Liveblogging ROFLCon
2008-04-25 06:11 -
This post will be updated throughout this weekend – it’s excluded from RSS due to the stupidity of Facebook’s RSS puller.
So, having spent a week working on the guts of the intarwebz in Cambridge, I headed down to the MIT campus to revel in the awesomeness of the culture that’s been spawned.
Registration wasn’t terribly chaotic, thanks to the large numbers of volunteer staff. Schwag abounds, although the official ROFLCon shirts cost money. It is somewhat awkward, however, to be sitting around two and a half hours before the keynote without any organized activities. As we’re almost entirely geeks, it seems as if everyone is slightly socially inexperienced. The activation energy for starting conversations and getting to know a whole room full of strangers is slightly too high for much mixing to happen. Yet.
The crowd seems surprisingly gender-balanced; it’s mostly college students from the east coast, but there are people from all over. There’s the Mozilla Firefox and Tron Guy hanging around and mixing with the crowd, as well as a bunch of people from the press (Wired, G4 Tech TV, etc.).
Given the large number of people whose fame comes from video, there’s predictably video cameras all over the place, people giving interviews, and other media madness.
My friend Ken was attempting to do a survey of the operating systems of the people using laptops in the room. We counted mostly Macbooks, with a small smattering of Thinkpads.
With 10 minutes to go until the start of the Friday keynote, the room is starting to fill up, and people seem to be getting to know their neighbors a bit more.
Oh my god, Leeroy Jenkins. He is MCing.
David Weinberger is giving the keynote:
Broadcast media is a one to many system. The scarcity results in greed. Famous people become a special class that we are supposed to admire. Us vs. them, alienation.
What happens if fame is a network property instead of a broadcast property? Blogging is all about taking off the makeup. People are talking in a way the exposes them as fallible human beings. We have to preemptively forgive our bloggers. This carries into what’s famous on the web – it feels like it’s done by human beings, even though they may be mass.
/WE/ made Mahi (kiss you page) famous. This was our celebrity/fame. We can take someone who’s not on the face of it famous. People pass things around. People tell each other what’s worth watching. It’s an odd conversation we’re having with ourselves. Comments (60k on laughing baby on youtube). We’re inventing new forms all the time. This is an amazing thing we’ve done. Do it yourself fame is peer to peer fame. In the future, everyone will be famous to 15 people. Abundant fame – we don’t know how fame works when it’s everywhere.
The long tail! Plotting # of famous people/video, you get a curve. Obama girl video vs. music video of obama, less popular.
In broadcast world, it’s a binary phenomenon. People are instead making each other famous in smaller circles. All kinds of fame – various attributes, but flawed like all of us.
Panel:
Marmaduke explained – sells tshirts, has google ads; people send him money. It’s remarkable I haven’t gotten sued.
Jibjab – an online comedy site since 1999. Popularity in 2004 (‘this land’ with kerry/bush). 100 pieces of short content. Push for personalization of funny stuff (put your head on dancing figures). Sell credit for sendables. Yahoo/msn licensing deal. Promotional deals with pepsi, budweiser, verizon. Used to sell merchandise, but now focusing on content.
Chuck Norris Facts – most valuable thing in my wallet is a CharlieCard, I’m a college student. I run google ads on my site, I tried merchandising. We tried witty things on shirts.
One red paperclip – traded on craigslist for bigger and better things, posted to boingbong, 14 trades later, had house. Wrote a book, dreamworks picked up movie rights. Going on a speaking tour. Teach government people to think outside the box.
Rocketboom – daily 3-4 minute video blog. News-oriented, highlights the things you guys do. Primary revenue stream is advertising (video advertising) – little bit more valuable compared to TV. Mainstream advertisers.
Million dollar homepage – $1 per pixel, made a million bucks.
To what extent was success from flukes vs. doing something differently?
