via joi

Last week on Friday, I met with Professor Henry Jenkins in his office at MIT’s Comparative Media Studies department about my future in graduate school.

Way back in the fall semester of 2007, I discovered the Comparative Media Studies website, and from there on my life would change as I switched gears from my English major to following everything happening with Internet studies at MIT, Harvard, and other schools attempting similar research. I would go on to attend ROFLcon, make my way over to Harvard for the Berkman @ 10 conference, and then eventually join teams with the likes of Students for Free Culture, MIT’s YouTomb project, the varied escapades of Tim Hwang and company, and Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, among others. After my study abroad in Kyoto, Japan during the fall semester of 2008, I would return to Boston finally to focus my interests on Internet culture, Japanese animation, and fan studies, hopefully pulling the three topics together in a relevant doctoral program for graduate school.

So, last Friday I met Henry to speak about his decision to move from Comparative Media Studies at MIT to the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. Since I had already pegged MIT’s CMS program as my ideal goal, I felt it valid to ask Henry about following him to SC. Unfortunately, he replied with an answer I expected: He will not know much about the management and organization of the program until he begins teaching there this autumn. Thankfully, he was able to advise me on a few potential research opportunities, recommend a number of other solid graduate programs in the States as well as abroad, and affirm that I have indeed been taking the correct steps (especially spending the next year gaining experience in the field to research my book). He did also provide an excellent piece of advice that I had (perhaps a bit foolishly) overlooked in my pursuits.

That advice was this: Immerse yourself in the popular culture.

I have one year before I’ll even be able to apply for graduate school, study abroad, and research abroad. However, on top of securing a job, researching current trends, and studying theory, Henry proposed spending as much time reading manga, watching anime, following Internet memes, and the like. I have a year, and he said one of the most beneficial things I can do is to engross in the popular culture and understand it inside out, in order to speak about it, establish arguments, and defend theses.

So, thank you, Henry. I’ll take your words to heart. I’ll be sure to keep in touch if I gain the chance to opportunity to study with you.

Ever since I got involved with ROFLcon (I attended the very first one and have been working with the team on hosting the smaller ROFLthing events since), I have had Internet culture research on my mind. Tim Hwang and I have talked over potentially writing co-writing a book on Internet memes, but recently the project has sunk below our interest in meme research, specifically that of engineering. But ever since “meme” because the Internet buzzword of our generation, I’ve constantly been at odds with the odd term. What exactly is a meme? Why are we using that specific word? And what do we learn about the Internet by studying memes, or vice versa?

If you haven’t decided to discover the term’s etymology, I’ll try to provide a basic explanation. Trying to explain the meaning of meme by looking at Wikipedia illustrates the issue of defining the word: throwing “meme” into Google provides you with both two articles on Wikipedia, the first entitled Meme and the second, Internet Meme. The discussion of meme here draws from the article Internet Meme; however, we cannot ignore the history behind the former article, especially since work around Internet memes borrows heavily from studies of memetics.

The etymology of the word meme is derived from the biological term gene. Merriam-Webster defines gene as “a specific sequence of nucleotides in DNA or RNA that is located usually on a chromosome and that is the functional unit of inheritance controlling the transmission and expression of one or more traits by specifying the structure of a particular polypeptide and especially a protein or controlling the function of other genetic material,” but I prefer Wikipedia’s simplistic explanation better: “Genes hold… information to build and maintain… cells and pass genetic traits to offspring.” Examining Wikipedia’s explanation, we can understand a gene in two ways: 1) it contains information, and 2) it transfers that information.

The term meme was coined by the biologist Richard Dawkins in his book, “The Selfish Gene,” (1976) to explain the movement of ideas and the formation of culture through the metaphor of biological processes.

To elucidate the construction of the metaphor, Susan Blackmore, in her paper Evolution and Memes: The human brain as a selective imitation device, writes, “As Darwin (1859) first pointed out, if you have creatures that vary, and if there is selection so that only some of those creatures survive, and if the survivors pass on to their offspring whatever it was that helped them survive, then those offspring must, on average, be better adapted to the environment in which that selection took place than their parents were… If you have the three requisites – variation, selection and heredity, then you must get evolution… This [evolutionary] algorithm depends on something being copied, and Dawkins calls this the replicator. A replicator can therefore be defined as any unit of information which is copied with variations or errors, and whose nature influences its own probability of replication (Dawkins 1976).” Quoting Dawkins, Blackmore names the element of transmission shared by genes and memes: they both replicate with variations. Replication with variation is then how Dawkins explains his concept of the evolution of culture, how ideas move, the meme: “The new soup is the soup of human culture. We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation.”

