 So Tim Wong, Berkman staff, thanks David for that introduction and thank you Berkman for having me actually. Having gone to a bunch of lunches this is kind of a sort of a terrible sort of longtime listener first-time caller kind of experience and I'm excited and intimidated. I was saying to David before the talk began I've seen sort of a lot of speakers go down in flames on this chair so so I was up until sort of like three or four preparing so you have to forgive me if I'm a little fuzzy today unfortunately. So my talk today is entitled the low-cat-thedral and the bizarre. I was wondering whether not the reference would be too obscure but then I assumed it was Berkman so I just go ahead with it. And what I'm going to talk today a little bit about is sort of the past year in memes and internet culture and from that pull out basically a model that I've been thinking about recently to approach sort of studying web culture and and actually apply that model and also attempt to use it to kind of talk a little bit about the trends that might affect web culture and memes sort of in in the coming year. So first a little bit about me as David mentioned I'm the founder of RaffleCon which is basically an attempt to get everybody who is ever famous together in a room together to talk about sort of web celebrity fame and the spread of ideas. So there's a really diverse group is a bunch of webcomic people people were famous on video and most interestingly kind of people who are unintentionally famous. So this is a picture of a bunch of audience members and Tron guy who some of you may remember from Slash's out a few years ago. He actually well funny thing about the story is he actually recently purchased a plane whose colors match actually his costume. So I'm not sure if he flies the plane in his costume but I thought that was pretty interesting. Also some of you know me because I'm a research assistant at the Berkman Center where I work with this guy, Yochai Bankler, where Yochai is very interested in cooperation online and specifically how design levers like conflict resolution mechanisms and systems of norms and reputation systems can affect kind of aggregate behavior on a website and he's kind of interested in trying to test out and learn more about sort of the relationship between between the two. Extra-curricularly I also do work with students for free culture which is kind of a group of student chapters and colleges around the country kind of devoted for advocating and sort of promoting the idea that we should have the right to share and remix cultural content and code. And I'm also happy to announce that just recently I've started a project this summer to shoot a documentary about Goatsy. Now if you're if you're not familiar with Goatsy you should not look at it right now on your computer. The hope with this sort of project is that we're going to actually find the model that's in that image and interview him and then interview a bunch of web notables about their experience with Goatsy and so it's it's hoped to be something along a little cross between sort of the aristocrats and fog of war if you've ever seen that documentary. And so I'm just starting that and we'll see where it takes us probably not to good places. Now I'll get right into it because there's a lot to talk about and so first what happened in 2008? Well really a lot happened in 2008 and lots and lots of stuff and sort of an explosion of content in ways that we really haven't seen before and some of it was content of the format that was pretty typical in years past on the internet. Pictures of funny cats and videos and sort of music videos and techno remixes and really just a lot of typical stuff. But also you've seen the emergence of a bunch of new trends that we haven't seen before as well right? Sort of the emergence of internet culture into the mainstream, the entanglement of various mainstream celebrities with internet culture and also sort of the the commercial success of internet culture in a lot of ways. Creating businesses around internet culture and and really sort of providing content and so now when you're looking at this there's a kind of intuition and the intuition is that the internet looks a little bit like this. The internet is fundamentally at a core level really random right? You know it's a dinosaur with the birthday cake and then there's rocket ships right? And that there's not a whole lot of relation between all the various parts. The internet's definitely more interesting than anything you happen to be doing at the current moment but really it's all random you know there's no relationship between funny cats and a dinosaur and Rick Astley. But when you start thinking about this this intuition is a little bit wrong right? Certainly our online spaces are constrained in a fundamental way by an ecosystem of hardware and software. And so if we think about it there's a reason why certain memes emerge when they do and how they emerge and how they spread is contingent on that kind of environment. So Yokai's thought a little bit about this and he thinks about the web and these sorts of layers right? So at the base level there's kind of a hardware layer of sort of fiber and boxes and stuff and on top of that there's sort of a code layer right? There's there's software and the things we run on top of it and then on top of that there's a content layer right? The world of media and also the world of sort of online communities. But what's interesting about this relationship is that it implies that if we look close enough there should be a relationship between over time and there should also be a relationship between memes across the internet occurring at the same time. And sort of in my misguided attempt to coin more unnecessary buzzwords this is something I've been starting to call the memescape. Basically idea that the internet and internet culture is not