ROFLections on a conference
Posted: Monday, April 28, 2008 5:01 PM by Will Femia
I attended
ROFLCon over the weekend, a two-day conference devoted to Web memes and the phenomenon of viral popularity. What follows are some of my observations of the event. This isn't a typical Clicked linkblog post but it does apply to a lot of the themes and sites we explore here. I'll have a regular Clicked up later, including the re-launch of Ralph's Recommendations of free Web video games.
The nature of "famous on the Internet"David Weinberger gave they keynote address and hosted a panel with such viral luminaries as the
Chuck Norris Facts guy and the
One Red Paperclip guy. The panel itself would prove to be a template for some of the less impressive aspects of the conference. The people behind these highly successful memes often were as clueless about how it happened as the people trying to harness the power of viral distribution for commercial and marketing purposes. The almost universal formula was "I was bored and just put up this thing to amuse myself and suddenly..."
But one point in Weinberger's keynote did stick with me and I'm still turning it over in my head. He made a distinction between
broadcast fame and network (p2p) fame. Broadcast fame is the traditional sort - "one to many" in the lingo of tech conference enthusiasts - with powerful single source feeding its content into the consciousness of its audience. Network fame, then, is the Internet kind that relies on word of mouth and social recommendations instead of a ready-and-waiting audience.
What's bothering me about that construction is that I ordered HBO because everyone in the office was talking about a hot new shot called The Sopranos. And in fact, while I do flip channels and find favorite shows by chance, I think most of the traditional media I consume comes to me by way of some kind of social suggestion, not because I'm simply leaving the TV on waiting for whatever new show or star it puts in front of me. Isn't that "buzz" that surrounds successful shows the same as "network fame?"
And on the other side of the equation, most of the people behind really successful Web memes had some part of their story involve a really big traffic driving site. "And then we were Slashdotted..." "And then we got on Boing Boing..." So was it really a network that created the fame, or was it closer to the broadcast model?
The Web meme is not as new as you thinkI don't recall if I've linked to much content on
TextFiles.com. I remember looking at it briefly and thinking it was sort of a nostalgia site with a lot of old Web content. In fact it would be better described as an archive or a library, and its host, Jason Scott gave the most unexpectedly fascinating presentation at ROFLCon. He took us all the way back to newspaper headline styles of the 1800s, through the telegraph and Hamm radio and into the early Internet, with the overarching point that memes and in-jokes and other pass-along content is as old as the technology that makes it possible. It was valuable perspective at the outset of a conference celebrating a new wave of memes as though the idea of stupid things becoming wildly popular without the aid of mainstream media is something invented in the last few years (the conference site's tag line is "in the making since '94). It also helped validate the general editorial decision I've made with Clicked about not getting too worked up about every little running gag that comes down the (intar)pipe(s). Then again, Scott was emphatic in pointing out significant figures in the history of communications culture who are nearly literally (but for Scott) forgotten to history.
Scott called it a "natural human thing" to want to share cool stuff and make art. I'm not sure it's a universally natural human thing but certainly some humans seem to do it as part of their nature. I made a note of his recommendation of
The Victorian Internet for more on the deep history of people playing with communication technology.
The past is the futureScott was asked about what he expects for the future of the Internet given its history. More stuff in other languages was one answer that seems undeniable. He also predicted more rediscovery of old things. That brought to mind the "A year ago today" box on
the old Blogdex aggregator and Jason Kottke's
Gems from the archive of the New York Times. But in a later panel discussion someone mentioned
the story of a Digg user
innocently recommending Fark without realizing
Fark's significance - particularly to sites like Digg, and that's probably closer to Scott's point.
Other meme-making panelists made mention of the fact that even once the joke is old there's always someone new on the Internet who hasn't heard it yet. Matt Chapman, co-creator and the voice(s) behind
Homestar Runner mused that the Internet makes things become retro cool faster. He suggested the new retro irony cycle is about four years.
In a related remark, the 4Chan founder pointed out that often part of the problem of starting a meme is that by the time it's popular the community where it originated thinks it's an old joke and they're sick of hearing it.
Distributed networking and shattering the monocultureJason Scott was also critical of what he called "the monoculture." It's not hard to imagine a future in which the Internet has spawned lots of small communities that elevate their own celebrities and customs. A related theme cropped up a few times through the conference, a theme that could only come up at a gathering of geeks with a sense of history: criticism of the monster sites that are the current gods of Web culture. Scott was bitter about Wikipedia, pointing to the success of Usenet as proof that one site doesn't have to posses everything. At other panels a similar criticism came up about YouTube acting as the video sharing default. And MySpace killing the personal homepage. The interconnectivity of the Internet, its most defining characteristic, means that everything doesn't have to live in the same place. I found myself wondering if computer education will eventually catch up and create a situation in which people prefer to construct their own Web presence.