To explain the actions of a meme, Dawkins illustrates them once again with the biological analogy: “Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.” However, Blackmore points out the difficulty of Dawkins’ explanation, writing, “The problem is this. If memes worked like genes then we should expect to find close analogies between the two evolutionary systems. But, although both are replicators, they work quite differently and for this reason we should be very cautious of meme-gene analogies. I suggest there is no clean equivalent of the genotype/phenotype distinction in memetics because memes are a relatively new replicator and have not yet created for themselves this highly efficient kind of system. Instead there is a messy system in which information is copied all over the place by many different means. I previously gave the example of someone inventing a new recipe for pumpkin soup and passing it on to various relatives and friends (Blackmore 1999). The recipe can be passed on by demonstration, by writing the recipe on a piece of paper, by explaining over the phone, by sending a fax or e-mail, or (with difficulty) by tasting the soup and working out how it might have been cooked.” She counters, “The whole point of memes is to see them as information being copied in an evolutionary process (i.e. with variation and selection). Given the complexities of human life, information can be copied in myriad ways. We do a disservice to the basic concept of the meme if we try to restrict it to information residing only inside people’s heads.” However, I believe that Blackmore’s statement, at least in an age where the Internet is general, accessible, and popular, is fairly known and thence a bit redundant given common sense. The one element that can be gleaned by her comment, though, is that while the transfer of ideas undergoes change (“variation”), it also undergoes “selection,” meaning that people eventually weed out ideas from the initial batch. This counteracts the stereotypical marketer’s view of the meme as “viral” because of the possibility for an idea to be discarded, rather than passed on to other people.

In relation to Dawkins’ explanation, the problem for me is not that he explains the concept of the meme in terms of a biological metaphor, but that people examining memes today have latched onto the concept of biology not as a means of elucidating memes but of approaching and investigating them. Case in point would be Mike Godwin’s WIRED article about memes, in which he writes, “A “meme,” of course, is an idea that functions in a mind the same way a gene or virus functions in the body. And an infectious idea (call it a “viral meme”) may leap from mind to mind, much as viruses leap from body to body.” In terms of the definition, Dawkins’ use of “brain” immediately calls researchers of memes to focus on the way the mind works and how ideas transfer between brains. However, I think that a fundamental change must be made here, and that is to examine memes as transferred between not physical brains but nebulous minds. By this I mean not that the physical nature of the persons involved in the transmission of ideas should be emphasized but instead we should focus on the (sociological?) relations between people to understand culture.

Second, Dawkins explains the meme concept by suggesting that memes might take on an entity of their own, in that “memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain.” Unlike some members of the Free Culture movement, I do not believe that information wants to be “free.” In fact, I believe that information does not move at all, at least by its own volition. Instead, people move information. People want information to be free, so people move ideas to match a system that lets them be free. Therefore, my thesis might be stated as people move information, and out of that statement I want to understand memes as people pushing ideas to other people — not a very “biological” concept in the least.

The interesting thing about the Internet is that it is full of people. However, only in the last few years have people been recognized as a presence, though of course one still minor to the extent of information on the Web. Still, they’ve finally be noticed, particularly since the spread of the popular buzzword, Web 2.0. However, the basic theories around the movement of information through the Internet does not seem to entirely account for the presence of people. Recent publications have begun to approach it, like Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody, but I feel that the text as well as projects like the Berkman Center’s Internet and Democracy project (to use as an example, not to call it out in a negative light) only approach the human element of the Internet as an affect of the Internet rather than a fundamental part or function of it.

Tim has talked many times about Yochai Benkler‘s Layers of Communication, which illustrates the structure of the Internet and how information moves across it. However, recently at SXSW Tim presented a panel on the future of the memescape, and he had to somehow account for the emergence of memes in real life. How else to do so but apply a human layer at some point to Benkler’s equation. Of course, the human element applies all over the above graphic: people create and set up the physical layer; people code the websites and applications; people upload and submit the information. We could think of each color tab with a tiny orange piece attached that would be the “human knob.”