fundamentally random in any important way and that memes are actually tied to some very very sort of material constraints right? Whether or not be in technology or even sort of in sort of the economic constraints of the situation. And so this is kind of very abstract. So it's actually worth drilling down a little bit and talking a little bit about what I mean. And the best way of thinking about this is something that I've started to call the 4chan paradox. And the 4chan paradox goes a little bit like this. So first there's Facebook right? Everybody knows Facebook. It's you know the industry leader in social networks. You know it's it's got a huge number of users. The changes it makes to its interface online have sort of big implications. It's always you know people complain about it you know it's a big thing. And we can start to say okay let's start highlighting the arenas where memes might be able to form right? And where might memes form? Well on a very low bar maybe it's just places where people can communicate and share content. Really really basic right? Because if people can't do it then sort of memes can't form because it's not sort of shared culture. So this is a typical home page on Facebook. In fact it's it's my home page so if there's any private information on there I hope you don't see it. And let's start looking right? Okay so there's there's friending right? Okay so I'm friends with you. I'm friends with Aaron. Aaron friends with me. And we share content. I can see what he's doing and he can see what I'm doing. So maybe that's one place where memes can form. There's also events. Great well that's awesome. You know there's a physical space where we can meet up and maybe share jokes and share culture. And then Facebook provides an interface for me to post pictures and comments and all sorts of other things. And then there's there's chat. You know chat's great right? I can have conversations and memes can kind of form when I talk to people and I'm like oh how isn't that funny or like you iterate on what I do. And really once you start looking at it Facebook is covered with these things right? You know beyond chat there's status updates, there's applications, there's people recommendations, there's highlighted videos, there's various sliders for privacy, there's photos. And it's really in some sense sort of the stealth fighter jet of the social web right? It has every single doohickey you could ever want. Now enter 4chan. So if some of you aren't familiar with 4chan, essentially what 4chan is is it's an image sharing board. So a really simple idea. This is what a typical page on 4chan looks like. And obviously it's clear from the image that you know 4chan is really I mean it looks like a website out of the mid 90s right? And the idea of the image board is very simple. You post an image and you post some text and people can post just text in response to it, or they can post an image and text in response to it. So where are the places where memes can form here? Well basically two right? And what's most notable about 4chan is it doesn't even have profiles right? Like it's missing a lot of the standard infrastructure we associate with you know the social web and web 2.0 and everything. So what's the intuition about this comparison right? And the intuition might be something like this. Well we might expect that as a number of social tools rise there's more arenas for people to communicate in. There's more ways for them to iterate content. So we should see more memes emerge sort of in Facebook than 4chan. Facebook should relatively be able to you know pwn 4chan actually in terms of its content created. But what's interesting is this hasn't been created right? So like 4chan is responsible for the phenomenon of the locat right? Which became so huge in sort of 2008. You know and if you don't know sort of the idea behind the locat was you post a picture of a cat and then there'd be a caption. Very very simple. It's also been tied to the phenomenon of the Rick Astley Rickrolling phenomenon. So the way Rickrolling works if you don't know is you send a link to your friend and you're like hey this is a link to an important policy decision made by the Obama administration. And it's just links to a video of Rick Astley saying you're never going to give you up. It's also been responsible for chocolate reigns. So some of you may remember this video from earlier in 2008. And what I'm not trying to argue is that Facebook doesn't have memes because it certainly does. So some of you may have become the victim of this recently which is the 25 random things about me meme on Facebook where the premise is basically very simple. There's 25 things and you list random things about yourself. Some of you may also become the victim of this particular Facebook meme right? Someone posts ASCII art on your wall being like you've been hit by the beautiful truck. Hit 15 other people with a beautiful truck or it'll stop being beautiful. But what's interesting is that there's a number of distinctions between the memes that emerge in 4chan and the memes that emerge in Facebook. Well for one and I can take lolcats as an example there isn't sustained communities around these memes right? So like Icon has cheeseburger is a site that's been built around people who are really interested in lolcats. Want to talk about lolcats share lolcats and otherwise sort of communicate in that medium. So that's one difference that really hasn't happened in the universe of Facebook. Another one is sort of the the iteriveness of the memes that emerge from Facebook. So taking the lolcat example again you know here's a very classic lolcat really really early one in the genre right? It's a great one I love it. And so this one is created right and then and then someone creates a response to that. So you know suddenly there's a basement cat in contrast to the ceiling cat and he's got you know