Click here to grab it in all its hyperlinked glory

This week the Internet has
seen its usual mix of reality-television driven conversation, dead celebrity
searching and inevitable Gangnam Style parodies. However, there has been one
thing in particular that has caught my attention and, judging by the amount of
press that it’s garnered, a few others’ as well.

We had planking. Then we
had owling. Then we had batmanning. Now ladies and gentlemen, we have milking.

This frankly bizarre (and wasteful if I’m going to get all
Alan Partridge on this) activity was devised by a group of students at
Newcastle University. The man behind the video had this to say, “We were just in our kitchen talking about doing it outside
Starbucks in Jesmond and thought it would be really funny. We did that,
uploaded the video to Facebook and got a load of likes. So then we thought ‘why
not just make a video’?” Besides the badly thought out quote, I think that
these student pranksters were fairly savy as to how successful their video
would be.

However, the most interesting point for me is
how quickly the tabloids grabbed onto this. The original video was posted on
November 21^st and by November 25^th the Daily Mail had
already written an article claiming that milking was an ‘Internet craze’. Now,
I’ve done a bit of digging around and I’ve found a few copycat videos however
the large majority of these date after when the press got hold of it. Which
begs the question: when it is right to class something as a ‘trend’ or ‘craze’?
And also: did the press make this a ‘craze’?

The constant yearn to find the next big thing
is indicative of Internet behaviour and it seems that the press are now
spending more time on the web, on sites associated with Internet culture, in
able to fuel their agenda. I can only see this continuing, which raises the
importance and prominence of sites such as Reddit, 4chan and 9gag.

The tabloids lurking on Reddit. Now there’s a
scary though…