Going viral

In case you haven’t heard, we’ve had a bit of an “Internet sensation” on our hands. Someone snapped a photo of Tom Winter, a classics and religious studies professor, doing what he’s done for more than a decade around campus: skateboarding. As he told the Lincoln Journal Star, he does it because “I'm 19, but my joints are all of 68 years old. Sometimes, walking is simply unpleasant.” It helps that he is a champion roller skater.

It’s amazing that something that we’ve known about for years can go viral on the Internet in 24 hours. It really points to how the new media shapes things and how the right placement, the right time and the right photo can really attract attention. It takes just a few people to pick up on it, push it out to enough people and wham, it’s gone.

As of Tuesday morning, the original photo of Tom attracted more than 915,000 views on imgur.com and fans responded by using the photo to create more than a dozen memes with commentary like “Has a Ph.D. in righteousness.”

Decades ago, Andy Warhol famously said that in the future everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes. The statement has held up, particularly in a era when we can easily turn to websites like imgur.com and reddit.com or even Facebook and Twitter.