Meme police — Boston Phoenix
While you’re waiting for me to edit all the ROFLcon II videos on youtube and show you something that isn’t a complete waste of your time, read Chris Faraone’s article:
Meme police – Lifestyle Features – Boston Phoenix.
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THE ROAD TO ROFLcon
Follow my journey to ROFLcon in Cambridge today and tomorrow! What is ROFLcon? A celebration of the meme. A festival for all things viral.
In their own words:
It was a classic story as old as time: college kids grow up online, decide that it’d be a great idea to throw a internet culture conference, and unleash sheer ridiculousness upon the world.
Back in April 2008, we put on the original ROFLCon — the first internet culture conference devoted to discussing what makes memes work, why they work, and where its all going (and then throwing a big-ass rocking party with the internet celebs themselves). It was a kickass time, not to mention the most important gatherings since the fall of the tower of Babel.
We figured we’d keep doing this as long as it remains awesome (and it still is), so we’ve put together several more internet culture events. Will we ever stop? WHO KNOWS?
A very special thanks to Soulcraft Comics who have had a momentary lapse of judgment and decided to make this adventure possible. Be sure to check out Soulcraft’s new book TRIBES: The Dog Years in stores June 29, 2010.
Thank you also to the folks at downtowntv.com and girl blog for taking a chance on an unknown culture creator.
Follow me live via Twitter and watch the heyadele show for live video coverage of the conference.
Nerding out with my words out.
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francesco masci is hip to the scrip
From The Morning News
The Twitter Issue
Interview by Nicole Pasulka
Twitter’s not just the next step in online communication or social networking, according to Francesco Masci—it’s the next step in civilization. In Masci’s “Twitter Issue” paintings, the little blue mascot flirts with Gregory Bateson, cuddles up to Charles Darwin, and leaves a mess on Jean Baudrillard’s forehead, claiming that every “revolutionary” new tool belongs to a history of great ideas.
Francesco Masci has shown extensively in Italy and the U.S., in both group and solo exhibits. Born in Rome, he currently resides in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Masci’s solo credits include ‘Godi…menti” at La Sapienza University of Rome (2003) and “La verità del paradosso, Il paradosso della verità” at the avant-garde cultural space of Cantieresanbernardo, Pisa (2006). As a political cartoonist, Masci’s work appeared regularly in such Italian publications such as Par Conditio, Italiasera, Il Tempo, and La Piazza. All images © Francesco Masci, courtesy the artist, all rights reserved.
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Why have you embellished portraits of theorists and philosophers like Jean Baudrillard and Karl Popper with the Twitter icon?
This series started as a single piece one night while I subscribed to Twitter. As usual, I did not step away from the computer, so I got sucked into the internet and started jumping and brainstorming from one thing to the other—and it was great. I automatically connected readings relating to evolution, biologist Gregory Bateson, anthropological subjects, and cybernetics with other things I was reading on the web, blogs, and tweets. People and thinkers that I was reading, who are trying to understand how human beings work and make hypotheses about the future, fit perfectly into this mashup. I ended up painting an image I found on Google of Charles Darwin. Blue birds invaded the image. The moment that you make a piece of art, maybe you don’t really think. My brain was loaded up with images, and these particular ones came to me automatically.
Are you looking for guidance and insight into new social and cultural phenomenon?
Just like the writers and thinkers I depict, I have my own hypotheses and ideas. I’ve absorbed their ideas in philosophies and have created personal atmospheres around them.
Do you wonder what they’d say about our world today, or are you just having fun with social media?
Certainly, I would be very curious to hear what these people would have to say about the state of what’s happening in our information-drenched society, but it seems absurd almost to imagine them frozen in time somehow and transported to “now.” I am actually more attracted to the opinions of my contemporaries who are looking at the phenomenon today.
As for fun? Yes. I’m having total fun, combining human facial expressions and elements of cartoons. In painting, I can recreate the atmosphere that I imagine there would be if the scene was happening for real. It does happen when I paint it. The way we all live in an open tribe of the web, so to speak, has inspired my painting space.
A lot of your work seems to juxtapose the “high” cultural with the mainstream or commercial or consumer objects. Why are you drawn to painting these contrasts—if they are in fact contrasting?