But I think we need to think of a human layer as integral to the structure of the Internet, specifically a human layer separate from the other three tiers. The graph would then look like this:

Thinking about the structure of the Internet this way makes sense. The physical layer provides the module on which the Internet runs and users interact (eg., through fingers on a keyboard and looking at a screen, which then travels over a wire to other fingers and eyes), the code forms what we recognize at the Internet’s visual structure (as well as the inner workings of the Web via applications), the content is the information that we want/need to see, and the human layer moves all of that information through that code over the physical elements. to other humans.

Internet futurists have already attempted to tear apart the structure that I am proposing here. I present as evidence the semantic web. Basically the semantic web is an attempt to create an Internet in which the human layer no longer needs to exist. To explain that statement further, essentially computers cannot read all of the information on the Web, because it was built by people for people. For example, proof might be Google search: although it helps us find a lot of wonderful things, it is not necessarily the best method for finding everything that we need. To combat that imperfection, the semantic web was created to provide information in a format that machines could easily read, thus helping humans find information faster. We can think of the semantic web as hacking the human layer of the web by rerouting that layer through the code layer.

However, I don’t believe it to be that simple a solution. My assumption is that to find information, we need to find people. I can immediately dismiss my previous statement by saying that the Internet already allows that to be possible. Simply reading this article means that you have found information without having had to find me to provide you with that information. However, I will rephrase my statement to make more sense: To find the information we want, we need to find people.

It is here that my research with the anime fandom in America first coincides with my research on Internet culture. They link in two ways (the second of which I will examine later). First, in trying to find information for my research, I have had to contact multiple people, because it is essentially not on the Web. Currently, we rely on information that already exists when we search for it online. The semantic web, too, relies on the fact that the information its code provides to users of the semantic web already exists. If it does not, the code (basically, XML) must be applied to the information as it is uploaded to the Internet. One of Tim’s most recent questions has been about the potential for an Internet EPA. Basically, such an organization (?) would commit to providing relevant information of quality for users of the Web. However, to find information that does not exist on the Web yet, we need to go to people that have or will provide that information. A basic issue right now with finding relevant information of quality is that if you stumble upon a blog that you feel provides you with that information, will the author(s) of that blog continue to provide you with the same quality or relevance of information. This might be a common issue with communication in general, but especially so on the Internet because direct contact is usually not available for both communicative ends (whether or not the author is anonymous). Also, if you wanted to find a certain piece of information and it did not exist, how do you go about finding the person(s) that would provide it to you?

The aspect of connecting not with information but people is where the human layer of the Internet especially comes into play, and where I believe research on Internet memes needs to focus.

First, though, I must reexamine the concept of the meme to apply it to the Internet. As I stated before, Wikipedia draws on two concepts of meme: Meme and Internet Meme. The Wikipedia entry for Internet Meme makes a bold statement: “The term is a reference to the concept of memes, although this concept refers to a much broader category of cultural information.” The author here suggests that Internet memes do not encapsulate the entirety of cultural information that exists outside of the Internet. And, actually, I agree. To clarify my agreement, I would simply state that Internet memes deal with popular culture.

My statement requires two explications. First, to distinguish between memes and Internet memes, I suggest that we can look at the concept of the “meme” as a movement, while “Internet meme” is a manifestation of that movement. When we say meme, we mean an idea, a cultural product, but also that it moves in a certain way. When we say Internet meme, the nominative “Internet” does not denote that the movement of the meme relies on some new Internet-based form of movement; rather, the Internet relies on popular culture, and hence an Internet meme is a meme of popular culture. Second, to explain the phrase “meme of popular culture,” I must define popular culture. However, I will not define it as much as name criteria for the term’s application. Popular culture depends on access and audience. More specifically, the culture of popular culture is that which is accessible by the general populace (in that they can interact with it), and it is culture to which the audience relates. Of course, not all popular culture might be considered “popular” culture given certain contexts: for example, a movie that can be seen in a theater in the city might not be available in the countryside, but it is generally accessible nonetheless.

Now, by “meme of popular culture,” I mean that an Internet meme is a piece of popular culture that moves like a meme, in that its audience replicates it and is selective of it. Taking the Internet meme as a popular culture meme, though, helps us understand the human layer and thence the movement of communication and information online, because when we observe the production of memes, they usually derive from popular (widespread) media or popular (favored) ideas. The importance of popular culture to meme studies is that it brings attention to the audience, or basically the people moving around these bits of culture.

