But there’s been a controversy in the relationship arena. Since the feature had been implemented, a large number of users have been faced with seeing photos of their current significant others, but those pictures are old memories of when said S.O.s were photographed with ex-boyfriends and ex-girlfriends. This InsideFacebook article about the feature lists comments about how annoying and painful these photo recommendations are. A Facebook group called I HATE PHOTO MEMORIES was created to protest the implementation internally. Even my own girlfriend has complained to me about Facebook recommending her photos of me with former exes.

Recently, though, Facebook solved the Photo Memories That You’d Rather Not Remember problem by implementing a change in the recommendation system, so that any recommended photographs would not include users with whom you have had a Facebook relationship. According to a second InsideFacebook article, Facebook’s photo project manager, Sam Odio, commented, “Hi All – I’d like to let you know that we’re listening to your feedback. The photo memories product no longer shows tagged photos of your friends if you were previously in a relationship with them.” So it seems like the problem has been solved.u

Not quite. Let’s take a step back and look at profiles as spaces for teen culture to see the new conflict at work with Facebook’s “solution.”

Since I’m working under danah boyd at Microsoft Research, I’m going to draw from a lot of her writing to tease out the issue.

danah’s written a lot on identity creation online, specifically within the context of teenagers: how they form relationships with friends, how those relationships manifest online, etc. Opposed to that, she’s also written a fair amount on user configurability: that is, how mediated online platforms, like Facebook, structure what a user can do with the system they’re given. For example, Facebook configures a user’s presentation of him- or herself by allowing only certain information to be placed in certain areas (Hobbies go here, Political Affiliation goes here, Jobs go here, etc.). Of course, these two issues — contextual creation versus structured configuration — are at odds with each other, and usually the former dominates the latter. And because a lot of users — especially teens — don’t want to be corralled into the limits of an egocentric social networking site’s platform, they tend to go out of their way to “hack” the profile system, either literally through code (eg., MySpace profiles) or culturally. And it is this last point that conflict with Facebook’s solution.

The cultural behavior of users crafting the visibility of their friends in their profiles is an interesting point of contention on Facebook. One of MySpace’s major features was its Top 8 list, where a user could list eight of his or her friends out of the aggregate list of hundreds. Top 8 is important particularly for younger users, whose daily lives are consumed with fashioning their identities around the fluctuating relationships they share with friends, family, coworkers, teachers, adults, etc., because in choosing eight “favorite” people, the list defines a part of who they are.

Facebook, though, does not have a Friend-parsing widget like MySpace. Some third-party apps were developed to enable those sort of options, but the low level of adoption across a social network site like Facebook — especially one that now boasts over 500 million users — means an insignificant module like that would not hold its popularity over a long period of time. So a question remains: how do teens situate themselves in relation to their friends on Facebook, when it’s not a central part of the platform?

One of the more recent behaviors in response to this question is the case of Facebook siblings and relatives. A user — most likely a teenager — will invite his or her closest friends to be a “sibling,” which means that the friend’s profile is linked on the user’s profile in a very distinct and visible position on the “Info” page. It’s a trend among a lot of high school students that wish to make their friends more a part of their Facebook identity. And more often than not — or at least it’s my assumption — teens will list their friends instead of their actual parents and siblings, to retain a barrier between their social lives familial lives.

But the ability to list relatives is a fairly recent addition to the Facebook profile. Before that, the only basic feature to show distinctly a relationship between one user and another was the Relationship Status.

And I hope by now that just by mentioning Relationship Status, you understand where I’m going with this.

When I was in college, only a couple years ago (and let’s be honest — it’s still a huge factor today with all teenagers), the Facebook Relationship Status changed youth culture radically. That you could see if an acquaintance was single or taken, or who they were dating, or who they recently broke up with, and then also comment on all those developments, was a game changer in college, and then high school, culture. But the Relationship Status wasn’t necessarily used for relationships. A good number of my friends would set themselves up “in a relationship” with a best friend. I even know a couple people that are dating others, but list a different friend in their Relationship Status. So there was and still is a significant trend in pairing yourself up with a buddy on Facebook, even if you’re not dating.

So this interesting bit of youth culture immediately conflicts with the changes that Facebook implemented to avoid current significant others to see their partners’ exes. If you’re “dating” a friend on Facebook — just so that your acquaintances will understand that you’re best friends — Facebook will never recommend a photo of your friend if you cancel that relationship.

This social media “cultural hacking” takes place on all sorts of Web platforms, in direct opposition to any sort of “user configuration” by which the platform intends each and every user to abide. For example, YouTube implemented the ability to add links to YouTube videos, but some users use those links to combat the “Recommended Videos” displayed in the right-column module, or we can even look at the change in video form that has developed from YouTube users including three different optional endings that a viewer can choose to click on. But the implications of user configuration on youth culture are even more interesting, because thousands of teens growing up with Facebook and other Web 2.0 technology are shaping their identities in part because of the social interactions and connections they maintain on these websites. And no matter the mantra that companies give to users — such as Facebook being a place where users should share everything — the users will tend to behave differently.

Do they upload it?