I am fascinated by a process I observe most every day, one which I like to call “crystallization”—things start from one place and spread so fast (real-time) in our culture; soon after, they solidify in our mind. Combining times, elements, styles, and concepts is not a contrast for me. This is normal and it happens every day. And normalcy can be stranger than fantasy.
Do you tweet? How do you feel about Twitter?
I don’t, but I feel terribly good about Twitter.
The men you’ve painted have each authored a concept, philosophy, or idea that’s become relatively mainstream, or at least widely recognized and influential—simulacra, natural selection, the double bind, etc. Are you interested in the dissemination or popularization of philosophy and theory?
Now I paint “The Twitter Issue,” tomorrow may be I’ll work on a totally different matter, driven by whatever connection. I am interested in everything. Dissemination presupposes a subject—scary! I think the ecosystem will do the job itself. Maybe the blue bird will be influential?
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means vs. media
All day I’ve been collecting reactions to this. While many agree that the pursuit of ceaseless, uninterrupted connectivity is “for the poor” I think Sterling may have spoken too quickly. As Heffernan points out at the very end of the article–the main difference between us regular folk and the supremely wealthy is time.
You see, the celebrities and CEOs of the world are just as plugged in is the rest of us, however, they are able to hire assistants to tweet for them, thus, they are able to mull around in their private, West Village rooftop gardens while the rest of us are busy screaming our own names at the bog with our keyboards.
Money may not be able to buy love or happiness, but it sure as shit can buy you free time.
So many struggling 20 and 30-somethings such as myself find ourselves spread professionally and emotionally thin attempting to keep up with the rat race while simultaneously producing personal work and maintaining friendships. The problem for us is that our personal work doesn’t pay [yet] so we are forced to take jobs we don’t love in order to pay rent and eat food. The only way to pursue our own projects and ideas and stay alive inside our 40+ hour work weeks is to avail ourselves of the wealth of personal marketing tools at our disposal
Twitter has already become an obligation for countless employees at hundreds of PR firms and media machines around the known universe–and this includes the personal marketing entourages of celebrities.
But the idea that “you only care about your virtual network if you’re poor because it makes you feel more important than you are” is grossly incorrect.
I have friends without cell phones, who have never joined myspace, never owned a personal computer (yes, these people still exist). These are all choices these people have made for various reasons–and these choices are far easier to make if you are wealthy. If you are wealthy people will seek you out anyway, but if you are not, you have to make yourself available or no one will know you exist. It’s just a fact. Why Heffernan’s article worries me is that I can already hear people interpreting it as an advocation of a “personal analog hermitage” —already tres chic in certain circles, but only practical if you can afford it (you know, like voting for Bush and citing his tax cuts by way of explanation).
Whenever any new medium is invented, there will always be several hundred years’ worth of resistance to it. Socrates HATED a newfangled medium known as the written word, and preferred to do all his work verbally. How do we know this? Because Plato wrote down his master’s conversations.
Look at that list I just made of things friends of mine have learned to live without–cell phones, social networks and computers. While the newest of the 3, social media, may seem like a ridiculous burden to you, what would you do without your computer? Your cell phone? I guarantee that you have come to accept that you cannot live without at least 1 of those 3 items. In 5 years there will be new media which will be so annoying it will have eclipsed Twitter and all of its critics will have shifted their focus to it, leaving Twitter to be accepted as the norm. If you want to put money on this I will totally take bets.
Resistance to media almost always begins with the wealthy, mainly because the spread of new media=the spread of knowledge. The wealthy like to maintain a monopoly of knowledge because knowledge is power. I know that sounds cliche and slightly socialist, but do your research. The Catholic Church hated the letterpress in the beginning because they feared the availability of books and widespread literacy would mean an end to unbridled accord with their particular interpretation of the Bible. Voltaire, champion of intellectual idealism, would not let his servants into his salon during his discussions (you know, ‘lest they get any lofty ideas). In many ways their fears were completely founded.
Those of us who are poor [sic] , are obligated to maintain our own networks, for our own advancement, because we can’t afford to pay anyone to do it for us. For me, that means twitter and facebook. For some, all it means is email and texting. For others, it just means talking to an assistant who will tweet, text and type for you.
That said, a glass of wine with friends and a record playing in the background is something we all need to schedule into our lives. The time is there, most of us are just not wealthy enough to do it all day.
