What if this:
I made this!
Were topologically equivalent to this:
I stole this from Google Image Search!
Silly Bandz are a big fad right now; the target audience is children up to about age 15, but they’ve caught on with the older set, too; you’re likely to see at least one in an average large group of 20-25 year old women.
For the basics, let’s turn to the CBS21 Cumberland County Mobile Newsroom, the hardest-hitting journalistic unit in Central Pennsylvania, digging up the gritty goings-on at the Hallmark Store in the Camp Hill Mall:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uisPmaiXJmc
As is customary, OTI will pick up where the Cumberland County Mobile Newsroom leaves off – they tell you the what, the who, then when, and the where of Silly Bandz; we’ll handle the “why.” Why are silly bands popular? Why are they so exciting? And what does “topologically equivalent” mean? I’ll answer the first questions and do my best with the last, after the jump –
A Tiny Bit on Topology
Topology is an advanced branch of mathematics of which I have a slightly above-Wikipedia-level of knowledge, because I’ve played some topology-based cell phone games.
I’m not talking about topography – little rings on fancy maps to show you where mountains are and stuff. Topology is the study of shapes independent of their size or distortions created by stretching or twisting. If you have a bunch of points with paths between them, and the length and direction of the paths matter less than what points they connect or whether they cross, that’s probably a situation that calls for at least some basic topology.
As is so often the case when a faint reflection of an inspiring scientific subject matter leads to an idea in the humanities (such as the nonsense that related relativity in physics with relativity in morals, which is a trick of semantics and little more), topology lends an interesting point of interpretation to Silly Bandz.
When an object with semantic weight is distorted, what remains of its meaning? Are there qualities of meaning, which, like qualities of shape, are preserved when the image itself is transformed?
We don’t have to look far for examples of artists considering this question:
But what if we up the ante?
And what if we push the envelope on top of the ante, which has already been upped?
And what if we add a lens flare, because this is the Internet and such things are obligatory?
Are those still clocks? Do they still tell time?
At this point, we’ve definitely ventured into social art, where the context of you and I talking about this piece and interacting with it has become essential to the way we’re trying to understand it.
On one hand, we’ve effed up Mr. Dali’s fine painting beyond recognition and ruined it, but on the other hand, because the process was part of the experience of the art, we know what it was, and that information isn’t entirely lost. It has just become more secret, more privileged information than it used to be.
Getting the Bandz Back Together
This is how Silly Bandz work — people who have seen the Silly Bandz in their relaxed, iconic state, have information that is not apparent to others when the bands are in their ovoid, bracelety shape. This asymmetry creates gaps in understanding and context which are fun to be part of and relevant to the interest of contemporary social life. It’s cool to be “in the know” — and “kids today” (as it were) are engaged in an endless game of nigh-Freudian retention and expulsion of information with each other all the time.
If I have a Silly Band (I’m uncomfortable using this in the singular because of the “Z,” but it has become necessary) shaped like an elephant, and I stretch it and put it on my wrist, I still know it’s an elephant, and it still represents an elephant to me, just like that information that told your computer to light up a bunch of dots or liquid crystals or plasma or whatever it does, which is, of course, not an actual elephant either, but we’re talking about the idea of an elephant here, which is a construct in the first place.
(The difference between, say humans and elephants is trivial when compared to, say, between humans and comets, or humans and the number 3. It’s all about context and why we choose to call things by certain names — our reasons are our own, not intrinsic.).
But I digress (YOU DIGRESSED? REALLY? YOU? NO!!!)
But to the kid who sits behind me in my geometry class, my Silly Band does not represent an elephant. It just looks like a crimpy, crinkly necklace. He does not have information that I have chosen to withhold from him. That control is comforting and creates a tool with which to play status games.
In my Juggalo Theory of Value series, I talked a bit about object permanence. The pleasure in Silly Bandz partly comes from enjoying fully developed object permanence — from seeing the elephant will come back after it has disappeared while being worn on your wrist. But that’s not the whole story. The pleasure of Silly Bandz isn’t strictly cognitive; it’s social.