he's kind of a dark force in the lolcat universe. And then stuff starts to get really really strange when these universes begin to collide and start to interact with one another. And this is really bizarre right? Because suddenly you have a meme that contains memes within it right? And it becomes its own kind of self-referential universe in a certain way. So that's another contrast. Another contrast taking the lolcat thing even further is the extent to which lolcats have kind of spilled beyond their boundaries right? The beautiful truck in Asciiara always stays the beautiful truck and so does 25 things random things about me. You can never do this with the memes that emerge on Facebook. So this is a picture from a project called the lolcat bible project. Effectively a wiki project to translate the entire text of the bible into lolspeak. This kind of like pigeon that's used in the captions. And the project is going along and people create images right? Like first there was ceiling cat and so on and so forth. It's also spilled beyond so that there's a project called lolcode now right? We can do entire software packages in lolspeak. You know every program kind of ends with kthanksby. It's like it's ridiculous. And it's also spilled out to things beyond cats right? So during the 2008 election season some of you may be familiar with the lolbama project where it was very simple. You take a picture of obama and then you caption it with lolcat speak. So one particular favorite of mine was So the question with this is why? And so there's two intuitions about this. The first intuition is the internet looks a little bit like this right? That the memes cluster totally randomly and there's no reason why lolcats emerge in Facebook or in 4chan and why the beautiful truck is really big on Facebook. There's no fundamental relationship and it was just random chance that happened that things emerge this way. That's one approach. The other approach is to start thinking more deeply about memes and to say well there actually is things that kind of constrain a production of memes and how we want to produce communities online. And that there should be relationship if we look close enough between various meme areas across the internet at the same time. And so there's sort of this fundamental relationship that we might be able to see if we look close enough. So I'm going to step back a little bit and talk about why that might be. So some of you might be familiar with this book. John Zetron sort of founder of the Berkman Center. And so he wrote this book recently called The Future of the Internet and How to Stop it. And in it he talks a little bit first about sort of why the PC beat out older systems sort of like the Flex and Frida writer which is sort of a 1960s IBM device that was really constrained in what kind of uses you could do. It was basically a very specialized tool for doing a very particular kind of business application. Jay-Z also talks a little bit about why the open internet beat out walled gardens and how that came to be. And the reason that he presents for it is the concept of generativity. So Jay-Z defines generativity as sort of the systems capacity to produce unanticipated changes through unfilled contributions from broad and varied audiences. In short, the idea that third parties and technology that's open to third parties allows for sort of this explosion of innovation that allows it to maneuver faster and innovate harder than sort of centralized solutions. And so he applies that to something like hardware to say okay so the PC is something that you can you can you know install whatever software you want on it. You can you know with sort of some basic technical knowledge you can edit the hardware itself. And this kind of opened the door for amateur innovators and garage entrepreneurs to get involved in the process and basically beat out these really constrained solutions. He also applies it to networks right so he says that the fact that the internet is a contentless space it's an empty space with no basic infrastructure. Implies that people have are invited to kind of come in and build sort of e-commerce networks and and the rest. And this sort of ended up beating out something like the AOL system where you had a central curator that had to say well yes we're going to have this in our forums we're not going to have this in our forums. And what I want to suggest today is maybe that concept of generativity actually applies for social systems as well and sort of meme machinery. Because memes are in a sense some kind of cultural innovation so why wouldn't the pattern hold. And this is the kind of analysis I would draw right so Facebook is a kind of social flexor sorry freedom flexor writer. You know the uses are defined and not changeable right so this area is for photos this is for status updates you know you put your favorite books here. There's also many many many different mechanisms which makes it difficult to sort of easily master in some sense. And finally the whole information infrastructure of friending means that information is siloed right so if a meme emerges among my friends it doesn't necessarily mean it's going to transfer very easily to someone else. And so these three elements right how adaptable the technology is how easy it is to master and how transferable innovations on the platform are to other users are all kind of elements that Jay-Z points to as things that sort of raise a generativity that aren't present here in some sense. In contrast 4chan is really a flexible system right the uses aren't defined there's nothing to it that implies that you have to put any kind of content there. It's also a simple like a very single simple mechanism so it's easy to master right there's an image and there's text and also information is not siloed right everybody's looking at the same website so information and memes that kind of