It is particularly important to look at the concept of audience when examining memes because the Internet warps the real-life model, in that it can easily be analyzed. Online, with the potential for anonymity, finding reliable suppliers of information proves difficult. However, when we examine sites of cultural production online, specifically for memes, one of the origins of course is the bulletin board system known as 4chan.

Before tackling the structure of 4chan, I’ll mention that here we now approach the second relation to my research on the anime fandom: the ability to compare systems. When I study anime in the United States, I must also take into account its origins in Japan, which boasts its own fan culture, which even today influences the American fan base. A similar thing happens with 4chan, whose origins were in the Japanese board system, 2channel. Over at Metagold: A Research Blog About Nico Nico Douga (the Japanese video service similar to YouTube), the author writes, “X gives me first a basic introduction into the workings of the legendary BBS (Bulletin board system) 2channel, the direct predecessor of Nico Nico Douga. 2channel is important for Nico Nico Douga in many ways. Most importantly, it has made the culture of anonymous posting popular – it might indeed be a Western misconception to see Nico Nico Douga as a form of Youtube plus BBS. More precisely, it is a BBS plus video. The BBS culture was there first, and it remains the central driving force of Nico Nico Douga… Posts on 2channel normally only appear under the IP address –. Entries are therefore not only anonymous in the sense that they are hidden under a pseudonym. Normally it is impossible to connect the many entries that one user has made. Theoretically, people can also create an identity, but this is tricky, and hardly ever done. 2channel is all about radical anonymity, and this was its great revolution.” In relation to 4chan, then, the anonymity of the users defines the structure. Essentially, a user who posts information on the anonymous board need not worry about the implications of those reading his posts. Therefore, 4chan and 2channel act as a sort of semi-human-layered system, where the system connects the users to those who want to find relevant information in real time, but without consequences to the identity of the user.

The reverse of a anonymous system like 2channel or 4chan would provide the information seeker with more information about the information provider, and thus give the information seeker more clues in determining whether the information provider is worth tracking. A system that resembles this model would be Twitter, where a user is not obligated to follow any other user unless he wants to read updates. Therefore, a user on Twitter chooses the information he wants to follow, with the ability to stop following a user as soon as that user’s ability to provide relevant information lessens. Another interesting aspect of Twitter in relation to relevant information is the limitation of characters, which usually forces users to abbreviate any URLs they post. Because of that abbreviation, users may end up clicking on links to unknown destinations, relying on trust in the user who originally posted the link. I have found myself clicking on a message with just a TinyURL link with no indication where it goes, because I believe the user to be providing me with material relevant to my interests or needs.

The interesting thing about Twitter is that it is fundamentally hackable. Two simple experiments come to mind: 1) The creation of a fake person that provides users with relevant information, and 2) The existence of a real person that bombards users with utterly irrelevant information (by means, for example, of constant @replies, which are now always picked up by the @yourname aggregator). Both of these experiments play with the idea that information is moved around by people.

However, Twitter does not necessarily deal with memetic movement, particularly with regard to Internet memes. The problem, though, is that the definition of meme is slowly changing in the popular lexicon of the Internet. danah boyd recently posted a link on Twitter, commenting, “unbelievable must-view video: http://bit.ly/TnRKo (@ethanz notes that this is the kind of video meme that makes one proud of the interwebz)”. The link’s destination, a video on YouTube, does not seem to fit the concept of the Internet meme as a piece of popular culture that has been replicated and selected. However, it certainly has been repeatedly selected as an item of interest and the link to the video has been replicated across the Internet as people share it amongst friends (or strangers).

The video on YouTube, of Susan Boyle, a recent contestant on Britain’s Got Talent, recently swept the Web and has garnered almost ten million page views as of this writing. In less than thirty minutes this afternoon, I saw it jump over one million page views. The interesting thing about the video, though, is that it mirrors another video phenomenon that hit YouTube back in 2007, where Paul Potts sang an outstanding opera audition on the same show, in a similar lifestyle situation (he was a cell phone salesman; Susan is unemployed; both singers ended up outright shocking the audience). For meme researchers, the link between these videos is key, because it’s very difficult to match similar situations of instantaneous popularity online. Just as Paul Potts had taken the Internet by storm two years ago, so have Susan Boyle’s fans set up multiple fansites for her to spread her name around, widening her viewing audience. If it’s possible to track the people who move around this information on the Web, it would be a celebration for Internet researchers. Meme researchers: pay attention here!

