Towel Surfing?

They called it "Towel Surfing." Apparently, it was a flash mob event on beautiful Bondi Beach, very much in keeping with the guerrilla dancing meme made famous by our beloved Defenders of the Playful, Improv Everywhere, producers of the inspiring Where's Rob stadium event. I didn't see anyone actually surfing or dancing or even standing on towels, so I didn't get the towel surfing part. But the event was definitely YouTube-worthy (starting with the semi-inspiring image of a fat-challenged man dancing in his Speedos and then going on to embrace the more clearly inspiring images of lovely lasses dancing in their all-but-all-together), and the commercial underpinnings remained safely in the background. But commercially under-pinned it certainly was, sponsored by Do You Flip, an Australian site promoting the people who make the Flip digital video camera. And therein lies the departure.

So, OK. So they take a very successful meme which was created as a playfully artistic statement and use it to sell cameras. And it makes one perhaps enter into disturbing conjectures, similar to those entertained by the recent conference, called "The Internet as Playground and Factory, where variously sober thinkers discuss the way that some people make money off of others' freely contributed inspirations, the Towel Surfing video vividly exemplifying the very point the speakers make over and over again. And yet, and yet, when all is said and done, it's still fun. Even without towels.



via The Presurfer


from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith