparaging remark about pigs, and she likes pigs. Since they were operating by consensus and not a majority vote, she was able to stymie them for quite a while. Those who objected to Charlie (I can't remember why) finally gave in.

On Halloween, once they had all put on their costumes, we tried to take a group picture, but it proved difficult because someone had pulled up the YouTube Dan Meth video "Internet People," and all the kids were watching it and singing along. It combines a very catchy song with animated versions of some of the most popular or famous video clips of the last few years; (Leonardo Golden redid it with real clips). ALL the kids knew the song, and obviously got at least some if not all of the references it makes to popular videos or memes that circulate on the Internet. It struck me as they were singing along that their collective costuming and their participation in the YouTube imaginary were not that different, but what was noticeable was that the parents could "get" the themes they were coming up with for costumes, but only one or two of us were able to get the references in the video clip. I was able to catch a lot of them mainly because I've been making a conscious effort over the last two years to ride this wave so that I know what the kids are talking about (and I include my students in this group). Besides, I've always been a pop culture junkie, and now this has turned into a scholarly interest; my next conference presentation will be about the way Mexican writers and artists are using digital media, blogging, etc, to do more or less what my kid and here friends are doing: work together on a theme, create new performances together that reference wider cultural phenomenon, negotiate them, play with them, and then meet up in real life to share them with others.

The scholarly version of this Halloween "conference" is the upcoming ROFLCon, organized by a group of folks, some of whom are affiliated with the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and coming in April. They are trying to get all the folks associated with widespread memes and viral videos to attend. One of their posts turned me on to this compilation song We Didn't Start the Viral which, like Internet People, registers the Jokes-in-common that are one phenomenon of our new collective imaginary.


ETA: This video is funny, but the comments are all about chocolate rain!