The Bin Laden Joke Stream

The joke goes like this

If I had a gun with 2 bullets and was in the room with Bin Laden, Hitler, and xxx I would shoot xxx twice.

The joke is in the xxx. Who would you rather shoot than Bin Laden and Hitler?

This is a joke in the Bin Laden stream in Twitter. Every day hundreds of tweets show up including Bin Laden as part of the message. The writers put everything you can imagine into the stream including jokes in which Bin Laden is part of the action. This particular joke appeared 111 times between May 22 and June 2, 2010. Eighty of them appeared the two weekends covered by the period. This joke, and perhaps others, are weekend activites.

Who would the tweeters rather shoot than Bin Laden and Hitler? The first telling was Toby, and Toby was to take the bullets in 63 of the 111 tweets. Second was Kat Stacks with 20. After that the numbers are small. Justin Bieber would have been shot 5 times. You, meaning the reader, would have taken the double hit 4 times. Jonnybananas got it 3 times. David Cameron, Paul Pierce, Glen Davis, and pronger were nominated twice. And the Comcast CEO, David Beckham, Derek Fisher, Guiccimane, Kobe Bryant, lawyer, NBA referee, and Vaan only made it once.

If you don't know Toby, of Office fame, you are a hopeless academic. The NBA references kept me from being a total dunce in this culture, but others are definitely notables. Justin Bieber was one of the trending references on Twitter for weeks, maybe months, it seemed like forever to some, for example.

It was 111 tweets. What was the reach? How many people had the chance to see these jokes? All but one of the writers had followers. Followers are individuals who have 'signed up' to receive all the tweets produced by a given individual. The number of followers receiving these jokes was 24,244. It is not exactly worldwide distribution, but it looks reasonably big relative to telling a joke to your friends, which is how culture was spread a couple of generations ago. The average number of followers was 218, but the distribution is very skewed. Seventy-nine were below the mean and only 32 were above the mean. The top 3 had 1688+ followers. It is the kind of long tail distribution that is usually found in these communication streams -- a few very popular writers and many less followed.

There is an emerging global popular culture in Twitter, Facebook, and other social media. Jokes are among the most culturally embedded of communications. Of course everyone knows Bin Laden. What is the big deal about that? Notice what it means to say everybody knows Bin Laden. It means there is a global domain/culture in which knowledge of Bin Laden is, more or less, universally shared -- and Hitler as well. Their evil can be taken for granted and played with bending it into humor. You do not have to explain their evil to anyone in this culture. And Toby and David Beckham and Justin Bieber and others are equally known in this shared knowledge space.

It is called globalization, and it is growing with every joke being written. The challenge to us, scholars, is understanding what will be wrought by this emerging global culture -- beyond jokes. What other globalizations emerge as the shared culture grows?

This is the Karl Deutch story, of course. Long may we remember his insights.

A more fully developed analysis will be presented at ISA 2011 if the organizers see fit.

G. R. Boynton
June 2, 2010

For more analyses see New Media and Politics.

The tweets and additional information were collected using the search engine of SocialPing.

The jokes were extracted from the file using QDA Miner by Provalis Research. If you would like to read all 111 versions of this joke they are contained in this excel 2003 file.