How Nigerian social media users created humour off a global event

While her speech was flawless and conveyed her vision and perception of African feminism, the birth of Nigerian affinity with the global lecture has since grown.

Since then, you can see Nigerians quoting Akala, Nehisi-Coates or Yvonne Orji TED Talks, in part aided by the vertical accessibility to Internet, promoting exposure and structural literacy.

What is a TED Talk?

A Ted Talk is a zonal event organized by Sapling Foundation to help promote relatability or perspectives on diverse topics, as regards relevance and by a variety of intellectuals, professionals and people across all walks of life.

In essence though, as much as social media keeps simplifying the angle of global communication, it is also a ground for pettiness, humour, sarcasm and promoting circumstantial lifestyles.

A few people choose Twitter as grounds to vaunt themselves as intellectuals, while intentionally derogating upon other people. In essence, they are called “intellectual/big grammar Twitter” or “ITK” — short for “In The Know” or the more Nigerian “I Too Know”.

Origin

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“Thank You For Coming To My TED Talk” is basically what TED Talk anchors say after delivering their speeches. Its pop culture connotation and humorous angle has a bit of a skewed origin, but it is not Nigerian.

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One can say it rose to popular around first quarter 2018, while certain people had been using it sparingly since last quarter 2017.

Usage

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The idea behind it, is simply a laidback activism against the backdrop of these 'ITK' and their tendency to lecture people on social media — especially Twitter.

It was created as a play on their tendencies to tweet out threads of “knowledge” mirroring TED Talks, or made in the serious and intellectual tone of a typical TED Talk.

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It’s usage has however increased since June 2018.

Since it took its earliest steps into a pop culture trend, it has been used in 3 ways; straight humour, sarcasm and activism.

The beauty of this trend is that however intentionally, humorously senseless the Tweet is, whoever is behind it constructs it in a way to mirror a typical ITK’s Tweet.

Typically, most of the Tweets are humorous, but since they are usually to mirror ITK character, we can say it is fundamentally sarcasm.

The activism part usually comes when corrections are being made with subtle abuses inherent in those tweets.

In the end, this is one of the better movements on Twitter NG.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.