I Accidentally Became A Meme: Blinking White Guy
- I accidentally became a meme,
and this is that story.
(electronic music)
My name's Drew Scanlon,
and some of you may know me as the blinking white guy meme.
I was working as a video producer at a website
that covers the video game industry called Giant Bomb.
Part of my duties as a video producer,
I not only was shooting and editing a lot of video,
but because we were a really small team,
everyone was always on camera kind of all the time.
We did this weekly show called Unprofessional Fridays
for our premium subscribers
and it was basically just us sitting around
playing a bunch of video games.
The Giant Bomb fans are amazing
and they're very passionate,
[crowd cheers]
so, there were animated gifs being made of us constantly.
So, that part was not really new to me.
When that happened, it always was sort of contained
within the Giant Bomb community
or maybe video games at large.
The video of the meme was recorded in just one
of these sessions where we'd get together and play games,
and my coworker Jeff was playing a game called
Starbound, which involves farming,
and he said...
- So I've been doing some farming-
- Nice.
- With my hoe here. I can kind of till the-
- What kind of a-
- So what is that-
(deep slow motion voice)
And that's the reaction I made to that,
sort of, double entendre, I guess.
And it was just one joke in a 2 hour show,
it didn't, at the time, it didn't stand out
as anything particularly special.
I think, one of the weirdest things,
is that 4 years went by between the fil-
when that video was shot and when the meme
kind of reached its critical mass.
[alarm Buzz]
I don't know why that happened.
Uh, I always just attribute it to internet chaos theory.
The point where I noticed that it had, sort of,
blossomed into this larger thing,
like outside of the gaming community,
was people mentioning to me on Twitter
that they saw it used somewhere else.
Like, their Mom used it on Facebook or something.
She has no idea who you are, but she used it on Facebook.
And there were also a lot of tweets using it
that had tens of thousands of likes and retweets.
Once I got a sense of how large it was,
it was honestly a little scary,
(somber music)
because it felt very much out of my control.
I mean, nothing on the internet is within anyone's control,
really, but it just, there's something about
the scale that was a little alarming.
I was very thankful that that clip was fairly inocuous.
Something I said may have been twisted into something bad,
or it could have been more embarrassing,
like, that has certainly happened to people on the internet.
At some points, it almost doesn't feel like me.
Like, I just made a face on a livestream.
It was other people that, you know,
trimmed that out and then discovered a way to use it.
There's still not a lot of association with me.
People think it's Cary Elwes,
they think it's Michael C. Hall,
and so, you really have to dig a little bit
to figure out, to trace it back to again, a real person.
I have been recognized one time as the meme guy
because of the fact that it was so long between
the filming of the video and when it, kind of, got popular,
I looked pretty different.
Like, I had more facial hair, my hair was longer.
So, shout out to the guy at the Dublin Best Buy.
Memes are this weird different thing.
They're different from, you know,
celebrities like actors or something.
People expect actors to be real people.
They don't necessarily expect that,
and this is just my theory,
they don't necessarily expect that from memes
because memes come from the internet.
I don't know that people necessarily will notice someone
and say hey, I think I know that guy from a meme.
It actually happened right at the time
where I was leaving Giant Bomb to start Cloth Map.
Cloth Map is a video project on YouTube,
but it's supported by my audience on Patreon.
Some people, I think, jokingly associated, like,
Drew's a big meme now so he's gonna go out on his own,
when, like, there was no correlation there at all.
My audience sends me around the world
to explore different countries
through the lens of the games and sports that they play.
Games are a lot like food.
They're this thing that people come together
and do with their family and friends,
and it's a commonality across all cultures.
On a trip for Cloth Map, I went to Brazil,
and I met some people who had heard somehow
that the guy from the blinking white guy meme was coming.
Like, that was not, I wasn't there to be a meme,
I was there to like, you know, ask them questions about
video game development in Brazil
and they were all very excited to meet me,
which, you know, that was strange but kind of fun,
which I think, strange but kind of fun
kind of sums up the whole thing.
I think virality is a weird thing.
I think, if you chase it, it doesn't come.
I think, people are really good at detecting deception
and when people are being inauthentic,
that is easy for humans to detect.
I think, if this happens to you,
I think my advice would be just to embrace it.
You can't hide on the internet
so whatever is out there, is out there
and just try as best you can to have fun with it.
[electronic music]
