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May 1, 2008
Rocketboom is running a synopsis of my talk on fame at ROFLcon. (Does that make me meta-famous?)
April 28, 2008
Mary Joyce did a nice job live-blogging my ROFLcon talk. Thanks, Mary!
April 26, 2008
Chris Kelty, a prof. from Rice, leads a panel of Internet cult leaders. He asks if we want these celebrities to become leaders. [I am totally out of my demographic]. Ryan North (Dinosaur Comics). Randall Munroe (xkcd). Moot (4chan). [Live-blogging. Highly compressed. Many mistakes. Even sketchier than usual. ]
Ryan denies he has any leadership beyond superficially. Randall also doesn’t want to lead anything. He’s humbled and horrified that there are other people like him. Moot says he merely provides a place for people to express themselves.
Randall denies that the comic is based on his life. Ryan “tries to have it both ways with his comics.”
Q: Ryan, you’re the creator of Project Wonderful, an auction-based ad system that has revolutionized advertising on the Web. So, which Dinosaurs characters are based on your ex-girlfriends?
A: Sometimes. Unadvisably.
Randall: It can be bad if you write about a fake relationship while you’re in a real relationship…
Q: Are you fighting any preconceptions?
Ryan: People don’t know how to respond to someone writing comics on the Internet.
Q: When have you been most afraid about what you’ve created and the consequences thereof?
A: Right now. [applause]
For some reason, Moot pantomimes a barrel roll.
Ryan says that he doesn’t explain his jokes even when people get them wrong.
For reasons I don’t understand, Randall has the entire audience do a barrel roll. Later, he says that he expected controversy when he did a comic on the meth addicts of cunnilingus in order to set the outer edge of edginess within which he can operate. But there was no controversy.
Ryan adds that he’s surprised by which of his comics are controversial.
Q: Why are so many of the cultural producers men?
Ryan: Online I could be a 12 yr old girl if I wanted to, and perhaps I have been. I don’t think there’s anything inherent in the Internet that selects towards men.
Moot: It’s a conspiracy. We can’t talk about it.
Kelty: A comic like yours does more to entice people into that world than anything the universities do. You seem to be trying to do this. Can you do more than a comic?
Randall: It’s hard to be preachy and funny at the same time. The causes of the gender imbalance are complex. It’s by far the most complicated thing I’ve ever studied, and I’ve studied quantum mechanics.
Q: When you meet someone in a bar, is it more weird and awkward when they know who you are?
Randall: The weirdest is when they seem to be friendly, and they’ve read the comic and don’t like it.
Ryan: It’s nice when you start on an even ground.
Moot: I’m a huge fan of anonymous posting. It evens the playing ground.
something
Q: Was society crying out for the communities you’ve created?
Moot: 4chan was based on 2chan. Eventually, someone else would have come along and done it.
Q: 4chan has a different community than it started with. During the panel, moot, you’ve both distanced yourself and identified yourself with. What parts of the community do you like?
Moot: Hard to articulate. Started out for anime. The random board grew. The “let’s raid someone’s life for no good reason” is terrible, but a lot of that has migrated elsewhere. I don’t control 4chan but I am at the reins and can say what we do and don’t want there.
Q: What will you be doing in 10 yrs. The same thing?
Ryan: I can see it. My drawing doesn’t change. It’s hard work but I enjoy it.
Randall: Me, too.
Q: Ryan, do you feel more constrained or liberated by the form of your comic?
Ryan: There’s a lot you can do with the narrative form even with a repeating graphic.
Moot: I spend most of my time on the Net reading news. It’s important to be connected to your world. Not just BBC, but community sites.
For reasons I do understand, people ask many insider questions I don’t understand.
Huge applause at the end. Even huger for the organizers of the conference. And why not? ROFLcon is now a meme as much as conf. On its way to becoming a movement?
I was talking with Kate Raynes-Goldie of the CBC at the end of the first day of ROFLcon yesterday [live-streamed here] and had a small realization about another difference between broadcast fame and Web fame. A little connection that immediately seemed too obvious to blog about. Nevertheless, here goes….
I said in my talk at the conference yesterday that we are making fame our own, rather than an alienating effect of the broadcast regime, because we make people famous on the Web by passing around links, and that — especially when you watch people watching YouTubes together — it’s a lot like how people tell jokes together: one video reminds someone of another, and there can be a type of pleasant one-upmanship as people try to top the current video with one that’s even better.
Not until I was talking with Kate did the further obviousness occur to me: One of the differences between broadcast and Web fame is that in making someone famous on the Web, we are putting a little bit of our social standing at risk. We’ve got a stake in it.
For example, during the wonderful, impromptu videofest blogged by (and, to a large degree, led by) the wonderful and impromptu Ethan Zuckerman, during Fellows Hour at the Berkman Center last week, everyone was pointing to the next great video to play. In the midst of this, I lost the thread and pointed to a video that, when projected to the group, was out of place and not even very interesting. People shuffled uncomfortably, trying to figure out why I would suggest such a clunker. I was embarrassed. (At least the video was short.)
That we have something at stake in what we recommend is, of course, well understood and completely obvious. But for me, only last night did I recognize that that’s one of the reasons the Web famous feel more like ours than the broadcast famous usually do. Not only do we make them famous, but we do so at some risk to ourselves.
It’s a type of sweat equity, or, in my case during video night at the Berkman, it was more like a type of flop sweat equity.
April 25, 2008
The LOLcats panel at ROFLcon, with six panelists and a moderator, is redeeming the format. It’s been hilarious. And sometimes more than that. “Ignore the haters,” says Cheez (ICanHasCheezburger), “because every moment you spend responding is a moment taken from those who love you.” Another advises not to try to control the meme.
Q: Why is it pronounced “loll” instead of spelled out L-O-L? Because it’s easier, they say. But an audience member — and it’s a raucous audience — says that it’s because you can make puns with “loll” but not with L-O-L, e.g., LOLicoaster.
Someone asks when the dialect went from based on toddlers to based on the retarded. (I told you it was raucous.) Cheez responds that it’s the first dialect that was written first, and spoken later. Thus, he says, we all hear it in our heads differently. So, if the questioner is now hearing a retarded person instead of a toddler…
One of them says that the LOLcat Bible is well underway. The moderator suggests a LOLcat Koran…
A question about origins brings replies pointing to l33t speak and to Yoda.
Is there LOLporn? The panel rolls its collective eyes. Oh yes. “The most common meme is ‘do not want,'” one says.
Has anyone tried to own the language? “There’s so much prior art,” says Cheez.
I haven’t gotten close to capturing this. It was hilarious, with a great panel and a great audience. There’s a real sense of commonality at this conference, and it’s in high spirits.
April 24, 2008
I’m talking tomorrow at ROFLcon, a conference about Web fame, celebrity and culture. I’m supposed to be talking in a general way about Web fame. Then I’m leading a panel composed of men (yup) who are Web famous: Kyle Macdonald (One Red Paperclip), Joe Mathelete (Joe Mathelete Explains Marmaduke), Ian Spector (Chuck Norris Facts), Andy Ochiltree (JibJab.com), Andrew Baron (Rocketboom), Alex Tew (The Million Dollar Homepage)
Here’s a sketch of what I’m thinking of saying:
Fame has been a property of the broadcast (= one-to-many) system. Fame is based on the math of many people knowing you, so many that you can’t know them. But it’s not just math, of course. It’s also economics. The broadcast economy has a fiduciary interest in building and maintaining the famous. They’re “bankable.”
Because of this scarcity and the fact that the one-to-manyness of the relationship means the knowing is one-way, the famous become a special class of person: mythic and not fully real. They are not like us, even ontologically. Fame is a type of alienation.
Outside of the broadcast system, fame looks different. This is a type of do-it-yourself fame, not only in that we often want human fingerprints on the shiny surfaces we’re watching, but also because we create fame through passing around links … occasionally for mean and nasty reasons. Kids sitting around watching YouTubes with one another are like kids telling jokes: That reminds me of this one; if you liked that one, you’ll love this one. And the content itself fuels public conversations in multiple media. This is P2P fame.
There’s a long tail of fame, although I suspect the elbow isn’t quite as sharp as in the classic Shirky power law curve for links to blogs. At the top of the head of the curve, fame operates much as it does in the broadcast media, although frequently there’s some postmodern irony involved. In the long tail, though, you can be famous to a few people. Sure, much of it’s crap, but the point about an age of abundance is that we get an abundance of crap and of goodness. We get fame in every variety, including anonymous fame, fame that mimics broadcast fame, fame that mocks, fame that does both, fame for what is stupid, brilliant, nonce, eternal, clever, ignorant, blunt, nuanced, amateur, professional, mean, noble … just like us. It’s more of everything.
But most of all, it’s ours.
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[ROFLcon will be live-streamed here.
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