Social Dance in the Age of (Anti-)Social Media: Fortnite, Online Video, and the Jook at a Virtual Crossroads

By all accounts, we are again in the midst of a “dance craze,“ a cultural moment when a wide swath of people—most remarkably, white middle-class youth—embrace the ability to communicate and coordinate using little loops of codified gesture. As with prior crazes, the phenomenon is inseparable from new media: the craze of the 1910s, with its scandalous “animal dances” and ragtime rhythms, was abetted by dance manuals, silent films, and a new public culture of dancing;¹ the Twist-era explosion of solo/group dances in the early 1960s spread via television programs, such as American Bandstand;² and the current craze of the late 2010s—promulgating such re-branded moves as the Floss, the Hype, the Swipe, and Orange Justice—is driven primarily by a networked video game, Epic Games's Fortnite. The game, with its hundreds of millions of players, is arguably the largest media platform for the spread...