{"id":8975,"date":"2010-08-31T17:29:16","date_gmt":"2010-08-31T16:29:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/?p=8975"},"modified":"2010-08-31T17:29:16","modified_gmt":"2010-08-31T16:29:16","slug":"epic-beard-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/2010\/08\/31\/epic-beard-man\/","title":{"rendered":"Epic Beard Man"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Earlier this year a video filmed on a bus in Oakland revealed much about how modern life can be filmed and processed by the public.<\/p>\n

When a fight broke out in February aboard a transit bus in Oakland, California, it might not have seemed an especially\u00a0unusual incident to anyone familiar with public transport in a major city.<\/p>\n

What made this this particular one interesting was the way in which the decision to film and upload the footage to the web (itself a modern compulsion) opened up particularly post-modern can of worms including issues of race, violence, the Vietnam war and modern technology.<\/p>\n

This ‘Know Your Meme’ video from Rocketboom<\/a> explains how the footage became a viral\u00a0phenomenon\u00a0and how one of the men involved became known as ‘Epic Beard Man’<\/strong>:<\/p>\n

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The man that threw the punches gave his side of the story here:<\/p>\n

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The man who got punched gave his version of events to a local radio station here:<\/p>\n

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As you can see, they don’t quite match up and just provoke further questions about the incident and those involved.<\/p>\n

When you take into account the tsunami of comments online about the affair, along with the endless parodies and interpretations, it only becomes harder to get a handle on what went on and what it all means.<\/p>\n

There is even a Mortal Kombat<\/a> version of the fight:<\/p>\n

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There is a fairly detailed Wikipedia entry titled AC Transit Bus fight<\/a> but it isn’t exactly conclusive.<\/p>\n

When much of contemporary ‘reality television’ consists of carefully constructed narratives,\u00a0there is a strong case to say that this incident feels more real, as what was a confusing and messy fight gets endlessly reinterpreted through different voices on the web.<\/p>\n

> Know Your Meme<\/a> at Rocketboom
\n> The AC Transit Bus fight<\/a> on Wikipedia<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Earlier this year a video filmed on a bus in Oakland revealed much about how a single incident can be filmed and processed by the public.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8976,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,40],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8975"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8975"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8975\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8976"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8975"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8975"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8975"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}