Are you one of those fuckwads who has a fucking problem with my gay son getting married?

FCKH8.com is a new initiative by non-profit media campaigner Luke Montgomery in support of LGBT issues. The website gives a big, ol’ Fuck You to the haters of gay marriage and the proponents of denying gay couples benefits like health insurance.

I came across FCKH8 because a gay friend from high school had posted the video to his Facebook wall, and it had turned up in my newsfeed. The bright pink background caught my eye, and the “You will be offended.” tagline inspired the final clickthrough.

Although the embed contains enough expletives to ward off some viewers, especially if they’re viewing in their workplace, it’s a professionally produced video: great aesthetic quality, good caliber of sound, and an energetic cast that gets the point of “screwing hate” across strongly and proudly.

And the marketing has done pretty well so far. Spanning across all of the major sharing sites — Facebook, Twitter, and StumbleUpon — the pink FCKH8 message has already as of yesterday raised close to $30,000 selling T-shirts and other schwag.

But the most interesting part of the FCKH8 campaign is the video strategy. And this strategy is bringing a whole new perspective to how we think about virality, spreadability, whatever you want to call it.

The FCKH8 channel hosts two official videos on their YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1amIrR-VMAI (“NSFW”) and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVwLaOtOlQ8 (censored).

However, yesterday, the FCKH8 Twitter account announced that the video had been flagged for removal: “YOUTUBE CENSORS: H8ers campaigned to flag R main video. Uploaded again! Share the FCK out of it!,” seemingly by anti-GLBT protestors.

The interesting note to be made about this message, though, is that “Share the FCK out of it” meant more than just “Share the video, embed it, send the link to your friends, etc.” Instead, dozens of users were inspired and allowed to reupload the original FCKH8 video on their own YouTube channels. Searching “FCKH8″ on YouTube yields “96″ videos, most of which are the original with its iconic hot pink background, with a sprinkling of other response and support vids.

To which I have to say… Fuck. Yes.

When we think about online video strategy by brands, entertainment companies, and producers, we tend to focus on two elements:

1. A piece of media uploaded in lieu of the copyright holders is considered by them, and then — given a positive reception of the illegal uploading — allowed to remain online, an existence from which the copyright holders can reap additional monetary benefits (usually in the form of ads).

2. A piece of media is intended to be spread by users, moving from the “influentials” to their followers and hopefully spreading amongst diverse communities. But this usually includes spreading one piece of media through multiple groups. If there are multiple pieces of media to be spread, companies tend to follow some sort of “transmedia” initiative, where the brand or media is adapted — or sometimes just copied without any change — to other media forms (such as from TV to film to webisode, etc.).

But with this FCKH8 case study, I believe it’s one of the first times when an initiative to spread has allowed users to copy the original media and subsequently spread it, be in via the same or entirely new communities and networks. If we think in terms of the current discourse on piracy, this is astounding.

What makes this case study doubly interesting is that we’re talking about collaborative disruption. Although this initiative is small (less than 100 videos), they are in practice bombing YouTube with repetitive information. Yes, it’s in the face of censorship — although it appears that YouTube has collaborated with the videomakers to reupload the original video after it was flagged for removal. And we can’t necessarily call it “bombing,” because all of the videos either have the same title or append a [MIRROR] tag to the video. In other words, it wouldn’t be difficult for YouTube to suppress the collective action.

But we can compare this to the DDoSing recently by 4chan against the MPAA and other anti-piracy websites or even Justin Bieber fans taking over Twitter’s trending topics (and Bieber’s subsequent complaint about the removal of his fans’ signs of devotion).

Of course, the benefit of FCKH8′s grassroots mass uploading is the eventual spread of a meaningful human rights campaign. Go check out the video, and share it with your friends!

The key point I want to emphasize from the video: If we look at the economic implications of moé, to increase [I hurriedly said "understand"] sales, most producers nowadays have borrowed from the moé aesthetic and specifically catered to this otaku subculture.

In the last week of January, an interesting conversational thread broke out on the Association of Internet Researchers mailing list regarding a video about scholarship in the “critical commons,” on the debate between digital humanities and media studies. The video follows below, but judging by the preview image it might not be exactly what you expect:

Professor Charles Ess reacted to the video, writing:

How profoundly disappointing, if not on the edge of insulting. If (a) you know German reasonably well, and especially if (b) you’ve seen the terrific film, Der Untergang, that is ripped off here – it doesn’t strike me as funny at all. (emphasis mine)

Jeremy Hunsinger, who had circulated the video to the mailing list, responded:

It is actually just a spin off of a meme that uses this clip from that movie, there are probably 30 or so different re-texts and mashups i’ve seen of this clip. The joke, i think, of the meme is that it never ever comes close to the German, nor is it ever supposed to, nor is the content really supposed to be evil or really related to the clip, it is a play of contrasts and a play of hyperbole. I think you hit it on the head, it is supposed to be contrary to intentions, that’s sort of its point. … however, i’m pretty sure that neither german, nor evil is supposed to be the point here. (emphasis mine)

Before elucidating the above situation (the entire thread of which can be viewed in the AoIR archives here), I want to take a step back to examine the idea of “meme” — a unit of cultural information — once more. We’ve encountered memes before at the Consortium, particularly in Henry Jenkins’s white paper, If It Doesn’t Spread, It’s Dead, written by Xiaochang Li and Ana Domb Krauskopf, with Joshua Green. On his blog, Henry briefly explains the history behind the idea of memes and its confusion with the buzzword “viral”:

Talking about memes and viral media places an emphasis on the replication of the original idea, which fails to consider the everyday reality of communication — that ideas get transformed, repurposed, or distorted as they pass from hand to hand, a process which has been accelerated as we move into network culture.