Lessons on fame's lightning strikeI don't have a lot of notes to relay from the panel of
Tron Guy Jay Maynard and
Matt Harding but it provided some of the best perspective on Internet fame I've ever heard. Harding used the sausage factory metaphor for mainstream television media in a way I hadn't heard before but with an undeniable accuracy. Usually we think of the media sausage factory as the ugly production side that creates the usually clean, professional product that appears on the screen. But Harding's twist pointed out that the other problem with a sausage factory is that everything comes out sausage. No matter who you are or what you have to contribute, the professionals in legacy media are trained to know their product and how to produce it and they'll turn you into a sausage no matter what. He mentioned this as an explanation of why he preferred to represent himself and not submit himself to mainstream machinations in spite of his popularity.
Other advice from Harding that stayed with me: When you do an interview, know what you have to say (in Harding's terms, "know what's in your bag") and keep that in mind. If anyone's keeping track of our list of lessons for dealing with instant fame so far:
- Have enough product. (Don't get caught showing your gizmo as a guest on the Today show if you don't have lots of gizmos ready for sale in the ensuing demand.)
- Know what's in your bag (and bring it).
- Beware of sausage casing!
- And one I learned the other day from a colleague with an interest in documentary filmmaking, make sure you have a "next project" lined up in at least enough detail that you can talk about it when you're inevitably asked "So what's next now that you're so famous?" (Every panelist was asked this question either about their particular meme or about their area of Web specialty.)
We are nerdJay Maynard, meanwhile, was the living embodiment of just about everyone at the conference. In short, he's a nerd who has come to embrace his nerdiness in the face of horrible ridicule. Whether he realized it or not he was a constant piece of performance art, mixing with the crowd at the conference and even attending social gatherings outside the conference, his suit a representation of social awkwardness, personal uniqueness, nonconformity, self consciousness and frankly the cruelty of cultural standards.
He was the bee girl. At ROFLCon he was us.
(I'll add that this was in contrast to
Leslie Hall who also represented nerd empowerment to some degree but only, from what I could see, in acting as a character.)
Where Maynard's example was perhaps most informative was in answering the question of whether (and when) Web memes can transcend online audiences and speak to the mainstream. Writing Clicked on msnbc.com, with its mainstream pedigree and billion plus page views a month, I often struggle with the audience question. Sometimes my mainstream masters want to know how to make the Web work for them. Sometimes I want to know how to make the mainstream work for Clicked.
Both Maynard and Harding have received quite a bit of mainstream attention, Harding on the Today show, among other places, and Maynard on the Jimmy Kimmel show, and I asked them if they noticed a difference in the reception by nerd audiences versus mainstream audiences. Maynard's answer would prove to be one of the most powerful of the conference. He explained that the running joke for his appearances on Kimmel was, "Get laid yet?" which always brought uproarious laughter from the show's audience "but you'll notice no one here is laughing." Sure enough, the hall was dead quiet. Someone quickly lightening the moment with a joke shouted from the back, "That's because none of us are getting laid either!" And I don't mean to imply that nerds don't take humor at others' expense, but there's clearly some aspect of the nerd/geek perspective that makes it distinct from the general population.
Book smart vs. Web smartSpeaking of contrasts, day two of the conference opened with a speaker from academia whose presentation was remarkably parallel to what we'd learned anecdotally from Matt Harding and Jay Maynard the day before - except that she did it with big words and heady taxonomies. Just to be clear, I'm not one to bash academics, but this conference gave such direct access to people so entrenched in Web culture that as insightful as her presentation was, it was hard not to mentally ask, yeah, but when was the last time you were the subject of a Fark Photoshop contest?
Marwick, the day two keynote speaker, also raised, or re-raised, an issue of political correctness that popped up repeatedly throughout the conference. In essence, why were so many of the panelists white males and what were the white males
doing to help non-white males achieve panel-worthy status. I'm not looking to pick the fight yet again, but since I'm already talking about social estrangement and bee girls, when the subject is social and cultural there's another oppressed minority that doesn't benefit from the activism of liberal bleeding hearts: smart kids.
A question of styleOne interesting phrase that stuck with me from Marwick's presentation was that she described Internet microcelebrity as a style of performance. In a way, this recalls Weinberger's "network fame" (it's a style of fame) but what I like about it is that usually we talk about the rules of the Internet or what behaviors are typical. We see top ten lists and how-to checklists on how to succeed online. But to call it a style speaks more to the philosophy than the dogma.
Perhaps the exception that proves the rule, Randall Munroe, creator of the wildly popular
xkcd cartoon confessed that while he's active in online social sites, he avoids feedback threads on his work for the sake of his mental health. I can only imagine how appearing in front of a giant MIT lecture hall packed with adulating fans affected his mental health.
