Xanadu and the Internet Memetics

Posted on 26 May 2008 by Alex Leavitt

On May 26th 2008, Alex declared “Xanadu and the Internet Memetics” a great band name. So, if y’all steal it, I’m calling Creative Commons on you!

But, really, in this post I want to discuss Internet memes. Not in full — that was done well enough at ROFLCon, though the conversation will continue, especially at ROFLCon 2.0 (??). What I will talk about: On Thursday, Weezer released a music video for their new song, Pork and Beans, via YouTube. The theme? Internet memes.

If you haven’t heard already, the term ‘meme’ has hit mainstream, and Richard Dawkins even gave memes a new branch of academia: memetics. On Wikipedia, the “meme” is defined as a unit of cultural information. What kind of culture Jay Tron Guy Maynard, Tay Zonday, or Sneezing Panda are reflecting cannot be explicitly defined, unless we consider the Internet to have birthed its own culture (which I will discuss in a future article), but all of these Internet stars certainly can be classified as belonging to contemporary popular culture.

To wend a way back to Weezer… the music video encapsulates a general bird’s eye view of the popular Internet memes of the day. But can Weezer’s video exist as a separate meme entirely? To pose the real question: Is tallying Internet memes a new meme?

At the beginning of the year in a creative display of marketing to the digital niche, Mozilla uploaded a marketing video (also of the musical variety) which borrowed the talents of many Internet icons:

On April 2nd, a South Park episode aired in the show’s twelfth season featuring a number of famous Internet memes:

view it here until I can embed it into WordPress

In another example, Meth Minute 39 produced a short, animated tribute to the same memes:

If you visit MM39′s website, they wrote a chicken-or-the-egg post about whether or not MM39′s video had influenced Weezer’s own. Originality is difficult to define online — hence the brouhaha concerning intellectual property rights, or the term “public commons” — but it seems here that these videos all fall under the category of Internet metameme. (Or maybe I should rename that, since Christian Lander hates the prefix meta-.)

Zuneral: The Death of DRM

Posted on 25 May 2008 by Alex Leavitt

Yesterday, Harvard Free Culture held a funeral service, or Zuneral, for Digital Rights Management — one that was, according to Dean Jansen, “part viking, part mafia, and part probably something else.” Four members of HFC encased a Zune and an iPod in a bucket of cement, performed a memorial and eulogy, and put a physical manifestation of DRM to rest in the Charles River outside Harvard University.

If you weren’t able to attend the event, I pieced together a video encapsulating the momentous occasion:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UdGX6kMaeY]
Notes:
- Pictures of the Zuneral preparation are borrowed from Christina Xu’s Flickr.
- The marble engravings are from the JFK memorial fountain inside JFK Park.

You can browse the Zuneral photographs tagged on Flickr here.

Also, take a look at DRM is Dead to Me, featured in the video, for the community’s perspective on the life and times of DRM.

Berkman@10: Networking

Posted on 23 May 2008 by Alex Leavitt

Me playing Rock Band with Charlie Nesson, et al., courtesy of the Berkman Center @ Flickr

I’ve already discussed the social tools used (or overused, or underused?) during Berkman@10, but of course as at any conference much real networking occurred as well. Not one particularly adept as networking in any sense, I did meet an excellent bunch of new contacts and friends. I didn’t speak with many adults — probably a mistake on my part — but I did make the acquaintance of Jeff Young from the Chronicle of Higher Education; Miriam Simun, the coordinator of research in the Digital Natives project over at the Berkman Center; and recently-graduated Andy Sellars. Of course, I’m extremely sociable with those my own age, so I spent a good deal of time speaking with and hanging around Diana Kimball, Tim Hwang, Dean Jansen, Greg Price, Christina Xu, David Edelman (from Oxford University) and Rob (aka. moot, of 4chan). I have to admit: I’ll probably be attending more Harvard Free Culture events than those of BUFC in the future. On the other hand, two pieces of really good news: First, I spoke with Miriam about participating in the Digital Natives project next spring as an intern, after I return from Japan, and the potential looks good. Second, after talking at length with Christina and Diana, it looks like I may have a spot on the team of ROFLCon 2008. All in all, I took away a bunch of real-world connections from Berkman@10 and now I’m hooked on attending conferences.

If anyone’s willing to help me fund a trip to Washington D.C., I really want to go to Beyond Broadcast 2008 at American University on June 17th. Maybe I’ll get some cash from my 21st birthday on June 8th *hint hint*.