How Silly Bandz Are Used
As far as fad objects go, Silly Bandz are disposable. They are sold in packs of two dozen, they break frequently, and they are of very little value individually. You buy one Pet Rock, you have one Pet Rock. You buy one Silly Bandz package, and you have 24 of them.
This empowers kids to not just ask for them from their parents — Silly Bandz are given as gifts and traded among friends, not so much in a drive to fill a collection, but as a signifier of social relationships. They’re similar to friendship bracelets, except not nearly so serious. They’re sort of like “facebook friendship” bracelets.
Thus, I get to the main limb upon which I intend to go out here — Silly Bandz are pieces in a real-world game that teaches the values of online social networking systems, and of the new rules of the currency of information.
A person who has Silly Bandz has a certain amount of information. They can make this information as public as they want — they can tell everybody what their Silly Bandz are in their relaxed states, they can carry them around unworn and show them to people; conversely, they could keep their Silly Bandz at home or always wear them on their wrists so people don’t know what they are.
But this information isn’t really private. If somebody really wanted to find out which Silly Bandz you had, the way Silly Bandz tend to be used and the way kids talk doesn’t make this especially hard. After all, most people carry theirs around a lot of the time (and there are some skeevy folks who do this, no doubt, who are rightfully exiled to the fringes of society). Plus, Silly Bandz are cheap and plentiful — this ubiquity is the best protection any one person with Silly Bandz has against anybody trying to find out what their Silly Bandz are in their relaxed states.
The owner of the Silly Bandz can give these bands to friends, showing vulnerability by sharing the non-public information of what the silly bands really are. And as the friend wears the Silly Bandz, keeping this information obscured, they are still aware of the signification going on because they shared a social relationship with a friend that gave them the necessary background (they saw the Dali painting before we went over all the clocks with schlocky GiMP filters).
The social context is affirming. It creates a new way of “proving” that our relationships to one another matter, and that fills a psychological need — one that is at the center of the current information economy, which is, as I wrote in the aforementioned series, increasingly looking to social capital as a primary value from which to build other assets.
So, I think there are a number of pleasures to Silly Bandz that make them a great fad, and a great fad for right now:
1. They’re interesting. People talk about how modern folks have no attention span; that’s not true. We just have no time or inclination to deal with things that bore us. Things that spark our imagination and thinking resonate and pull us in. Silly Bandz do this.
2. They transform. Transformation is inherently fun, which is why it is part of so many stories for children and adults, from Turbo Teen to Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Transformation is connected with hope and life, whereas stagnation is connected with despair and death. A plan necklace becoming an elephant is kind of a magical moment.
By the way, we all now have to watch the intro to Turbo Teen, whether it supports my point or not (and I think it does) because it is amazing:
3. They reaffirm that “meaning” can persist even when it appears to be absent. This urge is at the emotional bedrock of most religious and secular drives to achieve understanding of the universe — the things we can’t see with our eyes that we discover or learn are true by either faith or investigation, both of which have roles in the semantics of Silly Bandz.
4. They socialize the interpretation of an art object, which makes it more fun. This is why people have book clubs, or why you go to the movies in groups, or why people put together pop culture websites.
5. They allow for the exchange information as a currency in a social context. Which is one of the most important and relevant skills people are learning right now. People are smart enough to know that games that teach this skill are useful games.
6. They create semantic affirmation for personal relationships. Friendship bracelets are cool because they give meaning, albeit one not derived from text, to something we know is important but sometimes hard to identify. Silly Bandz do this as well – except they are easier to use for lots of people, which is cool, because it feels good to feel like we have lots of friends, which is why, in turn, so many people “friend” their acquaintances on social networking sites.
7. A lot of them are elephants. And elephants are awesome.
Quod elephant demonstratum.
P.S. – It is important to note that Silly Bandz are completely different from sex bracelets, another current fad that is somewhat more bothersome. And they are both in turn different from plastic bracelets that raise money for cancer research. The only things these three fads have in common are that they are popular, they are successful, and they are made possible by plummeting costs in the manufacture and distribution of plastic bracelets.