Using social media is often a kind of performance. It’s an opportunity to show the world—or an extended circle of those you care about—just how interesting, amusing, attractive, intelligent, self-deprecating, athletic, or, indeed, pretty much anything else you are.
Words remain the bread and butter of these self-presentations, but few things speak louder than a video or image—or have a potentially greater capacity to spread from mere hundreds of admiring viewers to millions. Enter, then, the phenomenon known as “planking.”
If you want to go planking, all you need is yourself, a companion, and a device equipped with a digital camera. Having gathered these and chosen your location, you then lie face down in a plank-like posture with your arms touching the sides of your body, and get your friend to take a photograph. You then put this photo online and hope that the amusingly incongruous sight of someone lying face down in your chosen location will lead to the viral transmission of your image around the world.
As a word, planking is evidently based on the idea of making your body deliberately stiff and plank-like: an analogy that holds all the way back to the Latin word planca, meaning a board or slab. The immediate source for the word plank in English is the Old French planche—a term that remains in use today as a technical term for a technique in gymnastics where the body is held rigidly in parallel to the ground.
Like many online coinages, planking can be deployed equally as a verb, adjective, and verbal noun; also like many online activities, its profile was boosted in the most unfortunate of circumstances, thanks to a fatal incident in May 2011 when a young man died in Australia after planking on a high balcony.93
Online examples of what might be termed proto-planking exist from around 1994 and, not surprisingly, its venerable status as an activity has led to several more recent variations on the theme appearing. First documented in 2011 is a practice known as owling, where a person adopts a squat, owl-like posture and posts a photo online (“owl-planking” combines both, with one person adopting an owl-like posture perched on top of someone else planking).
Also born in 2011 were the practices of “batting” or “batmanning”—where you hang upside down by your legs with your arms crossed—and most bizarrely of all, “coning” or “cone-ing.” This involves taking a video of yourself ordering an ice cream cone from a stall and then, rather than simply accepting it, either getting out a second empty cone of your own and placing it on top of the ice cream you’re being offered, or grabbing the ice cream topping off the cone and sticking it in your mouth. In either case, the crucial element is capturing the unsuspecting server’s reaction on video, the “point” being not the act itself but the subsequent social media comments, likes, shares, and reactions when it’s uploaded.94
It’s not all about the twenty-first century, though. As early as the 1920s, a fashion emerged among amateur photographers of staging photographs in which it looked as though someone’s head had been detached from their body. The practice was termed horsemanning—almost certainly after the headless horseman of Washington Irving’s 1820 short story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”
Predictably enough, the growing digital fame of planking and its derivatives led both to a revival of horsemanning, and the scanning and republication online of many 1920s photos of the practice: a case of photo-posing trends coming full circle (and of people continuing to find the same kind of silliness extremely amusing).95 And while these fads may already have faded since the heady days of 2011, their ilk continues unabated—from the surreptitious sport of “photo-bombing” (when someone or something suddenly appears in the frame of a photo that isn’t about them) to the photoshopped recycling of famous images and poses.