“You talkin’ to me?” – Reenacting as cultural per...

The possibilities for contemporary popular culture to reach larger audiences have increased considerable during the last two decades with the emergence of different arenas associated with the Internet. This is a report from a pilot study of a fieldwork conducted mainly on the Internet, YouTube to be specific. The object of study is an iconic piece of cultural performance; the “You talkin' to me?”-scene from Martin Scorsese's film “Taxi Driver”. The film was released in 1976 and this scene has since then been reenacted many times. The re-enacting occurs in daily life, in advertising and commercials, in films and TV-series. The basic thought in this text is that that re-enacting could be seen as a chain of events  (you watch, you imitate and thus something is transferred) that together form a cultural performance in its own right. Even this study of the possibilities to conduct a fieldwork on YouTube can be seen as a cultural performance.