The following informant is an 8th grader. In this account she is explaining what the Mannequin Challenge is. This is a transcription of our conversation, she is identified as SA and I am identified as K:
SA: So, the mannequin challenge was something you heard about online. We found it on Instagram, and it’s basically you play a song and you have to stay still like a mannequin. and someone takes a video of the room, and you can act like you are having a party or like doing sports or whatever, and they just take a picture of you still not moving
K: do you have to use a particular song?
SA: yes, Rae Sremmurd’s “Black Beatles,”
K: What grade where you in when this became viral?
SA: Well it was last year, so 7th grade
K: Did you participate and make a video
SA: Yeah we did it with my English class and someone recorded it and someone posted it on instagram
K: Do you know who started the challenge?
SA: No we just heard about it when it went viral. I think the first one was at a high school.
K: What did you think when you first saw it?
SA: I thought it was like really cool and a funny idea, and then a lot of people were doing it at our school so I wanted to do it too
Context: She told me this while at my house one weekend.
Thoughts:
Like with other internet trends and challenges I struggled to define them. It kind of feels like a ritual, in that you have to do a certain thing like freezing and playing that song, in order to say its that challenge and then post it online, but you are still aloud liberties, like doing it in a classroom, or stage, or anywhere really.
I could not get permission to post the video the informant did with her class, so instead Im providing a link to the top 15 celebrity mannequin challenges