What’s behind the urban meme of shoes hanging from overhead wires?

A peculiar meme with global reach, you can find shoes hanging from telephone lines in New York City, Sydney and Madrid. Like being able to find a McDonald’s or a Starbucks in almost any major city, the spread of the strange phenomenon is a testament to how quickly ideas and culture travel in the global age even when the significance remains opaque. The Mystery of the Flying Kicks is a crowd-sourced collage that combines animation, donated video, photographs and phone messages to shed light on the trend.