8 Is This Real LIFE
Protection Services Joins the Internet
Red & Black
04 A pril 2013
Just like every Halloween at Washington & Jefferson, we were all in for a treat. When it came to costumes this year, let’s face it, there was the good, the bad and the ugly. F
Harlem Shake: Cultural Appropriation?
courtesy theinspirationroom.com/auroragov.org/simpliblog.org/fbcdn.net
Protection Services is now posting updates to Twitter and Instagram.
Michael Nemchick Red&Black Staff Protection Services has decided to finally join the age of social media and open a twitter account. Ever wonder what “student A” is up to when you are up late studying on a Friday night? Now you can find out with ease. Simply subscribe to the twitter to instantly be informed of belligerent students swearing at security officers as their green vegetable matter is confiscated to the evidence locker during at “act 64” call. The Protection Services office will soon be hiring students with experience in social media to follow them around on calls to assist with instantly updating their twitter as the action is happening. Now you will never again have to wait a week to read about drunken underage students getting into a tussle on the streets. Anytime the garbage cans on President’s Row get flipped you will sure to be in the know. See another tweet about students getting onto the roof of Old Main? Now you know that the door to the top still isn’t fixed. Did you just hear a large crash followed by screams in the room next to yours? No need to call security anymore, just post on Twitter and they will check out
your situation as soon as possible. This both alerts the proper authorities and shows all of your friends how up to date you are on the current events happening around campus. The office is looking to move into Instagram next. However, this is more difficult. For this the office needs students experienced both with photography and picture editing. Student workers will have to sign a non-disclosure agreement and blur out the faces of photographed students before posting to the Protection Services Instagram account, unless intoxicated students can be convinced to sign publicity release consent forms. These Twitter and Instagram accounts will help current and prospective students to observe the seedy underbelly of Washington & Jefferson College. If all colleges catch up on this trend, students can decide on their choice of institution based on quantity and quality of security related social media posts. In the near future Protection Services has considered posting an AMA on the social news website Reddit. It is also rumored that individual officers have begun posting anonymously on Live Journal.
Courtesy popdust.com
The original Harlem Shake dance originated on the basketball courts in Rucker Park in Harlem in the 1980s.
Alexis Geeza Red&Black Staff If you spend even an average amount of time on the internet these days, it’s likely you’ve seen the more recent video meme craze: the Harlem Shake. Only about 30 seconds long, the videos usually begin with a masked individual dancing alone among a group of people doing otherwise mundane things until the beat drops and the video suddenly cuts to a wild dance party involving the entire group and as many ridiculous props as they can include. The style of dancing is typically varied, ranging from your average attempt at swaying back and forth to completely out there improvisations. The meme is so popular nowadays that practically everyone has done one — students, celebrities, people in the military, office workers, newscasters, firefighters, you name it. The University of Georgia men’s swim team made a Harlem Shake video underwater. Really good impersonators of the British royal family made one (check YouTube, it’s kind of hilarious). You’ve probably done a Harlem Shake video without even realizing it
by merely existing in the world during the time of its conception, it’s just that impossible to avoid. The song used in the video, named the “Harlem Shake,” comes from American musician Harry Rodrigues (stage name Baauer), uploaded to YouTube in August of 2012 and mostly ignored until January of 2013, when video blogger DizastaMusic uploaded a video of four people dancing to the song. Several parodies of DizastaMusic’s soon appeared, and on Feb. 5 one of those videos went viral, amassing 300,000 views within 24 hours. By Feb. 13, approximately 12,000 Harlem Shake videos had been posted, gaining more than 44 million views. Even more videos have been posted since then, with the total number of views still rising. Why is this meme so popular? There’s probably no real answer to that question, though TechCrunch writer Josh Constine proposed his scientific theory on the matter, saying that the concise, 30 second length of the video is quick to watch and easy to make. So watching a Harlem Shake video doesn’t take much time out of your day, unlike longer videos that may not have a worthwhile payout. The premise itself, a lot of
silly aggressive dancing, is easy to replicate with your friends if you have nothing better to do on a Saturday night. Even though the name of the meme is the Harlem Shake, the meme has nothing to do with the actual Harlem Shake, a dance that originated in the 1980s at Rucker Park in Harlem, where basketball player Albert Boyce would dance during halftime. Dance crews adopted and developed the dance into what became known as the Harlem Shake. Many Harlem residents have pointed out that the new meme has absolutely no relation to the actual dance or its origins, and some have said that they find the meme’s use of the Harlem Shake name disrespectful, considering it a matter of cultural appropriation. In the end, there’s nothing wrong with the continued craze of this flash-mob style video meme (aside from its inherent insaneness and the general lack of creativity in most videos). Appropriating the name of something that already exists and has meaning within a community whose culture is often appropriated in other areas only adds to a long history of this kind of problematic behavior.