The basic theory of this article states that a new layer of the Internet structure must be analyzed: the human element of the Web that moves information around. I believe that studies like meme research will become a new aspect of fan studies research, and I hope to begin research into that area as I continue my research into the American anime fandom this summer.

I’m putting together a panel on technology in the classroom for an infamous conference called South by Southwest. My presentation’s called “Blackboards or Backchannels: The Techno-Induced Classroom of Tomorrow.” This thing’s BIG. And I’m trying to make it bigger.

I’d love to show the audience the potential and capability of students connected. The Internet is a grandiose machine. So I’m extending a hand to fellow students and friends to get the word out.

If you’re willing to help, go to http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/1123, take five seconds to create an account, and vote on my panel idea. If you want to be more awesome, vote and then leave a comment, to get people talking.

This would be an awesome way to show that students, together, can break the system, be it a simple voting interface or the conventional, old-school methodology of education.

Visit the original Facebook note here and throw it around between your own group of friends.

Also, check out these other nibblets of amazing:

Christina Xu’s Behind the ROFLs: Next-Gen Conference Organizing While Broke

Tim Hwang’s The State of the Internet Memescape: 2008-10 and Obsolete?: A World After E-mail

Last week, I Greyhounded myself down to American University in Washington DC to attend Beyond Broadcast 2008. The amiable conference organizers offered me a scholarship in exchange for a little guide to Twitter, because evidently those guys and gals over in broadcast media don’t understand simple methods of sociability online. Either way, to save $50, I had to force myself to like Twitter. But I do like Twitter, don’t I? I mean, I’m not a Twitter obsessor; I follow less than twenty users. What’s so appealing about Twitter?

First off, kudos to the design team. You’ll pulled off a Threadless/Victorian mashup that I truly find appealing.

But really, the element that makes Twitter what it is: simplicity. One hundred forty characters may not be a lot, but such a limit persuades the composer to ruminate on the few phrases he can put together to create a coherent thought.

Then there’s the element that makes Twitter useful: the fact that it produces coherent thoughts. Keep in mind I did not write relevant or sensible. I agree that some messages are completely inane. But good things come out of Twitter. I’d say that the most useful, albeit less frequently utilized, potential of Twitter is to become an idea aggregate, for people to compose quickly-scribbled, Post-It note sized messages that would be more utilitarian published for the world to see than ported around inside someone’s head. Unfortunately, it seems that other Twitter inhabitants would rather employ the service as a replacement for a Facebook status feed, just to keep on top of what everyone’s doing. Of course, there’s also the in-the-moment practicality of Twitter, especially if you have it hooked up to your mobile phone, in situations such as reporting breaking news (eg. the earthquakes in China or if you get thrown in the slammer).

A positive: the Twitter community, I’ve noticed, is fairly peaceful. Well, disregard when Twitter goes down for lengthy eras of time. But in terms of argument or plain old insipid flame wars, I haven’t seen or read about it. There’s no competition on Twitter. And that’s good. (Unlike

OK, so Twitter’s not bad. But, honestly, Twitter has a cult following and it’s turned into something akin to a fraternity considering its most loyal users. A few weeks ago, I surmised what might have caused Twitter’s popularity to skyrocket so quickly and not peter out. At first, I simply blamed the adults and called Twitter the solution to the next generation middle-aged crisis. Now, I feel like being a bit nicer. So let’s pull it back to ROFLCon…

At ROFLCon, Friday’s opening keynote, a talk by David Weinberger, and Saturday’s opening keynote, by Alice Marwick, dealt with Internet fame, which I guess became the official theme of ROFLCon 1. Instead of dissecting Internet celebrities online, think about the general concept of fame, popularity, fashion in the online space. Dave spoke about the current evolution from a broadcast system (mediated, where The Man chooses what we watch and eventually what we find popular) to a network system (free-reign, where We link each other to videos and images, and choose what becomes famous). In a broadcast domain, alienation results. Via network, the focus is intimacy. And so Twitter’s success, I believe, is based in the familiar. As I alluded to previously, I find more statements about breakfast and bodily functions than theories and thesis. But modernism is about the quotidian, the familiar, the ordinary: for example, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, the in literary terms revolutionary piece of fiction that follows the everyday, unspectacular actions of Clarissa Dalloway as she experiences London in less than twenty four hours. Localization, therefore, is a product of intimacy. Becoming acquainted with one person familiarizes with a community. Although it appears that location does not matter, geography exists and cannot be ignored. And although the Internet and its culture is highly specific, the consequences of connection becomes globalization, yet also localization. Twitter simply links to some acquaintances on a global scale, and others on a local scale.