emerge in one community can basically spread across the entire community of 4chan users at once. And while I'm not saying this is conclusive it certainly is an interesting parallel between the kind of connections that Jay-Z is looking at in sort of the universe of hardware and networks and certainly kind of bears some kind of sort of research that I think might be quite fruitful. So that gives you a basic overview of what I've been thinking about about how to apply this model of the memescape and what's very interesting is when you start saying like okay well so memes are connected by things deeper than just random stuff happening on the internet and so in that case can you use your model to think about what might be happening into the future. And this is something I've been thinking a lot about and I have to say in 2009 and 2010 I'm actually really really excited about the internet I mean I think we're going to see an explosion of content and we're going to see an expansion of internet culture into the mainstream like we haven't seen before and this is really good news and the really good news is buttressed by really bad news this is the reason why I think internet culture is going to do great in the next two years. The stock market has lost a huge amount of its value banks are in trouble people are out of work no one knows where to go right and that's just within the United States the even better news is that the entire world is in recession right so everywhere in red is in trouble right now and if you're listening to me you should probably be stopping me right now because the question is how does an economic recession turn into a boom for internet culture and so let me lay out the argument over the next uh few minutes so internet culture in some senses is built up of two sides right there's a supply side right people have to be out there creating content sharing content and sort of iterating content right like oh ha ha you just rip rolled me oh i'm gonna brock roll you back and kind of back and forth until a meme forms but also has to be uh experience some kind of demand right either people have to be paying those creators um or people have to just be interested they have to pay attention to what's going online and be part of what's going online so i'll tack the supply side because i think it's it's probably the easier place uh to start with and this is just it right lots and lots of people are out of work um and what's that mean when hundreds and thousands of people are out out of work in front of their computers with nothing to do all day right that's a fertile ground for memes to form it um and and some evidence from this is suggested in this really interesting uh sort of 2007 university Calgary study that came out about what times people what time's during the day people use youtube and what's very interesting is you look at the chart and youtube used kind of peaks right after lunch before getting back to work and it's almost as if those empty cycles are being used for people participating and and generating being part of internet culture um and you know clay shirky calls his cognitive surplus but we know what he really means he means a lot of people with a lot of time on their hands um and even if you don't buy this logic right you say okay now tim you're wrong um people are out of work what they need to be doing is looking for jobs they're not going to be just fooling around online um i can agree with you but i think the analysis holds over still because um people are increasingly starting to use blogs and content to kind of signal that they're reliable people they produce good content and kind of using it as a showcase for their content so there's a very interesting connection between a lot of people being out out of work and a lot of content being uploaded online and sort of like non-commercial i have a lot of free time kind of way um but supply isn't the only part of the picture right so there's demand and here's an interesting question right so if you're a big media company and you're like our advertisers in trouble um and i need to still produce content so what do i do i could continue to license with very very expensive celebrities go through that entire bureaucratic bureaucratic process and support a really really heavy weight system of content production or i could hire really beautiful people from the internet um and so this is the cast of the college humor show that was recently picked up by mtv um and and it's a pattern that you've seen more and more right so um do i do i contract with a huge celebrity or a internet celebrity so some of you might have seen this on on on prime time television a few months ago this is the macy's day parade um and uh what happened was uh there's a cartoon network show called fastest home for imaginary friends which is an awesome awesome show on many counts um but but what happened was that the characters were on the floor singing a song and suddenly uh there's a dead stop and rick astley comes out and sings never gonna give you up and for a moment there it was really bizarre because it was kind of like internet culture just barfed out into the mainstream world and and there's a moment where everybody on the internet was like holy crap that just happened like what's going on but it's a mainstream media company right they make decisions they do their market research they know that you know is it more profitable for you to contract with a real superstar or superstar that has a lot of weight that came up on the internet and it doesn't have a whole lot of jobs right now um and and and honestly i think there's there's a real economic reason behind why the businesses chose to do this year do this this year that no no it's do we have a figure on it no i i just it seems like you know that this is the sort of fact that you may need and inputting this forward i agree yeah and it's something