ABSTRACT
In 2003, Matt Harding, a video game designer from Connecticut, quit his job and used his modest savings to travel around the world. Along the way, he published a blog titled Where the Hell is Matt? to keep his family and friends updated about his journey. A few months into the trip, a friend shot a short video of Matt in Vietnam, directing him to ‘Do that dance you do’. So Matt started doing his signature dance – an awkward but amusing jig – in the middle of a busy Hanoi street with motorbikes whizzing past in the background. In 2005, Matt combined that footage with a series of similar video clips of him dancing badly in front of famous and not-so-famous scenes around the world. When he posted the final product on YouTube, the video quickly went viral, attracting thousands of views per day and catching the attention of the marketing team at Stride gum. In 2006, Matt packed up his video camera and travelled around the world again, this time under Stride's sponsorship. He shot more video, edited another montage of himself dancing badly around the world, posted it on YouTube and attracted even more online viewers. A year later, Stride agreed to sponsor yet another round-the-world dancing tour, only this time Matt did not dance alone. In each of the eighty destinations featured in the video, Matt was joined by local people who danced along as he did his silly jig. The result is a heart warming montage set to an uplifting score based on the poem ‘Stream of Life’ by the cosmopolitan Bengali poet Rabindranathe Tagore. The video from this third trip was posted on YouTube in June 2008 and by December of that year had been viewed seventeen million times. *
