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Type numa numa into Google Video’s search box, and you’ll get well over 400 hits; in YouTube’s, you’ll get over 1,500. Virtually all of the results are cut from a single template.

Brolsma’s video singlehandedly justifies the existence of webcams. His squarish head and shoulders are in the center of the shot. He’s got a short haircut, glasses that are slightly too small for him and reflect his computer’s monitor, and cheap headphones; he’s sitting in a dismal-looking suburban room. And he is going for it: rolling his eyes back in his head, shaking his face, shooting his hands into the air with the beat, saluting along with the word salut, gesturing grandly, lip-synching the whole thing with his grand opera of a mouth, flirting with the camera, utterly given over to the music. It’s a movie of someone who is having the time of his life, wants to share his joy with everyone, and doesn’t care what anyone else thinks.

they start to look less like an infectious joke than like a new cultural order. These kids aren’t mocking the Numa Numa Guy; they’re venerating him. They are geeks honoring the King of the Geeks, and they’re beautiful to see, because they’re replicating and spreading his happiness. They’re following a ritual that’s meaningful if not yet venerable: learning the dance, lip-synching the song, documenting their performance just so, making it available for the world to see.

INTRODUCTORY TEXTS FOR COURSE Boellstorff. T. Coming of Age in Second life (Princeton 2008) Cameron, F. & Kenderdine, S., Theorizing Digital Cultural Heritage: A Critical Discourse (MIT 2007) Horst, H. and Miller, D. The Cell Phone: An Anthropology of Communication (Berg 2006) Kalay, Y.E. et al, New Heritage: New Media and Cultural Heritage (Routledge, 2008) Ito. M et. al. Hanging Out, Messing Around, Geeking Out: Living and Learning with New Media. (MIT Press: forthcoming Kelty, C. Two Bits: the cultural significance of free software. (Duke 2008) Macdonald, S. & Basu, P., Exhibition Experiments (Blackwell 2007) Miller, D. and Slater, D. The Internet: an Ethnographic Approach (Berg 2001) Parry, R., Recoding the Museum: Digital Heritage and the Technologies of Change (Routledge, 2007) Tilley, C., Keane,W. Kuchler,S. Rowlands, M. Spyer, P. Handbook of Material Culture.(Sage 2006) Were, G. 'Out of touch? digital technologies, ethnographic objects and sensory orders'. In Chatterjee, H. (ed.) Touch in Museums (Berg 2008)