that i've been trying to find out we actually have a couple people try to call and try to figure out because we're trying to get rick astley for the next raffle con thing a little while back but uh but he actually i hear he went back on tour which is quite interesting as well uh from this kind of economic point of view um this is a pattern that you've seen extensively in 2008 also in the world of publishing right so the chuck norris fax meme now has a book um and publishers have been increasingly been like do i want to contract with someone and pay a huge advance or do i want to contract with someone who has a really popular blog or a really popular community online bank off of the community they have and pay relatively less so that can has cheeseburger book also came out recently and was also quite popular um zack parson's who's a really really big player on a message board called something awful that some of you might be familiar has a book coming out and in one extremely extremely standout example a christian lander from stuff white people like published a book so stuff white people like um is effectively a blog that's exactly it's exactly like it sounds um and and christian lander mostly just kind of post about stuff he likes and and he recently like i was talking to him during raffle con and i was like oh you must be having a really exciting year and he was like no i've been really having an exciting six months because the website really blew up in a lot of ways and there's a huge number of users very quickly and he signed a very a book contract in sort of a record amount of time um and this book is amazing right so this book has spent several weeks in the new york times bestseller list it's in its 15th printing and christian lander is on his third book tour um and and that's kind of another sort of amazing emergence of sort of internet culture into the mainstream but businesses are just one part of the demand picture right so people are another picture um when you're out of work and you're looking for entertainment what do you do well certainly piracy is one option um and certainly something i'd love to research to see whether or not piracy has gotten up now that people are out of work but more interestingly i mean there's a whole universe of free content online right there's web comics and podcasts and written content that you control through and probably have endless entertainment um if you're looking for entertainment online and don't have a whole lot of money to spend on going to a concert or going out for a fancy dinner or the like and even if you're interested in buying something right the internet is relatively cheaper um so uh so that you know buying someone a gift from etsy is is relatively cheaper than buying something for your significant other over sort of tiffanie and co or something like that um and you might say okay this is all well and good right you've laid out an argument this seems pretty reasonable but do you have any evidence um and what i'm about to show you is is some preliminary stuff i've been doing and i i don't by any means think it's definitive research but it's certainly very suggestive in an interesting way so let's go back to the the marketplace so this is a map of the dow Jones industrial average and the red line is in october when stuff got really really really bad and so what i'm about to show you is a bunch of charts of a bunch of websites online um of their daily page views um and that red line will stay there always showing october 2008 when stuff got really bad so what exactly happened to twitter at that time that made it make this kind of remarkable jump or consequently what happened to etsy at that time that made kind of a sort of disorderly disproportionate jump or interesting as well sort of uh what happened to vimeo at that time that created some kind of an interesting jump as well um it's sort of a you know a personal blogging site and and and so i don't know there's sort of an interesting pattern emerging here but obviously there's some caveats right yeah yeah right i'm gonna go into that right it's like by by all means right this is this is a huge case of correlation not causation um and and by all means you know i'm not to suggest that this holds in all cases or even most cases right it only happens in these few cases and i'm actually kind of interested in that it's suggested that it happens at that time and that it probably bears more research to see if there's some way you could actually get at this question of whether or not there's a relationship between people being out of work the economy being troubled and actually being quite productive for internet culture and that's something i would love to get any comments on and that sort of stuff and and those charts i don't think are by any means are like evidence but but certainly i mean are interesting because there's a number of problems right so even even stuff like alexa right has all sorts of debates over how exactly they measure things so that's a caveat um so i hear from armor that i only have half an hour so i'm gonna quickly tie everything up and i guess we can just get into the discussion side of things i'd love to hear kind of your input and what you think about it all um so we've talked a little bit about how the idea of the means meanscape might link sort of meme production and change over time and also between the meme on the internet at sort of at the same time um and that it could be constrained by certain elements outside of that certain material constraints whether it's money or hardware or software um but this also means that there's some degree of control over the culture and the communities we create online and the decisions that are made in code and hardware sort of critically influence that social space and so there's a couple projects that come to mind once you start thinking about the internet in this