How To Get Famous in 30 Seconds Oct. 6, 2001, was the night that would make David Bernal famous, although he didn’’t know it at the time. He was 21 and a senior at California State University at Long Beach, majoring in art and illustration and doing a little break dancing on the side. On the night in question he had been hired to perform at a Korean-American talent show in Los Angeles. There’’s a grainy video of the in which you can see him mumble his name into the microphone and then do his thing for about 60 sec. The audience goes insane. Those watching can’’t believe what’’s happening. Bernal, who performs under the name David Elsewhere, describes his dance style as a mixture of " popping, waving, liquiding, breaking, roboting". What this means in practice is that, first, his body physically melts into a little puddle and then rebuilds itself bone by bone; then he becomes a giant robot; then weird energies go surging through his arms and legs; then he makes it look as though something is crawling around under his shirt; then he becomes a springy hopping creature. And then, just like that, it’’s over. Except it wasn’’t over. Somebody converted the grainy video from that night into a digital file and posted it on the Web. One by one, then hundreds by hundreds, people started downloading the video, emailing it, linking to it, sharing it, copying it and reuploading it. In other words, the little video went viral—it multiplied and reproduced and spread out of control on the Internet like a virus. And millions of people caught it. Bernal is famous now, in a way, but it’’s a new kind of fame, courtesy of a new medium. Viral videos are only a few minutes or even a few seconds long, and they’’re generally in execution and wildly eclectic in subject matter. Browse one of the websites that hosts them, like YouTube or Google Video, and you’’ll see drunken karaoke, babies being born, plane crashes, burping contests, freakish sports accidents and far, far stranger things. The one thing they have in common is that people can’’t stop watching them. The viral video probably began with the infamous Dancing Baby, which suced in 1996. A strangely compelling animation of a diapered infant getting its tiny groove on, the Dancing Baby was born as a software demo, but people started sending it to one another as an e-mail attachment. Until the Baby came along, nobody realized that that kind of spontaneous In box-to-In box sharing, following the and-they’’ll-tell-two-friends model, could ever add up to much, let alone scale to the level of a mass medium. " It wasn’’t as though a marketing firm attempted to create the phenomenon," says Michael Girard, one of the programmers who helped create the Dancing Baby. Soon, other clips followed the same branching path the Baby did: a cheerleader apparently being flipped through a basketball hoop; Paris Hilton’’s tape; Janet Jackson’’s famous wardrobe malfunction; a 19-year-old New Jersey man (doomed to be forever known as "the Numa Numa guy" ) overenthusiastically lip synching to a Romanian pop song. Last December, Saturday Night Live’’s Lazy Sunday video appeared on the Net after airing on the show. The white-boy rap about cupcakes and Narnia immediately went viral, spawning half a dozen catchphrases and endowing SNL with an aura of cool it hasn’’t enjoyed since Wayne’’s World. But most viral videos come from s, brilliant or lucky camcorder auteurs who just put their work on the Net and watch it take off. Traffic to viral-video sites is surging, driven by ubiquitous broadband Internet access and cheap, easy -to -use digital video cameras. Since last year, visits to Yahoo! ’’s Video section have gone up 148%. Traffic to iFilm. com grew 102%. YouTube, launched in December, is storming the Web. It already had 9 million unique visitors in February, compared with Google Video’’s 6. 2 million and Yahoo! ’’s 3. 8 million. YouTube’’s traffic grew another 24% just last month, and the site shows more than 40 million videos a day. Visitors to YouTube spend an average of 15 minutes there per session—that’’s an eternity in the quick-clicking world of the Web. Seriously. Don’’t go to YouTube if you don’’t have some time to kill, because whatever time you have, YouTube will kill it. Viral videos are powerful, but that power can be a little scary. Once something goes viral, there’’s no way to get the genie back in the bottle, and some things go viral that shouldn’’t. One notorious surveillance video, still at large online, shows a suspect in a San Bernardino County, Calif. , police station shooting himself in the head with a pistol. Another video shows a chubby kid waving a golf-ball retriever like a light saber. The kid, Ghyslain Raza, was 15 