The Out-of-Touch Adults’ Guide to Kid Culture: What is Face Dancing?

This week’s Out-of-Touch Guide explains everything from a dance trend that anyone with a face can do to which social media trends are leading to arrests.Put on your face’s dancing shoes and let’s get going!

What is “face dancing?”

Face dancing is, as you might have guessed, pointing a camera at your visage and moving it in time to music; think of it like lip-syncing with extra sauce. It’s not exactly new—the online version dates to 2017, and the “just messing around” version is as old as mirrors themselves—but the pastime is having a moment right now thanks to face dancing’s own Twyla Tharp, @minynaranja, whose eight million TikTok followers are proof of the trend’s popularity. Here’s what face dancing looks like:

There are a ton of accounts dedicated to the practice, with each dancer bringing something new and distressing to the art form. Like this:

The big question is “does this take talent?” On the one side, people like X user @ElMichalito react like this to an @minynaranja live performance:

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On the other are the millions of likes and shares on face-dancing videos. It all makes me want to renounce civilization entirely and move to a cave, but I can’t deny the talent.

A follow-up to last week’s report of spooky Cat in the Hat memes: There have been a lot of arrests. Four juveniles in Berwick, Louisiana, face menacing and cyberbullying charges, as does a teenager in Port Allen, LA. A kid in Kentucky turned himself in to authorities. A high school student was arrested in Colorado in connection with the trend. Arrests have also been made in Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Kansas. Presumably, the arrests and charges are connected to specific threats accompanying images of the Cat in the Hat posted to social media, rather than kids just posting the meme itself. But still, if there’s a young person in your life, tell them to post Gucci Morty instead. Gucci Morty just wants to vibe with you.

The “Urban exploration” trend also leading to arrests

Teenagers poking around inside abandoned buildings (and maybe being popped for trespassing) is not new, but always being online has made “urban exploring” a more popular and public pursuit than it used to be. Kids post videos of interesting expeditions, other kids follow, the police get involved.

What do you think so far?

It’s easy to understand the allure of this kind of content. Watching people uncover the secrets of an abandoned hospital or the untold history of a “NASA scientist’s luxury mansion” is fascinating. But it also highlights how social media encourages young people to escalate. It used to be enough to explore a creepy local barn or something. Now you gotta explore a huge abandoned city in China or an old riverboat casino for clout. This makes it all more dangerous. Still, I hope the authorities go easy on copycats; at least they’re out of the house doing something.

Viral video of the week: “Fact Attack Adventures”

You ever say, “Whaaazzzzup?”‘ to a younger person and get a blank look in return, leaving you stammering, “…it’s from these commercials, for, I think, beer. They were really popular in… never mind”? Viral animated web series Fact Attack Adventures is the reverse of that: It parodies educational platforms like BrainPOP that Gen Z and younger Millennials watched in school. That means it’s intimately familiar to them, but foreign to anyone older, save maybe for parents who had to homeschool their kids during lockdown. It’s not exactly a note-for-note satire, but the influence is clear.

Speaking of influence, if you want to understand a big part of what shaped the younger generations, BrainPOP is a good place to start. It was founded in 1999 by a pediatrician as a way of explaining complex medical problems to kids, but soon expanded to include lessons in math, social studies, English, and more. It spread online through the 2000s, and today it’s used in nearly two-thirds of American schools. It’s nearly universally beloved, too. Anyone under a certain age knows who Tim and Moby are. It’s just the kind of thing that needs to be parodied. I’m glad the first generation raised entirely by computers has grown old enough to look backwards with a critical eye, yet still remain affectionate for the source material.

Anyway, Fact Attack is really funny. Maybe not that specific kind of funny that comes from really getting it, but even if it’s other people’s nostalgia, the conceit, which sees simple facts and lessons spiral into absurdity, is timeless. Good comedy isn’t all references to current cultural events.