Digital Culture: Rickrolling

In these few decades, the advancement of the technology established a superconnected world, in which everyone on the earth can easily communicate and interact with anyone on this planet. Such of associations between people prompt the emergence of a huge online community, in which people are sharing thoughts and joking around with others. It’s like billions of people are sitting around a table and having a party. One example that epitomizes this party is “Rickrolling”

At the beginning of 21st century, rickrolling suddenly spread out through out the internet among the entire world. “Rickrolling” refer the action of tricking people to open Rick Astley’s song “Never Gonna Give You Up” published on 1987. It began with posting hyperlink that seems to be associated with other content, yet it actually takes people to the song “Never Gonna Give You Up”. During the following years, the forms of “Rickrolling” are increasing, but the basic of “Rickrolling” never changed: It involves the unexpected appearance of the song(Wikipedia, Dec 13 2023).

Below is an example of early “Rickrolling”.

The trend of “Rickrolling” remains high until today, and hundreds of millions people have been rickrolled. To have a better understanding of the popularity of “Rickrolling” at current age among the world, check out the “Rickrolling” in a popular mobile game released merely a year before by a Chinese company: “Honkai: Star Rail”. Focus on the yellow texts.

For me, “Rickrolling” represent a straight-forward aspect of the digital culture, which is entertaining. As I previously mentioned, online community enables hundreds of millions people from different countries all sit together around a table, and “Rickrolling” is a joke to entertain others. This is only possible with the advanced technologies developed in these few decades. I like “Rickrolling” because unlike some other aspects of digital cultures that refer to different coutries, genders, organizations, etc., “Rickrolling” is merely an entertainment to make people laugh. Those digital culture involves specific groups of people may be misleading or offensive due to uneven availability of the internet, because merely 53% of the population have access to the internet(Chayko, 2020). Yet, “Rickrolling” doesn’t involve in any specific group, and thus not possible for it to cause any confrontation.

At this point, there are still an increasing number of people being rick rolled. It has no meaning but make you laugh, yet this is the reason I like this digital culture.

Citations:

Wikipedia. (2023). Rickrolling. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rickrolling.

Chayko, M. (2020). Superconnected: The internet, digital media, and techno-
social life (3rd ed.). SAGE.

Byrd, J. (2009). Rickroll’d. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_pRiUfp938