at the time. Three of his classmates found the footage and put it online, and it became an instant Internet classic. Soon strangers started fun of Raza on the street. The San Francisco Giants put the video on their Jumbotron. Raza, now 18, became known as the Star Wars Kid. He also became depressed and dropped out of school. ually he sued (控告) the classmates who had found the video. Two weeks ago, they settled for an undisclosed sum. Corporations are running into similar problems. They want to ride the viral train for the free publicity, but it doesn’’t always go where they want it to. In March Chevrolet organized an online make-your-own-commercial campaign for its Tahoe SUV. Green-minded humorists hijacked the campaign, creating widely circulated Tahoe ads with slogans like, "Nature It’’ll grow back. Drive a car that costs the earth. " Last year, Lee Ford and Dan Brooks, a London -based creative ad development team, came up with an "edgy" Volkswagen spot for a demo reel; a terrorist tries to detonate a car bomb outside a crowded cafe. But the car, a VW Polo, is too sturdy—it contains the blast, killing the terrorist but saving the caf6. Shot on a shoestring budget, the clip is shocking, tasteless, stunningly effective—and totally unauthorized. When it leaked onto the Net (it had been hidden on Ford and Brooks’’ website) , they were pretty stunned too. "We went to sleep, and then America got it," says Ford, 33. "I woke in the morning and looked at our website. The hit rate was through the roof. " The duo(成对的人) had to apologize to Volkswagen. Not every video goes viral. The vast majority go nowhere—YouTube hosts millions of hours of drunken parties, tearful confessions, smiling babies, sleeping cats and screen grabs from World of Warcraft, all doomed to obscurity. Nike showed a firm grasp of the form with a popular clip, an ad stealthily designed to look like footage, showing soccer deity Ronaldinho putting on a pair of sneakers and then, incredibly, nailing the crossbar with a soccer ball four times in a row. Some of the successes are accidental. For a while, one of the popular movies on Google Video was a 20-sec. clip of a kid falling off a jungle gym. Others are inexplicable: a 24-year-old Midwesterner known as Nornna has so far posted 755 movie clips to YouTube in which she laconically narrates the details of her daily life. The videos are almost excruciatingly prosaic, but they have a huge grass-roots following, and they have made her one of the medium’’s homegrown celebrities. Other viral videos show genuine comic smarts. One night in January a couple of Emerson College students named Jonathan Ade and Patrick DiNicola had a brain wave and stayed up late re-editing footage from the Back to the Future trilogy to create Brokeback to the Future, the time-traveling love story of young Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) and mad scientist Dr. Emmett Brown (Christopher Lloyd). Viral gold. "A friend of ours posted it onto YouTube," says Ade, 21. "After that point it got away from us. " Brokeback to the Future has been viewed more than 3 million times on YouTube alone and inspired dozens of knockoffs (including Lazy Brokeback, in which SNL’’s Andy Samberg and Chris Parnell find each other to be "crazy delicious" ). "Professionally I think this is going to help me out in the long run in terms of my film career," says Ade. That’’s quite possible. There’’s a purity to viral videos that can’’t be replicated in other media, if you can use purity to refer to a medium that is at least 5% fart jokes. Nothing can force a clip to go viral. It requires an authentic response from a mass audience, and the mainstream is learning to respect that. Soon after their unsanctioned VW spot hit the Net, viral admen Ford and Brooks were hired for a series of spoof political spots for Britain’’s Channel 4, and they’’ve gone on to work for McDonald’’s and the Sci Fi Channel Europe, among others. Says Brooks; "It put us on the map. " And what about David Bernal, a. k. a. David Elsewhere He’’s living the viral dream. Since that night in 2001, he has danced in commercials for 7-Eleven, Heineken, Pepsi and Apple’’s iPod. He has shown his stuff on Jay Leno, Jimmy Kimmel and Steve Harvey. He did a Volkswagen ad that consists entirely of his gloriously funky reinterpretation of Gene Kelly’’s classic Singin’’ in the Rain routine. He even did a cameo in You Got Served. "The choreographer had seen the video and wanted me to be in the movie ," Bernal says. "That’’s usually how it works. I don’’t have to audition. And even if I do, they just want to see if I can still do what I used to do. " The initiation of viral video is the infamous Dancing Baby, which suced in 1996.