Notes from the “State of the Internet Memescape”
17 March 2009 | Posted by Jeffrey Barke | No comments
The State of the Internet Memescape: 2008–10
Whether it's Weezer's "Pork and Beans" or LOLCat ubiquity, the internet memescape is getting enormously bigger and badder. This talk will assess current trends in internet culture and discuss how changes in the software and hardware environment will alter the construction, spread and evolution of online memes into the future.
- Tim Hwang, ROFLCon
Going to talk about the
* Past year
* Hardware/software that powers the “memescape”
* The future
Founder of ROFLcon: Web celebrity, Web fame, Web culture.
(Interesting map of Iranian blogosphere. Data map by subject/political affiliation.)
A lot of things we’ve seen before (funny vidoes, catchphrases).
But also new things: Emergence of web culture into mainstream culture. Emergence of books/realworld meetups.
Benkler’s Layers of Communication:
Content
Code
Physical
Connection between memes over time and memes happening at the same time.
Not random (dinosaur in a birthday hat)
Pattern underlying memescape.
Underlying patterns for content in 2008:
* The daily meme: Shorter memes. Numa numa was "funny" for like a year. Now shorter attention span. A lot of the shorter ones seem to emerge via Twitter.
* Real world emergence: Rick rolling. Gary from Numa numa always stayed online. Rick Astley "rick rolled" the Macy's Day parade. Forchan (anonymous image board): Anonymous protests against Scientology. Stuff white people like: from blog to actual book. On NYT bestseller. Twitter and Shorty Awards.
* Genres: Own self-referential world of … Hamster dance. Big meme in late 90s. Flash-forward to LOLcats. Former one-time thing, share link and that’s it. Latter has a community and develops memes within memes. Translating the entire Bible into LOLCat pidgeon. LOLCode. Hamster dance never spilled out. Lolbama.com
Underlying patterns for
* The daily meme: The function of the persistence of the internet. Now with the internet 24-hours day instead of less in the past. Mobile devices and laptops are much more diffuse than in the past. Everyone is on Twitter all the time.
* Real world emergence: Social networks are more popular than ever. And not just young people. The largest growth in Facebook people aged 25-54. Now there’s a market to connect with and sell to.
* Genres: Communities built around memes and the tools to build memes. I can has cheezburger. Shared knowledge about meme as you build new meme. And tools that make it easy to generate content.
Problem with Benkler’s layer of communication: missing people.
Stock market has lost a lot value and most of the world is in recession. This could be a boom for internet culture.
Supply
Lots of people sitting in front of the computer all day with nothing to do. And even when looking for jobs, good idea to publish something viral, but it’s easier to get hired.
Demand
Hire good looking people from the internet. Cost-effective choice in tough times.
People
If you’re an unemployed person looking for entertainment, what do you do? Can’t afford and piracy might not be appealing, so internet culture.
Proof: Correlation between decrease in value of Dow Jones and increase in Etsy and Vimeo pageviews. (see about getting graphs)
Question?
Once we understand it, can we hack internet culture.
Realboy: believable twitter bots. Bot identifies two independent groups talking about the same thing, but then redirects tweets from one group to the other to connect them. Bots with 25/50% follow-back
Hacker war between Fat and NYCR
Social Net Neutrality
Statements: arbitrary followbacks are damaging to the ecosystem.
Issue bug reports for various social networks.
Memes that have always been around. archive.org roflcon
Before the LOL: Cat photos with funny captions in the 80s
Bruce Sterling was a little bitter yesterday (wish I would have caught it!). Notes from Bruce Sterling's talk
With more people on the internet, is internet culture diverging or converging? Not just kids, but a lot of retired people on the internet now.
Anyone interested with working with Tim Hwang on a video documentary of Goatsy?
Q: What software do you use to track the memes you study?
A: Have to develop tools yrself.
Berkman center: media cloud. Eats RSS feeds. Generates associations between certain terms in the news.
Content analysis and mass RSS scraping.
Q: Are memes spreading internationally? And if so, what form do they take?
A: Nigeria and the 419 scam. Tim would like to start investigating international memes. But doesn't currently know a lot about it. Not just internet culture via nationalism, but also Internet culture across gender and class.