However, I would point out that the replication and transformation of ideas are part of a dependent relationship that informs us as to the lifecycle of an idea.

I have written before about comprehension of memes, particularly those that replicate online, over at The Department of Alchemy. Back in April 2009 in my article, Internet Culture Research: New (?) Thoughts on Memes, I wrote about the origins of understanding culture through evolutionary steps, as positioned by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976):

To elucidate the construction of the metaphor [of biological processes], 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.”

While Henry dismisses the term “meme,” I embrace it, because its use particularly emphasizes the origins (past) and potentialities (future) of an idea. Understanding ideas as memes helps us construct family trees for those ideas, but it also helps us understand how we understand ideas.

Henry argues that spreadability adds value to an idea by allowing the idea to inhabit different contexts. He states:

Rather than emphasizing the direct replication of “memes,” a spreadable model assumes that the repurposing and transformation of media content adds value, allowing media content to be localized to diverse contexts of use.

However, I argue that the referential knowledge inherent to the subcultural network behind Internet memes allows for an increased understanding and application in new and different contexts.

Returning to the video above: While Ess’s reaction to the video should not be discounted, it is somewhat misinformed. As Hunsinger correctly explains, the video comes from an evolutionary, memetic chain of similar videos, which place subtitles over the iconic scene from Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Der Untergang (Downfall; 2004), a film that depicts the last days of Adolf Hitler in Germany. The meme, however, evades the historically dramatic tone of the film in favor of a number of comedic situations. The succession of these videos has been dubbed The Hitler Meme (or “Hitler finds out”) in the Know Your Meme database (which archives Internet meme phenomena for a general audience; for a more subcultural approach, Encyclopedia Dramatica explains the Downfall videos here [NSFW]).

The origins and history of the Hitler Meme are fairly vague. Last week, I spoke with Jamie Wilkinson, lead researcher for Know Your Meme, who sent out a call to find the first iteration of the chain. Based on this original scene…

… the earliest-uploaded step turns out to be the Spanish-subtitled “Sim Heil: Der untersim,” uploaded to YouTube on 10 August 2006, in which Hitler complains about “the lack of new features in the demo trial of Microsoft’s Flight Simulator X” (Know Your Meme).

The video was later uploaded with English subtitles by the same user on 30 August 2006, but was eventually removed due to a copyright claim by Constantin Film Produktion GmbH (Downfall’s film studio).

As the Spanish video’s description states, the Der Untergang spoof started as a joke (“Simplemente una broma en forma de video”), like most Internet memes. And like most jokes, one must understand the references to comprehend the humor. However, as more and more Downfall videos were created, the joke evolved into a two-fold structure: the joke portrayed in the subtitles, and the video as a joke in itself. To exemplify the binary, two videos follow:

Hitler gets banned from Xbox Live, currently the most-watched Hitler Meme video on YouTube, with over 3.5 million views.

What does Hitler think of the Downfall meme?, a meta-commentary on the Hitler Meme with a Hitler meme video

The Hitler Meme has already gained widespread attention, appearing for example in Wired Magazine (Hitler Remixes Are Big — on YouTube) and the New York Times (The Hitler Meme). But what value does it hold for us trying to understand the Internet’s influence on producers and consumers?

First, we can look quickly at the appropriation of the footage from Der Untergang for a very different purpose. It might be understandable that these videos are instances of fair use, but according to the YouTomb archives, Hitler Memes have been removed from YouTube by Constantin Film Produktion GmbH over 50 times. Perhaps the uploaders of the parodies did not file DMCA counternotices, or there might be moral ambiguity in the fair use of this material (even though there seems to be a trend in online comedy toward associating humor with Hitler, typified by Godwin’s Law).

Second, even though “a dramatic recreation of Hitler’s last stand is not exactly a laugh-out-loud subject,” the director of the film, Oliver Hirschbiegel, has reacted to these fan(?)-producers of his work, positively. Very recently (15 Jaunary 2010), the Vulture section of New York Magazine Online reported that Hirschbiegel approves and supports these mashups of his film:

“Someone sends me the links every time there’s a new one,” says the director, on the phone from Vienna. “I think I’ve seen about 145 of them! Of course, I have to put the sound down when I watch. Many times the lines are so funny, I laugh out loud, and I’m laughing about the scene that I staged myself! You couldn’t get a better compliment as a director.

One of the director’s favorite parodies, about Michael Jackson’s death.

