Planking was a viral internet fad in 2011 in which participants would lie face-down in unusual or inappropriate locations, with their arms flat to their sides, and then post a photograph of themselves online. The craze was a form of absurdist performance art, a collective joke that spread rapidly through social media. It was a social internet phenomenon that was both widely mocked and widely imitated, illustrating the power of online communities to create and quickly kill trends.

The planking fad, while brief and silly, represented a new form of public performance that has been analyzed by poets and writers exploring the nature of identity in the digital age. The act of posing for a photograph in a public space, often invoking a sense of the absurd, resonated with a poetic interest in the banal, the performative, and the construction of the self. The craze is a testament to how the internet has created new forms of shared cultural expression.