Can I answer the question, Why is Twitter famous? According to Alice, fame represents value. So what does the populace of the Internet value? Connection. Ease. And I suppose a little bit of humor. I guess Twitter’s popularity is due to people trying to find an easy way to make friends online. It’s not about being famous for fifteen minutes, or being known to one hundred people, or being connected to everyone by n degrees, or garnering a million hits. We want to get to know people, plain and simple.

Want to know me better? Follow me.

I will propose, then, that the use of consume came about because of adults. Yes, Generation X, I’m blaming you. Power to the Millennials! (I’ll discuss my intentional evasion of the phrase “digital native” in a later article. In fact, I don’t put faith in the term millennial either, but for the sake of brevity, it will remain for now.) I blame the older folk who grew up with television and commercials, spent money to go to the movie theater, and customarily lived in a pecuniary society. They are living, breathing customers. As customers, the adults of today matured regarding the world with an eye bent on finances rather than fervor. Therefore, it follows that they would approach the Internet with fiscal perspectives and intentions. Consuming digital media, specifically media inherent to the Web, then evolved from a money-hungry stomach.

And us kids are just, well, different. We’re not online to make money or use money (at least not all the time, though I do not deny calling the Internet the new teenager’s shopping-mall-turned-after-school-hangout). I’ll even go far enough to accuse adults and their outdated perspectives as the cause of the dot-com crash way back when, because they simply approached the Internet in an ignorant manner (I commend them for taking risks). My hypothesis reflects what David Weinberger and Jonathan Zittrain discussed at the final discursive session of Berkman@10, Onward!. Weinberger said, “It occurred to me that what does hold Berkman together and probably for everyone here is that we really really love the internet, just love the internet. How many people were at ROFLCon? The atmosphere at ROFLCon (an internet pop culture conference) was very different type of love of the internet. So in 10 years, how are we going to love the internet?” He expounds that the youth approach to the Internet is one of curiosity, intimacy, and passion. Youth are developing a culture online because they are not consuming the Web, acidically digesting its content and defecating LOLcats, but instead embracing the Internet creatively and living inside it, rather than using it as a tool while remaining outside its realm. In response to Weinberger, Zittrain stated, “I was struck by David Weinberger’s description of ROFLCon. I wasn’t there, but I can’t help but think that some of the goofiness, and the wonderful inanity of it, is exactly the spirit of the Internet that we celebrate here that I am continually amazed and amused by. … It’s the ability not to take ourselves so god damn seriously, while doing serious things and worrying about things like billions of people who are about to join the club, digitally speaking.” Charlie Nesson’s final words echo a similar response: “The question in shorter term for me really is, can we figure out how to engage kids of all ages in an open integrated media educational environment in a way that has them learning critical, algorithmic, strategic, thinking skills, in a form that we can measure — and that can be used as a meaningful credential.” Both professors identify the Internet as a space of informal learning, just like the neighborhood streets where adults grew up. Kids are just doing it online these days.

So how do youth engage with the digital space, strategically thinking and processing the culture that they unconsciously create? Certainly not through consumption. It’s simply by maturing, growing up, experiencing.

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-.)

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*.

I thought it already difficult to take notes and eventually blog after a live feed had already informed the people who cared about the content. Is there really a point in taking notes if the original content is available in full? Probably not. But I don’t want to suggest that blogging is out of the option. For one, blogging, although a form of journalism, is also a form of exploration, through essay form. The author may process the original content and produce reactions: argument, hypothesis, questions. The blog medium may also take on a hypertextual nature, unlike paper or televisual journalism, so even more information can be accessed to provide more context for the audience. In fact, blog articles plus original visual media is possibly the best opportunity for the digital author, because he has a primary text to reference directly, like a film.

I bring all this up because Berkman@10 is webcasting the conference’s panels and lectures, and will most likely publish the video recordings as it has done in the past. The Berkman Center’s actions help push forward initiatives like BU’s OpenCourseWare project to get videos of lectures, and other course materials, online for public use. And I’m happy about that.

Or, in this room, is the demographic of the adult audience limited? Is it a niche in the totality of adult digital users? A mix of industry guests and academic scholars and researchers, is the demographic more educated than the average digital adult?

