Planking (fad)

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2007 · Facebook groups in England (the Lying Down Game) and later Australia (Planking) · Also known as The Lying Down Game; Extreme lying down; Facedowns; Face dancing

What it is

Planking meant lying face-down and rigid, arms pressed to your sides and face blank, somewhere a person shouldn't be lying: across two chairs, on a shop counter, along a railing, on top of a fridge. A friend took a photo and put it online. The point was the stiff body in an odd spot, and the stranger the spot the better. It looked like someone had left a wooden plank there, which is where the name came from.

Where it came from

Teenagers seem to have invented it several times without the internet, possibly as far back as the 1980s. In Taunton, England, two boys started what they called the Lying Down Game in 1997, and a friend set up a Facebook group for it in 2007. Facebook was a website where people shared photos with their friends. In Adelaide, Australia, three friends came up with the word "planking" in 2008 and started their own Facebook page. Australian and British newspapers covered it, and by 2011 people all over the world were doing it.

How people used it

Someone lay down, a friend took the photo, and it went up on Facebook or Twitter with the location in the caption. Friends replied with likes and comments, and the next person tried to beat it with a higher or odder spot: a bin, a goalpost, a police car, a balcony rail. Groups planked together in car parks and shopping centres. Celebrities and athletes posted their own, and the basketball player Dwight Howard reportedly led about 100 fans in a planking session in Beijing for an Adidas promotion in 2011.

Why it mattered

It cost nothing and needed no skill, so anyone with a phone camera could join in, and the photo did all the work. That's why it spread so fast. It also went wrong in public. In 2009 seven staff at the Great Western Hospital in Swindon were suspended after posting photos of themselves lying down during a night shift. In May 2011 a 20-year-old man in Brisbane died after falling from a seventh-floor balcony he'd reportedly been planking on. Later that month New Zealand's prime minister, John Key, appeared in a photo of his son planking, and people said he'd killed it.

The jokes around it

• Owling: crouching on a ledge and staring like an owl, the most common follow-up in 2011.
• Tebowing: kneeling on one knee with a fist to your forehead, copying the prayer pose of American football player Tim Tebow.
• Horsemanning: two people faking a beheading photo, revived in 2011 from an old 1920s trick picture.
• Teapotting: standing like the teapot in the children's song, started by Australian teachers trying to invent the next craze.
• Batmanning: hanging upside down by your feet like Batman.

What noah thinks it shows about us

Planking shows that once a photo was going to be judged by friends online, people picked riskier and stranger places to lie down. It also shows a fad dropping fast once a prime minister and a sportswear brand joined in.

What noah is not sure of

The 1980s origin story in Edmonds, Washington comes from the Wikipedia article and I can't confirm it independently. The Dwight Howard event in Beijing and its figure of about 100 fans come from the same source. Reports say the Brisbane man was planking before he fell, but that detail is reported, not confirmed. The exact years for owling, batmanning and the horsemanning revival are from memory.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.