way and a couple projects that i'd love to propose and that that only started to try to get people together to maybe consider working on um so one of them is environmental advisories and this is sort of what you do is you say okay let's take a look at the structure of a system and look at what kind of broadly shared behaviors it generates on a website and then let's assess those consequences if a lot of people do it um so so the the parallel in the analogy here of course is littering right like let's take a behavior of people litter and what happens when people will litter a lot and we know that sort of for example littering might be really negative to the the the state of the environment um so one element that we could really kick on here is kind of symmetrical information streams so i see you you see me on on sort of a friending basis so this is obligatory in kind of the facebook case right the infrastructure friending makes it that when you see my data stream i see your data stream but it's also socially incentivized in things like twitter right so it's an expected way and it's a it's a process by which people can get more followers um so we might say okay so if people are doing this indiscriminately like they're friending back indiscriminately or they're following back indiscriminately what happens when this expands and scales up on a great degree and what's funny is that that the the information garnered by those information streams becomes diluted in a certain sense so i heard a really interesting story this summer i was talking to a guy who actually got sued by someone and then about a week later he actually got friended by the same guy on facebook um and and the guy was like and i was like did you friend him and he's like oh yeah sure i just click confirm you know whatever you know that this is the thing you do on facebook um and the interesting thing is could you say that perhaps could you issue environmental warnings at some point saying that arbitrary followbacks or or indiscriminate followbacks on twitter like on net on aggregate uh might dilute information streams with kind of uninteresting and irrelevant information right so i know when i log into facebook now there's a period in which i sort of indiscriminately followed people back and so you know the mini feed now for me it reflects the information of bunch of people i actually don't care a lot about or are very interested in at all so that's one project that might be kind of interesting um another one uh is bug tracking so let's go back to this chart right the fact that the internet is structured in this way and the internet culture is situated on top of an ecosystem of code and sort of a physical layer uh means in some sense the internet culture is hackable and that weaknesses in code and hardware can be sort of exploited to gain sort of special or unintended control over a particular system so a great example of this is dig so what's the original idea behind dig right it's user generated uh distributed news filtering right everybody gets together and we all dig up and some people dig down and together on net we find what's most interesting for a community and you can get the best stories or the stories that everybody finds the most interesting the interesting thing is once you start looking at the use pattern of dig none of this actually holds as a vision right so that the top 100 dig users have contributed basically about six 50 to 60 percent of the number of stories on the front page of dig and that's extensive power in a way that you wouldn't expect from a system that's set up like this um and what i would eventually love to do is is kind of set up a system where you do bug tracking for social systems online to say look you know dig is exploitable in this way maybe they should consider patching it um and and keeping track of this in some sense and together these two projects kind of form a more general idea i've been thinking a lot about is whether or not you could create kind of an epa for the social web you know an organization that sort of researchers and distributes information about sort of the health of the social environment on the web and sort of suggests ways of preserving vibrant internet culture um and and taking this kind of sort of material approach to understanding the way memes form and and the way kind of like communities form online um this is just a project that i just recently started trying to get people together uh to to start talking about it maybe and uh and it's something that i'd love to move forward and take any comments on criticisms on because i'm actually not sure that the environmental metaphor for internet culture is actually the best one um another you know some of the people have suggested me that you know maybe maybe the sec is another one right like protecting the market in some sense um and uh and so that's really all i've got i'm happy to take any questions or otherwise uh and uh and so thanks yep chris um and and these are memes that you described came out of a specific subsection of fortune which is the random board right which is truly filled with homophobia and misogyny and just absolute hard to build sure um the the the root of 4chan and i think that the the reason that it fits most of this growth is one they have a policy of not logging any information about any of their users they keep no logs no IP addresses nothing like that there's no user accounts um and there's no censorship they don't remove any content unless it contains software that's it um and so the the vast majority of the information it's posted to 4chan if it were posted to facebook would immediately result in site banks right everyone would be kicked off that that that place and so you know in many ways 4chan is like the primordial soup of the internet right like all these things sort of mingle around and many of them are really horrible but eventually