As for the idea of such a serious scene being used for laughs, Hirschbiegel thinks it actually fits with the theme of the movie. “The point of the film was to kick these terrible people off the throne that made them demons, making them real and their actions into reality,” he says. “I think it’s only fair if now it’s taken as part of our history, and used for whatever purposes people like.” He adds, “If only I got royalties for it, then I’d be even happier.”

These reactions from the director seem to go against the actions that his film company have taken in having videos removed from YouTube, but it’s a particularly interesting relationship of producer-consumer that is particularly heightened because of the ease of access to video editing and sharing hubs online.

Third, and probably most important, the Hitler Meme videos represent a convenient entry point for Internet culture to merge with communication and media studies in the academy.

Let me reiterate two points that I made above: 1) Memes help us understand how we understand ideas; and my main argument, 2) The referential knowledge inherent to the subcultural network behind Internet memes allows for an increased understanding and application in new and different contexts. To expound the first point, let me approach the latter first.

The confusion behind comprehension of Internet memes tends to be that they belong to an informational subculture of digital (mostly) youth inhabiting spaces such as 4chan (an anonymous imageboard) and Something Awful (a popular forum). Unlike some subcultures in which participation is through the association of fashion or philosophy (eg., goth subculture), this online subculture thrives in information appropriation, management, and consumption. It is, basically, a media subculture. And in consuming an infinite amount of media, authenticity in the subculture amounts to recognizing references made to these multiple films, games, music, celebrities, etc.

As a subculture, it makes sense that an outsider will not be able to understand references made within the subculture. Again, we cannot blame Ess for missing the purpose of the Hitler Meme, having never experienced the video chain before. As he explains:

it seems that for at least a few of us, the effort at humor doesn’t work.

The Hitler Meme particularly makes immediately association with the meme a bit difficult as well, since it deals with potentially objectionable material (unlike LOLcats, for example). Before a memetic video titled “Hitler’s Ultimate Downfall” was removed from YouTube, it was initially blocked in Germany and Poland, among a few other countries (YouTomb).

And as Professor Christian Fuchs writes of his viewing:

probably another influence here is that my cultural background is the german-speaking world, so i tend to view all media content related to the nazis with great care.

But as with most Internet memes, especially since they promote humorous situations, the association of the new meaning connoted by the meme tends to be displaced from the original meaning of the appropriated media. In his close reading of the video, Fuchs writes:

The video is making two false analogies. The Nazis would today probably support Internet censorship, Internet surveillance, etc. And actual Nazi groups are trying to use the Internet for their own propaganda, but most of these sites work in a traditional way without much employment of “social media” and “web 2.0″. One can argue if this video is funny or distasteful – these are unnecessary moral discussions, but one thing is for sure: the clip is unintelligent.

However, Hunsinger points out that a close reading is the wrong approach, and retorts:

The clip has nothing to do with Nazi’s or evil or censorship. The meme is playing purely off the emotional portrayals. … It is the reproduction and reconstruction of those meanings in relation to the emotions that make this work. … As I indicated, some people might not be ideal for this meme, audiences differ. However, if you are going to read the meme, you should try to do it justice within its own genre, that is my basic argument.

Let me return to a question posed earlier. Now that we have established that the sequence of videos based on Der Untergang holds meaning for a specific digital subculture, what value does it possess? I mean to draw a line between meaning and value, because to the latter I attribute a sense of beneficial worth. People can associate with Internet memes, but what can they derive from them?

To set up an approach for answering this question, I will return to an article I wrote previously for the Consortium, which contains notes from a talk I attended by MIT Media Lab professor Judith Donath (Human Signaling: Competition and Cooperation in Everyday Communication). In this presentation, Judith explains that these small and subtle subcultural references and jokes, in memetic fashion, create structural meaning beyond the simple meaning that one video or picture might hold. Primarily, she uses examples from the LOLcat phenomenon, which are various pictures of cats with short captions attached to each photo. While the picture-phrase combinations can vary, a handful of these combinations rely on a certain grammar to connote meaning (and I do not mean the childish wording that LOLcats tend to promote). Instead, I mean the repetition of specific phrasings that in themselves are smaller memes in the LOLcat meme universe. Anil Dash, in his article, Cats Can Has Grammar, points out a few of these:

• I’M IN UR X Ying your Z. This construct, based on i’m in ur base, killin ur d00ds has morphed into a catch-all structure for annotating cat pictures.

• Invisible Item. Variations on the seminal Invisible Bike, these are images of cats, usually in midair, with captions that prompt us to fill in imaginary objects or actions that complete the scene. There’s something brilliant to these images, speaking to our mind’s ability to intuitively extrapolate unseen details.

• Kitty Pidgin. And finally, the newly dominant lolcats, of the family I Can Has Cheezeburger? These seem to be spawning nearly infinite variations, and have exploded in popularity since being named “lolcats” instead of the more general “image macro” or “cat macro”.

NOTE: The third bullet here does not represent one of the structural meanings; instead, this kitty pidgin is the “childish wording” to which I refer above.