Then I must ask: Should we be defining the future of the Internet by these adults’ terms?

If you look at my spotlight on Michael Wesch, re/view the three videos. He argues that humanity has defined computing and the Internet in archaic terms, but also by archaic methods. I’m not saying that adults aren’t everpresent online, but they certainly are not omnipresent. Neither are youth. I don’t want to approach the digital divide in this article, though. I do, however, want to say this:

I wish that more youth had registered for Berkman@10. There certainly exists a dichotomy between the adult and adolescent perspectives toward the Internet and contemporary technology. My generation possesses different values and approach digital ethics differently. I do not want to suggest that we are more right than adults. But if we, Berkman@10, are going to argue about the future of the Internet, then we need to hear more from the “younger” generation present in the audience.

There is a strong polarity between Berkman@10 and ROFLCon, and not simply a polarity of content. I admire ROFLCon because it encouraged an amalgamation of digital inhabitants (contributors and critics) and digital creators (the “industry”). The demographic of the “inhabitants” consisted mainly of adolescents. I believe that, because so many youth attended ROFLCon, the audience was much more involved and familiar with the practicality of the technology, rather than the theories and assumptions present in an approach to the technology. A good example is the Question Tool used by both conferences (the ROFLCon tool is down at the publication of this article), where the audience members can submit questions and then vote up or down “good” questions, later to be viewed and answered by the speaker(s). The implementation at ROFLCon simply worked, while at Berkman@10 the tool hasn’t reached its full potential, nor do I think it will. My guess is that the membership of ROFLCon simply was more interested in what everyone had to say, while here we just want to hear from the infamous panelists. The presence of technology at Berkman@10 trounces that at ROFLCon, however, and I find that a bit strange. More laptops… but that may be because of the more academic nature of this conference, and it’s definitely easier to transcribe notes on a keyboard.

Either way, I am almost twenty one years old. I am very involved in technology. I grew up on a Macintosh. There is a septuagenarian sitting across the aisle. Is he that much more involved? Will I be less involved digitally in 2025 than the contemporary youth at that period? Or will Web 3.0, or whatever we’re in for, enable a highly digital future? And will I be heralding in that age, or will it still be the adults of today?

Finals probably hit me at the worst possible point in May. Well, at a good point, because I had a very relaxing respite from academics as well as conferences. However, I planned that respite to be my time to write more about Anime Boston, and to begin formulating articles about ROFLCon and the multiple lectures I’ve attended at MIT and Harvard over the past month. Instead, I studied hard and long, neglecting any urges to write, and now I’m sitting in the middle of Berkman@10, fretting in my seat because I want to write so much about some of the things I’ve heard this morning, but so much of it relates to items that I wanted to bring up in discussing the lectures and ROFLCon and… I suppose my approach might have to be melding everything together, although my productions will be much more disjointed than I had hoped.

To discuss at least one thing that I felt I needed to say, regarding liveblogging. Last night I attended a pre-conference event at the Harvard Kennedy School, entitled Civic Engagement and the Youth Vote in the 2008 Elections, hosted by the Berkman Center collaborating with the Institute of Politics. I won’t discuss the content of the panel discussion, but I want to point out that when I was sitting with my laptop taking notes, a woman from the Berkman Center was sitting right next to me, typing away into WordPress, liveblogging the event (the results of which you can read here).

In the interim between talks this morning, I met Andrew Sellars, who recently graduated from Northeastern University. We talked a lot about how we became interested in attending the event, the dichotomy between paying attention and multitasking, and eventually discussed how to approach the conference with its advertisement of so many social tools to use during the discussion. I bought up liveblogging and we both agreed that the method is at least a bit moot (you’ll see his liveblogs over at his website, /irony/), since the liveblogger never gets the opportunity to simply sit back and take in everything, to breathe the content, to turn it over and finds its gaps, to discover where it succeeds. I’ve discussed my one attempt at liveblogging, and I just didn’t get anything out of it. I want to be able to comprehend the content. So, in my frenzy to continue debating the issues and values at Berkman@10, as well as include everything that I’ve wanted to talk about for the past month… wait. It’s coming. I may have to type away the inked letters on my keyboard for the next three weeks though.

And, of note:
- I finally met, in person, Diana Kimball, who I really blame for starting me on this whole adventure. Hey, she writes well.
- Where do I get one of these Berkman 10 track jackets???