really cool things are out of there and and i would argue that it's actually the freedom of 4chan and the freedom to be horrible and filthy and and a scene that that provides everything else yeah and i think that's why facebook doesn't have that right it's it's like the McDonald's and the internet right and i absolutely agree i mean one thing that i think is very interesting about 4chan is that it is self selecting that very particular way like i'm not saying that facebook is in the business of generating memes because they're not they're they're totally aiming for something else uh and i yeah i agree actually i think that and i think that freedom that you see on 4chan actually has a lot of interesting parallels to sort of the history of the web history of like you know hardware in general um so yeah i definitely agree any other sir i was under the impression that one of the reasons why dig started to to be less good was because a lot of companies said well hey this is great let's get our articles up or let's get articles that talk about us on the front page of dig so did whatever they could to get digs right um and that sort of and that that meant that the really cool little gems throughout the internet did not end up on the front page of dig whereas the larger supported stories did right and and yeah and i think that's i mean that's a very great argument for this kind of sort of epa action because what's very interesting is i mean a lot of no a lot of people know that a digerati exists for example and for example a lot of people know that something like seo exists um but the thing is that that information is not very public like i would love to make those bugs extremely extremely transparent to people and like by distributing those tools i think creates certain forces that i think might be really productive to kind of people protecting sort of the value of certain the best stuff getting to the top so yeah i agree yeah that's you issues today so i i really like the environment metaphor i i think it's very much worth pursuing one of the things that i think you have to sort of put forward very quickly is this question of what's optimal right so you know the epa has certain rules out there that essentially say you know lead in drinking water generally speaking a pretty bad thing um larger ones that may actually be sort of complicated you know species diversity is a desirable goal we'd like to see things um not stamped out i i think you have a couple of problems there i think the first problem you have is to figure out what's a desirable creative internet building on chris's point i mean if you actually look at the creation of new memes and 99.7 percent of those memes are not something you'd want to show on on the screen at berkman you know is that actually something that you need to preserve right if you're trying to preserve a healthy internet environment you know do we know that 97 9.7 percent um totally grossly offensive turns out to be the right level would we be better at 99.97 percent totally grossly offensive so so i think that's that's the first thing to think about is where those standards are i think the second is that um you're trying to model something that's changing so very rapidly so um i i think for me the most problematic part of your talk which i i like a great deal is your attempt to correlate stock market fall on a creativity rise and my immediate response to that would be first to say bullshit and then to sort of pull apart the different ways in which i think it's bullshit there's a traffic rise on etsy due to christmas there's a traffic rise due to a northern hemisphere winter and people coming in people going back to universities there's all sorts of correlative factors there your core intuition though i think is right which is to say that not only are we seeing a growth in maker culture in general that that growth may actually have something to do with economics and i think you might do better there with case studies but i think you're going to have a really hard time with an environmental paradigm because in many cases that's a paradigm about homeostasis right that's a system that you don't want to change very much and when it changes too radically and suddenly you see lots of lead in the drinking water then you go after it it's a tough paradigm to work on for the internet because you have a system that has no homeostasis where in fact we don't want i suspect homeostasis so i think that may be your your challenge yeah i think i actually agree that's a huge burden so the first thing people brought up with me right is that again the ep has a very clear picture of what they consider a healthy environment right and even like the whole there's a whole all this whole literature about what do we conserve in the environment which i think is really quite interesting in this respect um and i think part of it is actually i mean the burden may just be we have to uh there has to be some kind of positive description of memes first before we're going to even start talking about that um and and you know i would love to map that out first and then and then start talking a little bit because then we can say in some sense like oh this will raise or lower this um and uh and yeah i agree with you i think that's that's a huge uh a huge hole right at this point um but i think generally i think thinking about the meme meme sort of in terms of like a system as opposed to sort of these random jolts that happen on mine i think might be might be sort of valuable in a way of thinking about it um and i actually i didn't didn't think about doing the case study uh approach to kind of understanding that kind of like macro culture thing which i think yeah yeah okay cool thanks appreciate it awesome uh cool any other comments questions thoughts criticisms here a nice question i i think um that chris is exactly right about the four champions