By GUY TREBAY

LOS ANGELES - Think globally, act virally. That notion seems to hang in the mild afternoon air here, as school lets out at Alexander Hamil- ton High School. At two o’clock, students flood from a 1930s brick building evocative of Andy Hardy movies. If you are 130 years old, you will get that reference. If you are not, let’s just say that they were Hollywood films in which perky and resourceful teenagers had a tendency to put on shows in somebody’s barn.

And isn’t the Web, in its wildly do-it-yourself essence, a technological update on the Andy Hardy narrative? And isn’t this partly why the students hanging out on South Robertson Boulevard have become huge stars on the Internet, their fame conjured out of home-grown YouTube videos of jerking - a new dance with its own quickly evolving music and a style of dress?

Julian Goins, the 15-year-old leader of the Ranger$, a five-member jerking crew, hops onto the tips of his sneakers - the Tippy Toe - and then swivels his body groundward, legs crossed at the ankle. He pops up, spins and bounces, gliding backward in the Reject, a move that resembles the Running Man, an ‘80s dance-floor step but in reverse.

The other kids in the schoolyard pay scant attention to the star in their midst. Until his Ranger$ schedule exploded and his mother decided to homeschool him, Julian was just another student.

Goofy, gentle, nimbly amateurish, jerking was little known outside this city until a year ago. But in the last nine months or so, jerking began an unexpected run as an Internet phenomenon.

When the New Boyz - two teenagers who had been playing high school auditoriums - released “You’re a Jerk,” the song raced up the Billboard chart, sold 750,000 copies on iTunes and provided the duo with a base for a national tour .

“Jerking started off in L.A. as just a little inner-city dance,” said one of the New Boyz, Earl Benjamin, 18, known as Ben J. “We used to search for it on YouTube and we noticed it had potential to be bigger than it was. It was like when you first saw break dancing: it has so many different parts, and when you get the dance down pat, you wanted to do it all the time. It reminded you of how fun hip-hop used to be.”

Warner Brothers/Asylum and Interscope were among those that quickly signed jerking crews - the Bangz, the Cold Flamez, the Rej3ctz and Audio Push. In late spring, Shariff Hasan, 30, a filmmaker, began filming a feature, “Jerkin’,” simultaneously developing a documentary and a jerking reality show for MTV.

“Jerking is a movement, almost like in the ‘80s when rap started,” said Tammy Maxwell, the manager of the Ranger$ and the mother of Julian Goins. “There’s a style to it, and a music and a lifestyle and all the kids have really jumped on it.”

Perhaps the most compelling thing about jerking, suggested Randall Roberts, the music editor of the L.A. Weekly, is how handily its practitioners manipulate the Web, scouring culture of historical context, freely deploying any tool that comes to hand. “It’s like they’re dipping back and forgetting that things like gangsta rap ever happened,” he said.


STEPHANIE DIANI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES