We’ve returned from ROFLcon II (April 30 & May 1, 2010) and are eager to share all we learned with anyone who will listen… 
Huge ideas abound and it was an incredibly helpful (and dare we say important) conference to witness. It was only the second time in two years they’d even held this exploration of internet culture, memes, academia and society at MIT. Anna (first-timer) and I (returning for round two) soaked up every minute of the packed two days. There’s so much to share, but we wanted to be sure to get some key themes in writing first:
- The entire conference started out with Ethan Zuckerman’s (The Berkman Center for Internet and Society) brilliant “From Weird to Wide” primer on important philosophical questions about culture, the internet and memes. This included not only a bright debut of Kenyan’s first meme explosion, but also an important discussion of a significant point: Be an anthropologist, not a bouncer. In other words, embrace rather than exclude. It would set the tone for some interesting underpinnings for the rest of the conference
- Apparently the rest of The Internet agrees that YouTube comments are the most ridiculous in the universe
- Another giant point writ large: Know your history. There were many great moments in a variety of panels that included memes and networks old and new, but the overall one can’t be hyped enough: know where we’ve been. For example, the open community of Usenet, with its challenges, imperfections, sub-communities, stalwart user trust and very existence pre-AOL set the stage for one of the toughest but singularly important lessons of the entire conference…
- “AOL” and “Training Wheels.” The Tweets heard round the world. As the very last panel at ROFLcon II tried to wrap its arms around the topic of “Mainstreaming the Web,” Ben Huh and Moot (from LOLcats and 4chan fame, respectively) deftly created a distinct separation between the open sub-communities that operate online (some anonymously) and those that allow for a mainstream audience to operate in a larger but closed system. With over 950 attendees, ROFLcon included employees from ominous internet giants such as Google and Mozilla, but as this panel pointed out, not a soul from Facebook (or none that would admit it). This lead to the single most Re-Tweeted line from the conference, uttered by Ben:
“Facebook has become like AOL, it’s like training wheels for the internet. It’s a safe place, except for your privacy.”
And thus what was once considered a fringe medium was correctly pegged as having moved into a mainstream culture controlled by a single corporation. We’ve been here before. With 400 million users, with meaningful proportions of diverse generations, races and cultures, Facebook is not unlike the closed system of AOL. This doesn’t make it right or wrong, but it does make it everywhere and closed – and drastically different from much of the sub-cultures brewing away contently in the rest of the web.
For Feedback one overriding point was clear: the social web hardly, barely begins and ends at the doors of Facebook and Twitter. Certainly a critical mass at those two giants means we must implement there to reach a large population of consumer. But even more importantly we must dive deep, see fewer obstacles and research even smarter and harder beyond these barriers into the sub-cultures that exist in the interest, cultural and geographic communities. There are enough self-proclaimed social media gods to take care of staring at Facebook and Twitter only. But it’s not unlike marveling only at a capital city and not noticing the swarms of people outside, down the roads, in other states, in other countries… The future of the net and community is not only also out there, it may indeed only be out there. Think I’m just being overly dramatic? Ask AOL.
More to come on some of our favorite moments by myself and Anna (@alucas9). We certainly had fun too and some photos are up on our Facebook Page right now. In the meantime be sure to check out her interview with Christian Lander of “Stuff White People Like” fame.
28
Um meme é universal/A meme is universal
by Feedbackmeme – (n.) in Internet culture, an idea that is shared digitally across a culture. Also, typically funny.
When things on the Internet spread like wildfire as they often do, we might be tempted to assume that since we – the English-speaking Americans of the world – began using the web in earnest, that Internet culture is ours and ours alone.
But that, of course, is not the case.
From the cryptic blogs in the Cyrillic alphabet hosted on LiveJournal blogs to the old oekaki online drawing boards in Japan, foreigners have contributed just as much as Americans to the humorous or interesting posts we find on eBaumsWorld.com, that are emailed to us by friends, or are shared on Facebook. Digital emoticons, for example, are now used by the masses but first started popping up in international Usenet groups, one of the first forms of large-scale message boards from the 1980s. A smile or frown emoticon says the same thing no matter your nationality.
The Tenso meme, using a screengrab from Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
The principle of how an Internet meme catches on also applies to viral videos, save one crucial detail: creating memes requires considerably less skill and equipment to create, capture and share with the Internet. And unlike videos, a photo meme can transcend the language barrier. A video that begins in America may only reach an English-speaking audience; but a funny picture that requires no caption or language knowledge to understand could end up flying around the world.
Tenso, which originated in Portuguese, is a beautiful example of such a meme.
Tenso memes are typically four-panel comics that showcase something that might not have been obvious in the original image. In most cases, this is drawing attention to someone who has a less than desirable facial expression in a photograph. An example, shown right, is taken from a concert scene in the film Scott Pilgrim vs. The World where an extra has a rather absurd face that doesn’t fit in with the crowd so much.
There are several instances of Tenso photos popping up on a forum called “Fórum Uol Jogos,” a popular Portuguese-language destination primarily for Brazilian Internet denizens to discuss pretty much anything from the latest video games to silly pictures like these.
Many memes are images adapted from their original media (a music video or a movie, for example) and applied to other pictures. Take the meme simply known as Dorgas, in which a Brazilian forensics dog has its picture taken in front of a large supply of narcotics. In the meme, people place a quote bubble above the dog’s head, and meme participants change what the dog is saying. The head of the dog has even been Photoshopped into the wildly popular “Advice Dog” meme, as well.
The Drago meme incorporated into the colorful Advice Dog meme.
Memes like this cross-pollinate on a near constant basis, turning pictures of a dog with a bit of text and point-blank humor into images that are instantly sharable and almost universally understood. It’s subtle humor that makes for big laughs and, if done correctly by a marketer, gives customers a reason to pay more attention to their brand.
So, to recap, memes must be:
- Simple.
- Funny.
- Universal.
“Language” is not necessarily included. Get all three of those right and you might have just created the next big Internet sensation.
- Brad (@bcarr)