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Reading time: 2 min – Spotted on Washington Post, Slate.com
Mike Sakasegawa is a photographer in San Diego, California, and one day in the street, he saw a lemon rolling. He filmed it and posted the video on Twitter:
"Today, as I was coming home from my jog, I saw a big lemon rolling down the slope. He continued to drive for about 400 meters. And now you can see it too. "
Twenty-four hours later, the video had been viewed more than 2.5 million times. In two days, the tweet reached 93,000 retweets, 311,000 likes and 7 million views for the video. Sakasegawa has already been contacted by a literary agent who has asked him to write a children's book inspired by lemon.
Everyone is trying to understand why this one-and-a-half-minute video went viral. Interviewed by the Washington Post, Sakasegawa hypothesized:
"From what people say, they find it soothing. It's like a little break from everything that's going on. "
Indeed, in the era of President Donald Trump's lead farting and his administration's scandals, the lemon's little adventure was seen as a Zen break, a moment of meditation in the heart of chaos.
There is also an interesting theatrical dynamic: during the long tracking shot of the lemon, the lemon is expected to stop, it is blocked, we want the lemon to continue rolling and we wonder how far it will roll. There is suspense.
When the lemon stopped, Sakasegawa went home, but once home, he regretted leaving the fruit alone in the street. He came back for him and he is now in a tree in his garden.
As Heather Schwedel notes in Slate.com, the other reason for the lemon's great success is the challenge, on the Internet, of seeing what absolutely bbad can become viral. And the more it looks uninteresting, the more it intrigues people. The summit was reached in 2016, when a video of a teenager saying "Damn Daniel" in a funny voice had been seen more than 45 million times in a few days. As with lemon, it was the absurdity of the buzz that had contributed to the buzz.
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