What on earth is a Harlem Shake?

This is a question that has appeared on my Twitter and Facebook timeline more than 10 times by different people throughout the past two weeks. “It’s the new Gangam Style!” said one of my friends.

These days, it’s hard to predict what will be a “hit” and what will be a “miss.” According to David Grazian in his book Mix It Up (2010), “The convergence of media content across platforms promises the development of exciting and dynamic new forms of cultural production.” Since achieving success in today’s mass media market is unpredictable, media industries base their decision making on strategies to minimize risk and financial loss. However, famous artists and prominent production labels are now faced with the problem that consumers themselves participate in the coproduction of their own media experience.

Although the strategies used by media firms to minimize risk were shown to be successful in many cases, today’s generation of consumers form a threat to those strategies considering that today’s consumers are also co-producers of pop-culture. According to Grazina (2010), “It is exceedingly uncommon for the media industries to promote cultural products that do not cleave to common types of genre conventions or stylistic boundaries.” However, if we observe the popularity of the Harlem Shake from a sociological perspective, it’s noticeable that it stimulates from the fact that it’s easily reproduced among ordinary consumers. Therefore, the success of a cultural product these days doesn’t necessary depend on the distribution or strategies held by prominent media corporations, instead, it’s now determined by the active participation of the audience in co-producing their own pop-culture and the widespread of popular fades among regular consumers.

The Internet meme culture has gained attention over the past couple of years and the Harlem Shake is considered a subset of this Internet meme culture. Although unexpected, the popularity achieved by the Harlem Shake has caused it to become one of the most popular trends of the year. However, Internet memes could also be considered a strategy for risk reduction since it has been used as a marketing technique and it has proven to be effective in achieving marketable success. Following this popular trend, on February 21^st Northwestern University in Qatar participated in the Harlem Shake trend.