What “Rick-Rolling” & “Cone-ing” Really Tells Us

Rick-Rolling was quite a fad for a while; playing “Never Gonna Give You Up” by Rick Astley (from the 80′s) at an event and people dancing while videoing and then placing it on YouTube. This harmless, seemingly daft activity was carried out all over North America and even across Europe. Now there’s “cone-ing” in which a guy goes through a drive-through window having ordered soft-cone ice cream and does inane things when handed the cone..videoed and put on YouTube. Or the Coke & Mentos experiment. We shake our heads and wonder why? For what purpose?

We Are Exploring Our Culture
With well over 200 social media research projects under our belt and three years plumbing the deep depths of Cyburbia and its social alleyways, we’ve garnered some pretty interesting stats and insights. One conclusion we’ve started to come to is the “cultural exploration” of social media…ok another fancy label, but as humans, labeling things helps us frame an understanding. Pop psychology 101. So what do we mean here?

From the time we are infants, as individuals, we strive to understand the world around us. We learn language to express to our parents when we are hungry, what hurts and what we like. We do this in varying degrees all our lives. So with social medias, we are simply expanding our desire to explore the world around us as individuals and as a group and culture.

Communication is A Fundamental Trait
As humans, we must communicate to survive. We do better by communicating and working together. You cannot build a hospital and serve all the sick people by yourself. A government needs a bureaucracy to make a society work. Our very nature is to work together.

Social Media Is An Exploration of Defining Our World
We’ve never been able, as humans, to communicate and explore and attempt to understand the world we live in like we can today. One can argue that it is our fundamental drive to communicate that drives ICT technologies forward. Social Medias are so popular and driving the Web and mobile devices today because we must communicate to survive as a species (I mean survival in more ways than just finding food and shelter.)

Individual & Group Behaviours in Social Media
The example or Rick Rolling indicates group behaviours whereas cone-ing is the act of an individual that in like Rick-Rolling gets the attention of large or small groups of people. If you pitched BBC, NBC, CBC on having a camera crew attend random events and broadcast them live at your whim, they’d laugh you out of the executive suite. But because of social media tools, we don’t need their permission and thus we are free to explore how we communicate and engage with people.

How We Are Adapting Social Technologies
But we are adapting through these behaviours. Today, people will rarely answer their mobile phone during a meal; if they do, it is seen as rude and disrespectful. Similarly, where it was “cool” and gave you “social rank” to walk around with a phone glued to your ear, that is no longer the case. Wearing a phone on your hip is not cool anymore. Hopefully one day it won’t be cool to have a little black thing with a flashing blue light stuck in your ear either…

Summary
Actions like coneing and Rick Rolling seen individually and by some may seem inane and irrelevant. But they are how we as people, are exploring our world. They are all simply experiments. Sometimes they work and sometimes they flop. Badly. But that is what we do as humans. Taken together, looked at over time and seen for what they are, these actions can help us better understand our modern way of life and the society we live in. For us as researchers they are valuable clues in sociology, cultural anthropology, marketing and governments.