Owling

About

Owling refers to the act of sitting in a perched position while looking off into the distance as to mimic the posture of an owl. The fad was created as a response to another photo fad called “planking”.

Origin

A thread was posted to Reddit^[1] on July 11th, 2011, entitled “Seems to be an increase in planking photos, so…” featuring a demotivational stye image macro of a woman perched on railing with the caption “OWLING because planking is so two months ago”.

Spread

On July 12th, 2011, the story was posted on Salon^[2], HuffPo Urlesque^[9], NowPublic^[4]. and BuzzFeed^[5], even spawning a few user-generated images on Tumblr^[6] and Reddit.^[7]