PropertyValue
?:author
?:datePublished
  • 2016-08-24 (xsd:date)
?:headline
  • Young Woman Struggles to Open Can of Spaghetti-Os (en)
?:inLanguage
?:itemReviewed
?:mentions
?:reviewBody
  • On 22 August 2016, the Facebook page AMERICAN STRONG published the following text and video depicting a young woman seemingly struggling with the feat of opening a can of Spaghetti-O's, suggesting that a generation of young adults have grown up lacking competence in such basic physical tasks as opening cans (at least, ones requiring the use of can openers rather than simply removing pull tab lids): The clip was one minute and 27 seconds long and bizarrely suggested that the young woman depicted was (for inexplicable reasons) demonstrating her manual can opening skills for a similarly inexplicably impressed crowd. The clip concluded with a round of applause, apparently offered by the crowd because the subject finally succeeding in her difficult feat of opening a can with a can opener. Comments on the American Strong Facebook post suggested many viewers believed the clip presented an entirely plausible scenario highlighting a plague of brain dead millennials in America: Not many Facebook observers appeared to question why the woman in the video was attempting to perform a rather mundane action in front of a large crowd in the first place, much less ponder whether there was more to the clip than presented. Indeed, the meme-tracking web site Know Your Meme offers the following description for an odd video known as Interior Semiotics, providing a clue that the footage was more likely a truncated version of a performance art piece: The full video of that performance was published to YouTube in May 2010 under the same title and ran more than seven minutes long, of which the opening a can of Spaghetti-Os segment comprised only a small portion: The artist, Natacha Stolz, described her inspiration for the piece as follows: The Spaghetti-Os video was misleadingly edited to suggest that millennials (perhaps routinely) struggle with mundane tasks such as using can openers, doing so for large assembled crowds to copious plaudits. But the shortened video was in fact a widely-known (and mocked) March 2010 performance art piece and was not intended to be a genuine depiction of the millennial incompetence. The complete performance went viral in its own right in 2010 and was jeered as an art form that many onlines felt was pretentious and pointless, but the clip did not depict a young woman struggling to open a can of food because she lacked the basic skills to do so. (en)
?:reviewRating
rdf:type
?:url