This land was a perfect storm – different demographic was starting to use the internet. The right people got hold of it and started mailing to others. It’s about being smart once lightning strikes. Take exposure and turn it into something else.
Be willing to do stupid ideas, instead of dismiss them as too stupid.
To what extent does the web inform things other than distribution?
Subject matter comes from the web, audience is specific kind of audience
Organic interest vs. dictated interest
People were doing million dollar homepage pixel buys for attention, pagerank
it was a 4-month story that people followed.
The people who did the trades got publicity
How does demographics (gender, race) play into internet fame?
How does being famous affect everyday life?
———————————————-
Will LOLcats still be around when we’re old?
Seems to have hit a peak a few months ago, we’ll be looking back at it on a nostalgic level though
LOLcode – creator is a grad student in CS, but turned over hashing out the language to the world via forums, wiki
cats have a very wide range of emotions
LOLcode: 80% male
LOLcats: 48% are women between 18-48; 60% female – became more female over time
LOLsecret: always mostly female
How do you feel about the repercussions LOLcats will have on the English language as they become more mainstream?
Linguists love it.
(I ran off to hear Noam Chomsky speak @ Google, will be back for PWNing for the good of mankind at 5)
——
The concert started off a little bit blah, but that’s probably because rap isn’t really my thing. The one thing that I found obnoxious was that a CBS reporter dressed in a tie actually got all the way onto the stage and started crowding it to get video on his camcorder.
People in the audience seem really enthusiastic about the guy, but yeah, not impressed.
(my phone battery died, so I’ll catch up on writing about the concert later.)
—-
Alice Marwick – Making it big
Social status/elitism in web 2.0
At SXSW, people all were talking about web celebrities instead
Fame as social recognition – desire to be recognized for uniqueness
Kids tend to overrate their chances of becoming famous, want to have the trappings of celebrity
Panacea – better, brighter, bigger self.
Myth of rags to riches is purported proof of hope that it could happen to us, celebrity being democratic
Larger than life public personas. pseudocelebrities – known only for fame, not for achievements
Publicity culture – we value what grabs the public’s attention
Path to advancement is public relations and extroversion
Microcelebrity – performance style to respond to fans, continue interaction, broadcast. Breaks down spectator dynamic of traditional celebrity; equality.
Awkwardness in a situation where someone can’t control his/her own image
“Internet Disease” with pictures getting cleaned up, etc. etc.
Press conference and ribbon cutting ceremony existed only to be televised – “Photo op”
We assume that microcelebrities are who they purport to be; they are less controlled than consumer-branded traditional celebrities
Backlash against internet celebrities can be severe when they are shown to be inauthentic; disappointment
Forbes’s “internet celebrity” list usually is tech bloggers; here, we probably have a different notion
Taxonomy:
- Careerist promoters (blatant self-promotion for career purposes)
- Creative promoters (bloggers)
- Self-promoters (promoting themselves as products)
- Reluctant celebrities (accidental fame) – someone with no desire to be famous may find fame disturbing/distressing, some end up adapting to it
Technologies such as youtube/myspace allow people to distribute content to audiences that would be unimaginable 10 years ago
Big media – yahoo, microsoft, google – internet culture embedded in it
Is internet media actually subversive to mainstream media?
It can be very sexist/racist/homophobic
Gay content often tagged as inappropriate no matter what
Most popular blog content is written by white guys despite women being the majority of bloggers
Internet celebrity rarely challenges the status quo
Internet of ROFLCon is a very particular subset of the internet
Each internet culture has set of properties that their celebrities embody
Internet humor isn’t universal humor
Fame as a drug of validation
Generation of narcissists – publicity and looks have replaced character
Always-on culture, continuous partial attention
Think about the voices that get heard – who do we want to hear? Think about responsibility, message.
———-
Panel is pretty inaudible, need to put all of my attention into figuring out what people are saying and who they are instead of blogging.
——-
Incubating the Mindvirus: Meme Infrastructures
