Friday, April 04, 2008

Biting Fingers and Cultural Mimicry

I love it. There's a YouTube video called "Charlie bit my finger- again!" with over 16-million views and almost 21-thousand comments. And once you watch it you'll know why.



Maybe it's when he decides to tempt fate by putting his finger so brazenly in Charlie's mouth...again! Charlie, who can't be much more then one if even, is more then happy to chomp on that thing because it's what he does. He's chomping on everything he can get his little teething gums around. Charlie chomps on this big brothers finger, regretfully releases it before checking to make sure big brother is still of one piece and then, with an amazing sense of timing, waits a few perfect beats before busting out a big old mischievous finger-chomping laugh.

And of course there are remixes or remasters cropping up in its wake. The guy playing the big brother who gets his finger chomped in this one is particularly good , though nobody seems to be able to really nail Charlie.



I suppose if you want to get a peak into how teenagers are riffing on the user-generated content of others, especially those that become Internet cultural phenomenons like this one, you could do far worse then to spend a few minutes checking out some of the remixes, remakes and remasters that have appeared in the original Charlie video's wake, most of which have nicely managed to rack up thousands of their own views.

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