This past Saturday, New York was 74 degrees and delightfully sunny. I spent it in the park with friends I invited to join me and friends who happened to walk past. On a day like that you don’t need a cell phone if you know which park your circle will flock to. These are times to be savored. Everything in moderation, the internet can wait a day or two for you, but cutting it out altogether at this point is just stupid.
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and now, we tweet
Are you ready for the biggest internet craze that has yet to make money for its founders? For over a year now I have been warning friends against the evils of Twitter, mainly because I had yet to find room in my life for it, couldn’t understand it, and was thus annoyed, slightly bored, and afraid of it. A few months ago, two words changed all of this for me: Christopher Walken.
The sordid tale of the now defunct Christopher Walken Twitter (google those three words if you’re one of the 7 people who didn’t hear about it, or read this) is nothing if not an indicator of the power and popularity of this amazing (albeit still slightly annoying) new tool. Suffice it to say, the CWalken Twitter sucked me in and now I am able to explain the phenomenon to you.
Twitter functions as a mass text, only people must “opt-in” to be able to view it. As such, it’s amazing. You can decide from whom you’d like to receive mass texts, i.e. people you actually know, news sources you trust, organizations you’d like to keep tabs on, etc. Bonus: being limited to 140 characters prevents these joyful bird noises (tweets) from running on into multiple texts which maddeningly clog your sms inbox. The first twitter feed I “followed” was Christopher Walken.
To be a member of Twitter, you are not actually obligated to tweet–if you prefer, you can treat it as a more succinct google reader. This is nice because, quite frankly, most folks do NOT have something worth sharing every hour…or even everyday (unless you are able to write in a style befitting Christopher Walken).
So many of my water cooler conversations of late have centered around “how to use Twitter,” and though I don’t believe we’ve totally figured it out yet, my advice to anyone who asks is this: before you tweet, think “Would I text this to 10 people or more?” If the answer is no, it has no place on twitter. If the answer is yes, please spare all of our sms inboxes and get on with it.
If all of this is STILL unclear, please direct all questions to The New York Times.
At this point I know you’re DYING to read it: my twitter
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desktop metaphors
I’ve been thinking a lot about why we are all compelled to publish our thoughts on the internet. It’s like, when live journal got all “it has the word ‘journal’ in it so that means I’ll pretend no one can read it and be surprised when they do.” A lot of people are misusing this new ease with which one’s thoughts can be made public because there are no rules, there is no precedent.
When the desktop computer was invented, it too had no place in modern society. Lucky for us, Alan Kay at Xerox came up with this ingenious identifier, both for the virtual space a computer affords you and its purpose in your home–the desktop metaphor. So now with the internet, I’ve been trying to draw new parallels between items and places in physical space that serve the same function as those online. The desktop metaphor just keeps getting larger, encompassing more and more things, you know?
Live journal totally had the right idea, but people are retarded.
Blog pollution bums me out. Especially because it is TOTALLY controllable. See, it turns out that using live journal as your secret-locked-in-a-drawer-you-hope-is-stronger-than-the-flimsy-lock-on-the-front journal is not a bad idea at all, because you have the same amount of control over where it is and who sees it. You control your privacy settings to prevent the kids who stole your lunch money from entering the room where your journal is kept. You have settings that control which pages you show to your best friends and which become the essays that get you into college.
Some people balk at the idea of marking journal posts as “journal” or “just me” or whatever cute language your hosting site came up with; these people are all “why is it there if no one can see it?”
But you can see it.
And one day you’ll find it the way you found your high school journal in a box you forgot to unpack 5 years ago, only you’ll be looking through your email or your old bookmarks or your del.icio.us tags, and you’ll find your old angelfire account or your friendster.
I’ve decided that I advocate keeping a personal, private, no-one-can-see-it journal on that kind of blog site.
20 years ago we thought we’d be living in space by now. Instead we invented a different type of space.
Archiving your anything on the internet is better than an external hard drive because you don’t have to physically take care of it; there’s no dust, no silverfish, no delicate parts riding across the country in a U-Haul, just light and energy and storage you don’t have to worry about.
Did you feel safer keeping your journal under your bed or in your locker? I went to public school and shared a room so neither was a viable option….But the old notebooks I keep in the Manhattan Ministorage on second ave are chillin.
If you’re not still using the email account you created 10 years ago check it now, see if it’s still up. Check your friendster, your livejournal. Even if you deleted them, that stuff is out there…