Digital Life
News spreads over the internet faster than over any other media before.
But not only world-moving news spread over forums, social networks or weblogs
but nowadays also pictures and videos find an audience of millions.
The head butt of Zinedine Zidane against Marco Matarazzi in the final game of the Soccer World Championship about five years ago had enormous resonance on the net.
The following day a computer game existed with the goal to head butt as many Italian soccer players as possible.
Head butt scenes were reenacted on open streets, filmed and uploaded.
A perfect example for an internet hype, also called "meme".
It is possible to call memes "thought units"
that multiply through communication of their carriers,
the simpler definition is "running gag" of a world wide internet community.
In the frame of a three parted series Konnie Lee will present especially successful internet "memes" of this year.
Part 1 focuses on the children cartoon series MLP that not least got an internet phenomenon because of the "Anonymous" hackers.
In October 2010 the US-american TV station "The Hub" started to show the new series MLP:FIM.
The series is based on the toy series MLP by Hasbro that was successful in the 1980s.
Already back then a TV series existed about the talking ponies.
To make the ponies popular with young girls again, Hasbro ordered a renewal of the series.
With success.
But nobody expected this type of success.
The TV series MLP:FIM did not only hit the target demographic of little girls
but also found a huge male fanbase online,
ranging from teenagers to over 40 year olds.
These male MLP fans, called "Bronies", let their enthusiasm for the series roam free on various platforms,
post images of ponies or cut videos.
The wired magazine calls this trend "neo-sincerity" and sees connections to the success of others like the musical TV series "Glee".
The irony of the 1990s is out.
"Guilty pleasures", secret preferences, no longer have to be defended with "I don't *really* like it, just ironically".
The fan community of Bronies celebrates MLP openly, without irony.
They like the humor of the series and also its core message about friendship and tolerance.
Repeatedly the production quality of the show gets lauded,
which is for a big part thanks to the original english voices of the characters.
Out of this fandom, every day countless amounts of images with funny texts and videos that use scenes from MLP and rearrange them.
Very popular are film trailer mashups that combine the audio from known film trailers with the images from MLP.
For example "300" becomes "300 ponies", "V for Vendetta" becomes "P for Pinketta" and "Inglorious Basterds" becomes "Inglorious Ponies".
Or scenes from the series simply get looped.
And out of that new videos get made.
And so the MLP meme grows and creates even more memes.
This week in "digital leben" we look at internet memes with special impact. Tomorrow it's the "Pepper spraying cop's" turn, whose image of treating "Occupy" protestants spread around the world.