With “I’m in ur X, Ying your Z” and “Invisible X,” as Judith explains, each of these jokes becomes a phrase with embodied meaning. It is a structure through which we can understand not just a joke but also a way of comprehending a context. For example, a common image macro (the form of a LOLcat) is the “You’re Doing It Wrong”:

The image with the phrase is a joke in itself, but it also contains a structural meaning of an ironic situation that appears to be correct from another (albeit incorrect) perspective. Explanation: in the above picture, the soldier is fighting with a weapon and holding it like a bow, but it is obviously a gun.

Pushing the structural meaning of the meme to another level, then, is the following iteration:

By applying the meme to the protest image above, the author gives value to the You’re Doing It Wrong structure. And our understanding of the image is mediated by the meme: while the protesters believe that they are correct, the author illustrates a particular political statement against their beliefs.

Now, while the subcultural joke is still present, the meme provides another way of approaching the picture’s context. Perhaps not for people outside of the subculture (although this particular instance is fairly easy to understand). Therefore, to further illustrate my previous point, this meme increases our understanding (and possibly appreciation) of the political statement for this picture now that the meme is applied to a new and different context.

The Hitler Meme is a bit more difficult to comprehend, evidenced by the email thread. However, it is fairly simple to understand when we examine the narrative of the video rather than its content. Without explaining the actual content of the video (since it obviously varies with each parody), let me do a close reading of the structure of the Hitler Meme:

- actor sets up situation, which superior seems to understand
- superior confirms that he understands
- actor(s) introduce problem that contradicts superior’s understanding
- superior suggests his frustration in extended silence
- superior explodes in confused anger
- superior realizes he cannot overcome problem
- superior accepts problem

This is a fairly simple narrative structure that introduces a problem and illustrates its embellished reaction (helped in particular by the exaggerated body language and facial expressions). Each Hitler Meme video establishes a problem with a (usually hilarious) tirade about a (sometimes banal; occasionally significant) crisis. Regardless of the quality of the issue at stake, the Hitler Meme presents a joke (basic meaning) whose structure dictates further meaning when applied to multiple contexts.

Finally, then, what is the value of the Hitler Meme? We can see that memes can be used to emphasize certain aspects of an issue (eg., the irony of the gay rights protesters). Coincidentally, a fairly recent use of the Hitler Meme has been used at a local university, which also happens to be my alma mater.

At the start of the fall semester of 2009, Boston University announced that it would be downsizing students’ print quotas. Reducing the quota from 500 pages to 100 pages, both students and professors raised protesting voices all around campus. Boston.com reports (BU limits paper route for students):

While the university has encouraged professors to move their readings and handouts online – which means students would be responsible for printing them out – it has limited undergraduates to printing 100 free pages per semester. After that, it’s 12 cents per page, even though the Kinko’s on campus charges 10 cents a page. Graduate students get 500 sheets; and law students are allocated 1,000 sheets.

Boston University’s student-run Daily Free Press (Faculty members frustrated by print quota changes) also writes:

[S]ome faculty members have also experienced trouble adjusting, especially given the late notice of the change, they said. Others, meanwhile, said they had not noticed any impact from the reduced print quota. “I haven’t changed that much,” Writing lecturer Amy Chmielewski said. “I still have my students print out the readings. It’s under 100 pages, so it’s still cheaper than textbooks.” President Robert Brown apologized for not telling faculty members about the change earlier, which would have allowed them to adjust students’ access to material, according to an Oct. 14 Daily Free Press article.

In the midst of the turmoil, one exemplary reaction surfaced on YouTube: Der Printergang (uploaded on 14 October 2009). The video references buildings across Boston University’s campus, a handful of the University’s colleges & students, and even Boston College’s lower printing prices. The video ends with Hitler’s words of hope: “I don’t have term papers for another few weeks. There’s still time for a printing injection.”

The use of this meme in the Boston University printing crisis works extremely well, and the video was passed around across students networks on Facebook and Twitter rapidly. Eventually, by Internet or word of mouth, the video made it to multiple university administrators (on which the Daily Free Press also reports). Dean of Students Kenneth Elmore reacts on his own blog:

Students, as Nazis, concerned about University print policies and residential computer labs – I know it’s over the top, and I do get the point – ouch! Heard the word on the street about this video throughout campus, including conversations with administrators and faculty. I refrained from replying to folk with DM and e-mail links so I could think about it before I passed it on or made comment. Don’t misread me – I’m not a killjoy; I love a good remix; I live for decent satire; I adore commentary on things going on; and, I think human around race, culture, and ethnicity, when done right, is some of the funniest stuff I’ve heard. My gut told me that this time I needed to move on. Not sure we’re at a point where people portraying Nazis makes good satire. Reminded me of the unease I felt this summer with the Nazi commentary and remarks embedded in some conversations and demonstrations about health care. Maybe we should be over it. Maybe I’m just part of a generation that’s needlessly sensitive about these images and what they have implied – perhaps it’s time for us to grow up and appreciate humor.

Even in this situation, the video’s content is questioned. However, the video-as-meme lends particular emphasis to the situation. Yes, the video is certainly humorous because it is quite exaggerated, but the anonymous uploader of Der Printergang uses this meme to point out the relatively outrageous problem (and the heightened reactions that are fairly appropriate) to an audience of students, most of whom would understand the memetic reference and appreciate the criticism of the school.

Memes tend to be jokes, first, but they represent a valuable example of networked knowledge online. Although most memes do not escape the subcultural barriers of small Internet communities, a few do make an impact on the real world. Of course, many Internet memes are simply humor. But the evolutionary structure of some memes create a strong cultural value that acts as a grammar for information networks.

I’m glad to see a new development along these lines, especially one that I can discuss briefly.

Trailer for Japan.

If you haven’t had a chance to check it out, the trailer for Lasse Hallström’s new movie, Hachi: A Dog’s Tale, has recently been passed around the major OMG-Japan link sites (like Japanator).

If you don’t know the story behind Hachiko, you can read up on the most loyal dog in the history of forever at Wikipedia. The tale is simple: a dog waits for his owner, a professor at the University of Tokyo, every day near Shibuya’s train station. When the owner dies, the dog keeps waiting. The story of Hachiko is infamous in Japan — the result of an article published in a national newspaper by one of the professor’s former students — and might be equivalent to, say, the story of Paul Revere (for Americans), as a piece of cultural history in the minds of the Japanese. Hachiko has even become an idiom of sorts, known primarily as 忠犬ハチ公 (loyal dog Hachiko), and the dog has an annual ceremony dedicated to him, held at his statue in Shibuya Square.

Photographed in Shibuya, October 2008

Looking at this trailer, though, the film immediately caused a bit of confusion. It’s an English-language movie based on a real Japanese story marketed first to a Japanese audience (with a later release to an American audience) with a trailer in Japanese but requiring Japanese subtitles. I can work around the lingual barriers present here, but — c’mon — it’s a bit circuitous.

On top of the linguistic clash, there’s also the problem of the movie as produced. The qualifying prerequisite to explaining said problem is to understand that a movie was already made in Japan.

Clips from the original Japanese film, 1987.

Hollywood remakes movies a lot, and while there are critics of multiple versions of the same film, we can’t outright denounce this film based on an earlier (potentially better) Japanese counterpart. However, the fact that Hachiko is filmed in America with an American cast produces the problem: the story of Hachiko is placed into an American context.

Trailer for United States.

After watching the American trailer, I hope you can understand what I mean by “American context.” This second trailer disregards the origins of the story, and I am frankly surprised that it didn’t state something along the lines of “A real story based on the popular Japanese tale.” The movie was filmed in Connecticut, and it obviously ignores the Shibuya locale (replacing it with Bedridge Station), the name of the professor, etc. From the trailer, it seems that the film ignores the Japanese side of the story altogether. It’s a remake, and poetic license like this is never discouraged. However, I wonder how many members of the American audiences will question the name of the dog, Hachiko (or, here, Hachi). It’s very Japanese sounding, plain and simple. Would the Japanese association minus the Japanese context create a barrier for a non-Japanese viewer?

In comparison, the Japanese trailer presents a much different film. I especially want to highlight the song (with Japanese lyrics) that plays in the second half of the trailer. The first words we hear are 忘れないよ、忘れないよ (don’t forget, don’t forget), which parallel Hachiko’s thoughts of his owner, but also reflect and emphasize the historical context that underlies the film (Japanese people have not and will not forget about this dog and his story). I assume that Japan will receive an early release of this movie solely because Hachiko remains such a cultural figure there, and the producers are trying to bank on the story’s popularity. However, I also wonder if the English-language and American actors will distance Japanese viewers from connecting directly and emotionally with the movie.

Going back to America, I must question the retention of the Akita dog breed, at least when presented to the American audience. Bluntly, I laud the directors for not changing the breed. However, Akitas (and Shibas, since the puppy in the film is actually a 柴犬) are so rare to see in the States that I wonder if it even makes sense to import the Hachiko story with an American context, particularly when there’s already competition with Bolt, Homeward Bound, Milo & Otis, and especially Lassie (though Hachiko’s popularity preceded Lassie’s by at least 5 years). Perhaps pet-movie obsession has fizzled out by now though, maybe even provoked by What I guess I’m trying to say in this last point is that, in Japan, Shiba dogs are EVERYWHERE, so I think Japanese will take to the dog fairly easily, while there might be some hesitance on the part of Americans.

I don’t mean to demean the movie, and I certainly hope that more Americans will take the time to look up the story of Hachiko with the film’s release. However, I don’t want people to regard this film as “the next Airbud.”

Oh, and if you check out the film’s Japanese site (there’s no English one), Richard Gere from the side looks like an authentic おじいさん (old man).

Been pretty busy this week (as evidenced by the lack of updates). Right now, I’m done in New York, prepping for the Open Video Conference, being held at NYU Law.

I’ll be presenting a talk on Saturday at 5:00 pm called “Online Video Culture: The Case of Fansubs, Anime Music Videos, and Copyright.” What I’m “supposed” to talk about:

The first fansubs (episodes of Japanese animation subtitled by fans, for fans) and AMVs (anime music videos, in which Japanese animation is timed to music) were produced in the United States in the 1980s in fans’ homes on VCR players. Twenty years later, these pieces of videography have proliferated across the Internet, creating an online video culture that has clashed with commercial forces as new issues of distribution and copyright have arisen. Alex Leavitt, a researcher of anime & manga studies and an analyst on the YouTomb project, will discuss the involvement of these fan groups with “illegal” production and file sharing; the videos’ ramifications on copyright law and discussions of free use; and the cultural flow of these fan-produced videos in contention with the new commercial and legal models of streaming sites (Crunchyroll, FUNimation, & Hulu) and sharing hubs (YouTube & Nico Nico Douga).

If you’re interested in awesome talks and interesting people, check out the Open Video Conference website starting on Friday at 10:00 am, because all of the talks will be streaming online for your viewing pleasure. Also, if you can’t take the time out this weekend, all of the talks will be recorded and made available to the world. Check out all the details here.

Akiba-kei.

My question this time around might be… Where do we draw the line between the promulgation of more-recent otaku culture and any differences with the older otaku culture? The primary image as evidence is Akihabara, of course, the geographical and cultural landmark of the otaku audience in Japan. Are there more correlations?

My initial thoughts emerged from examining the transformation of anime songs over time and the images associated with the music. There are not many cases where songs are reused throughout a series’ lifecycle (as in when the anime series is reincarnated by different directors after a lengthy withdrawal from television broadcast), but when a production team reapplies a theme to a series, the images tend to reflect the context of the times, different from before.

A second image is that of the Akiba-kei dance, a style that seems to be geared toward otaku. The style brings focus away from the singing to flashy yet simple hand and body movements. Such dancing derives its origins in the idol boom of the 1980s, and I would argue evolved further through the popular influence of Para Para in the late 1990s.

An interesting set of videos to examine are two instances of a song from the many incarnations of Macross, which ghostlightning posted to his blog last week. The song, 私の彼はパイロット (My Boyfriend is a Pilot), retains the original lyrics and melody from its first appearance in the original Macross series, dated 1982. The second video, below, shows the reanimation of the song, set in the Macross Frontier saga, dated 2008.

Sung by Lynn Minmay, 1982.

Sung by Ranka Lee, 2008.

Taking a look at the former video, Minmay doesn’t give us much to work with in terms of dancing, besides subtle swaying and a brief attempt at hand motion. In a way, it resembles the generic Japanese idols of the 1980s. For instance, take a look at Seiko Matsuda, who even today retains her popularity as an idol. In the flashback clips below, Minmay’s and Matsuda’s approach to the audience seems identical.

Seiko Matsuda, looking back on her career.

Examining the later video, though, Ranka Lee’s performance much more resembles the Akiba-kei style of dancing associated with maid-style idols of the otaku brand. Clearly much more hand/body motion, clearly much more skirt flashing. Comparable to Reni, below:

Reni, of New York City karaoke “fame.”

I suppose one of the defining characteristics between the “old” and “new” mindsets of the otaku culture is moé, but how much does that factor into what most fans observe as fan service? Heisei Democracy asserts (scroll down to (Fan)service), “In certain respects moe as a genre could be considered an exercise in fanservice,” but I resist asserting a correlation between the two. Certainly, moé characteristics are in a way a method of targeting a specific audience, but fanservice is distinct in its nature and intentions inside of an animated series, while moé characterizes most of the show (given certain respects).

In relation to the dancing idol, the fan service of the ’80s depends on a flip of the skirt or the wink of an eye. Compared to the moé image, though, such things do not necessarily titillate the (otaku) viewer as much as the essence of the moé show itself. Regarding Ranka Lee’s interpretation of 私の彼は…, it appears as if the image of the female has been caught up in the trend toward moé-ization of everything anime. Contrastingly, Minmay represents a period in subcultural time, encapsulating the feeling toward that which is adored, by the older generation of otaku.

Surprisingly, Anime Boston hosted a trio of panels about Neon Genesis Evangelion — a great opportunity because 1) Evangelion is maybe too influential, and 2) there are too many fans today that haven’t seen it. The three panels were hosted by a guy who goes by the moniker V, and while he was masked and played the character well, I couldn’t find any other info on him, and he was fairly reticent when I gave him my card after the first panel. V spoke at three panels: “The Evangelion Franchise: Past, Present, and Future,” “Explanation of Evangelion,” and “The Psychology and Philosophy of Evangelion.” I recorded the audio from the first two sessions, but V made a smart move: he recorded the video of all three panels and posted them to YouTube. Since the audio definitely isn’t as good as audio including panels (and a little humorous acting), I’m going to link to the videos for your perusal and enjoyment. I only attended the first two panels, but they were well researched and among the best at the con. Please watch, and check out V’s YouTube channel (filled with many more videos) at Revolution of Eva!

Note: Video embeds from YouTube don’t allow syncing multiple related videos, and since the talks are broken up (because of YouTube’s 10-minute limitation on videos), you’ll have to click the next part manually.

The Evangelion Franchise: Past, Present, and Future – 7 parts

Explanation of Evangelion – 8 parts

The Psychology and Philosophy of Evangelion – 8 parts

I reluctantly went to see Wolverine with my girlfriend at the local theater in Fenway Friday night, but I walked out of the theater satisfied, quite contrary to my expectations. The move contained a solid storyline and, though many critics seem to disagree with the plot, I felt that the narrative fit the mood of an X-Men supplement. Many corny lines, lots of action, and a satisfying amount of cool mutant powers later, and I felt like I’d gotten my money’s worth plus an extra bit on the side.

The trailer to X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

However, I have one gripe about the film: its fight choreography.

Not to say that it’s bad, per se. But what got me pondering the action sequences while watching was this music video I had recently seen. Watch it below and pay specific attention to the film’s camera depth: the establishing shot, long shots, and medium shots.

The music video for Daft Punk’s “Around the World.”

Michel Gondry produced the music video for Daft Punk’s “Around the World,” released in 1997. A strange video, indeed, especially once you realize that all the characters represent one part of the music (be it bass line, vocals, etc.). In terms of capturing what’s going on in the video, though, the interesting thing to take away is the camera techniques that I mentioned before (establishing, long, and medium). Gondry expresses the purpose of these shots in an interview with RES magazine, in which he states, “This was my first try to do choreography and I was sick to see choreography being mistreated in videos like filler with fast cutting and fast editing, really shallow. I don’t think choreography should be shot in close-ups.” Let’s take away two things from Gondry’s comment. First, he suggests a certain aesthetic in choreography, which we must view from afar. Second, his statement insinuates that “fast cutting and fast editing” might create a new or different type of choreography.

The problem in Wolverine‘s choreography to which I alluded at the beginning of this article deals with the latter point and speaks to the former. Although most of the fights left a decent impression, most of the fights between Wolverine and his brother/rival Sabretooth felt artificial. I say this because those fight sequences relied heavily on the “fast cutting and fast editing” that Gondry fulminates against. Relying on these fast cuts, the scenes would flip around from many different angles (filmed by multiple cameras), capturing a punch, switching to the block, watching the kick, and then skipping to the reaction. All in all, it’s very childish editing (unless you don’t notice the cuts), because it seems as if no action is happening at all, and the scene was formed essentially by clips of “actions that resemble a fight” stitched together in a style of a student film that couldn’t afford stunt doubles. Unfortunately, because the movie was just recently released in theaters, I have no footage with which to make an example (and none of the other fight scenes from the X-Men movie series do Wolverine‘s fights justice, though I guess they would improve them).

Although we can’t watch these scenes right now (go see them in theaters; it’s worth your time anyway!), knowledge of Wolverine’s edited choreography gives us the opportunity to ruminate on how choreography works. In particular, I wonder if there’s a disparity between Western and Eastern takes on fight scene sequencing, choreography, or general approaches to and methodologies of film. Not that Wolverine in any way represents the full breadth of Western masterpieces to be distributed in global movie theaters. And I understand that I am highly generalizing when I approach my thoughts from this angle. But when we look at the history of fight sequences in Asian-style film, we see that the camera remains at a substantial distance from the action, to capture it all, almost in an amateur way (akin to a home video).

A great example of that withdrawn style occurs in Asian martial arts cinema. One of my favorite movies happens to be Chia-Liang Liu’s Hong Xi Guan (1977, translated as “Executioners From Shaolin”), which stars Chia Hui Liu (Gordon Liu) as Tung Tien Chin, who fights against and ultimately defeats Pai Mei (Gordon Liu would later go on to play his enemy Pai Mai in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill 2).

The final fight scene from Hong Xi Guan.

As you can see in the clip, the camera tends to keep its distance from the fighters, attempting to encompass (and hence respect) the entirety of the choreography in its original form. Instead of the film, here the choreography is the art.

Again, I must repeat that my interpretations rely completely on generalizations. But even if we look at a modern interpretation of martial art cinema, we see similar camera techniques that do not infringe on the choreography as performed.

A fight scene from Wo Hu Cang Long.

In this fight sequence from Ang Lee’s Wo Hu Cang Long (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), we can easily perceive the increased amount of editing at work. However, the close-up camera shots tend to focus on either 1) the characters, specifically their visceral reactions, and 2) particular events in the fight (eg., a chair being hit and breaking apart). Besides these added cuts (which I could argue are made possible due to a larger budget compared to the ’70s production of Hong Xi Guan), the main movements of the camera are from a relative distance, encapsulating all of the action within the camera’s frame.

A fight scene from The Matrix.

Similar camera techniques are used in the fight sequence from the Wachowski brothers’ The Matrix (1999). We clearly see the influence that Asian martial arts cinema played on the film’s choreography, but the distanced camera shots also provide evidence for the same inspiration. Perhaps, though, that film technique developed out of the use of authentic Hong Kong martial arts choreographers during the production of the movie.

All in all, I’m not sure how to approach Wolverine‘s “fast cutting” choreographic techniques. Should we see them as basically bad film etiquette? Or perhaps this is a new style of modern choreography (though in my opinion one of bad taste)? If you’ve seen the movie, what is your take on the issue?

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.