Welcome to the internet. Many people think that www. at the start of URLs stands for 'World Wide Web' which sounds sensible but it doesn't take long to realise that it actually stands for 'Wild Wild West', 'Wiki Wah Wah', or 'Wiggedy Wiggedy Whack'; although truth be told, it's not Wiggedy Whack but actually just regular boring Whack, most of the time.
Also because the internet is like ten billion voices yelling into the void all at once all of the time, it means that you can do A/B Testing on people, or set up idiotic tests and have people run them for you; without their knowledge. I presume that this is how the people at Facebook, Google, Amazon, Twitter, and myriad other websites test and evaluate program's for profit. I also suspect that with neural networks which are designed to play the internet as a game where even the object of winning isn't known, that computers might be A/B Testing on people without the knowledge of the people running the websites.
All of this brings me to an experiment which i have been running; without people's knowledge because I have access to ten billion voices yelling into the void. The experiment has not only determined that I do in fact show up in people's media feeds but that if the barrier to response is so incredibly low that people can't help but yell into the void, that there will be a reliable response. I imagine that this works similarly to GET commands in various software applications.
Directions:
1. Type one of the following into a social media post:
- Who lives in a Pineapple under the sea?
- DUCKTALES!
- Sweet Caroline.
2. Wait.
No really, that's all.
What the internet will do, with the brain power of ten billion voices yelling into the void, is return very specific responses, which line up with your GET commands. They will be:
- SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS!
- WOOHOO!
- BAH BAH BAH!
Apart from food, clothing, and shelter, among the most basic needs of people are for validation and to make a contribution. That is, we need to be heard and to speak, we need to know and be known. Also, as these things stem from shared stories which we have likely absorbed, then knowning and being known, also involves declaring that we share the knowledge of our stories.
Also, yelling when the cost of retribution for having yelled is literally zero, not only means that there are no adverse consequences but that the payoff of amusement vastly outweighs the input costs. Yelling is fun when you don't have to pay.
Knowing all of this, setting up a call and response where the audience knows what the game is, pretty much guarantees that you are going to get a response having made the call. So then, here are the results for the average call and response times:
DUCKTALES! -> Woohoo! - 16 minutes.
Who lives in a pineapple under the sea? -> SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS! - 23 minutes.
Sweet Caroline -> BAH BAH BAH - 26 minutes.
My investigation is not systematic, it is problematic, and it may or may not be hydramatic. I only have a total data set of about 400 responses; which isn't enough to really be all that meaningful and to be perfectly frank, the whole thing could be flushed down the drain and disappear into the void without having achieved anything, never to be seen again and that would be fine. What it says is that at least some section of the audience knows what the proper response is to the call.
Certainly if you were to stand on a street corner with a guitar and start singing any of these songs, you'd get instant feedback because the call and response is expected in the moment but without that context and tethering, what we're left with is just the invitation to yell into the void.
It's also worth noting that those three calls and responses relate to pieces of pop culture ephemera date from 1969, 1989, 1999 and with a reboot of one of those, 2019. That means that five generations of people will be able to eventually give a response. I do not know if this will hold true for Generation Beta.
On that note, culture before the advent of radio was far less centralised than now. As the only way to transmit mass culture was in print, then I really doubt that this experiment would have done anything in 1880 (all other issues with technology aside). Before the days of mass broadcast, maybe there would have been call and response if you'd quoted from popular pamphlets or the Bible. It is only the advent of television and radio that mass market culture happens and I am very much showing that I am a product of the time, with late twentieth century references.
The culture being generated for Generation Alpha moves far quicker than ever before and the massive amount of fragmentation of every single mass media platform could mean that these kind of calls and responses simply won't work for Generations Beta and beyond.
I do know if in a hundred years' time that Generation Iota will be able to answer whatever that days' equivalent question of "Who lives in a Pineapple under Duck Caroline?" is. I also know that it will be impossible for me to know what exactly Generation Iota's equivalent question is. I think that because we, as in we who live in this current moment of time, have moved past centralised mass media, that it is fast arriving at the point where today's calls and responses might not be known in a century's time. Maybe they will not know who lives in a pineapple under Duck Caroline.
...Spongebob Woo-Bah.
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