but these are very different populations of people sure and i'm wondering um if you think that the population of people active in the meanscape uh is increasing will continue to increase beyond um short term factors like people being unemployed is is the audience for this expanding or are people who involve simply getting more and more active and immersed in this yeah well i mean so there's there's two elements of that right like so one of them is um how broad does internet culture reach like does a reach a large enough audience and the other one is do people within that audience say like yeah i'm going to go out and make this image macro or something and i can see like contribute to it um and on the first one i think yes i think that population is expanding right the fact that my my you know my my mother is on facebook um facebook is sure vanilla internet users right with people who are more involved in this i would say its origins are in people who are techies right right so the geek culture sure and and so is geek culture permeating into mainstream or is this really just about he's getting happier and happier with their jokes it's tough to say yeah i mean i guess it ends up being an empirical question really with a really really difficult uh difficult time of trying to get a good fix on the problem um i mean i think my best bet is probably exactly something along the lines of that market metric right you know that that when a mainstream media company goes in and makes a choice about what kinds of cultural elements they want to use um i i mean i'm intuiting that they have some kind of data on their side that says look rick assley was big with the kids these days like the kids love that stuff like get more of that on tv or that a publisher says this is in our best interest to sink the money into print these books um and that that we have a good feeling that it'll be profitable um seems to suggest to me that at least the audience is is big if not growing though the popularity of the books may not be yeah right anything to do with the website yeah it's a very imperfect signal in a lot of ways um so yeah i agree so many of the examples of the memes are reflections of distortions of mass culture even the wall catch and started out as the hang in there baby you know it's sort of moved away from that roots pretty amazingly but um you know the uh chuck norris and the uh the marmaduke plain and the the dinosaur strip which is clip art and um so many of them are sort of perversions of mass culture what does that say about the relation of the two cultures is this a sign of the immaturity of the internet memes that it depends upon is it i don't know right well and this i think is an increasingly interesting question as uh memes get into the mainstream right so one interesting question is does it does it displace culture or does it continue to kind of continue its sort of general pattern of saying like let's take mainstream culture and let's do something to it and make it funny in some sense um and i mean i think i think it's an open question i mean i think certainly what you're starting to see more of is it kind of becomes so perverse that it's actually a difference in kind rather than just degree right so that the fact that you know the low cap bible was something that was never never conceived of by kind of the the inventors of the hang in their kitty picture no but it's still a reflection on mass culture because it's the bible that's one of the things that makes it so hilarious that's interesting right right you know i don't know i guess i mean if there is any big hope for internet culture eventually creating its own like silos like its own sort of symbols and stuff i mean i assume it probably emerges out of sort of the i mean and this may be a good a good place for it right which is like um to say that that it kind of emerges from the universe of web comics and people creating their own content online right so like you know xkcd certainly references popular culture in other ways but it's sort of distinctly its own sort of like i'm a you know this is sort of a geek thing online in a way that that references are sort of is consciously like not referencing that mainstream culture um and uh so yeah that's that's why i think it would say we're you know it's it's still a game that has yet to be resolved but that there's there's certainly spaces where i think you're seeing that kind of independent culture emerge maybe building directly on that um if you want to piss off hengry drankins and yo hi bankler which who the hell doesn't a lot of fun talking about fan culture essentially as derivative culture wholly dependent on professional creation and if this were true creativity why wouldn't you have people creating their own characters and worlds and plots and so on and so forth and you can you can prompt them with this there's a fun response to this nowadays which is to say that coming out of that fan culture you have a great deal of sort of original creativity from people who sort of you know sharpen their chops within that world so you see someone like neomy novik who's now one of the hot up-and-coming sci-fi novelists who is also the head of the organization for transformative works which is sort of the leading fan culture group out there so this is someone who basically wrote fanfic for years and years and years, polish your skills and it's now out there writing kick-ass sci-fi so i mean there's a way in which you might sort of look at this and say this is the nascent new crop of cultural creatives this is the nascent new crop of marketers you know who knows whether they're going to go towards the good side or the dark side but these are people essentially mastering the techniques of propagating ideas within this space and then we're likely to see them use those talents in one fashion or another a couple years further down the line. I just wanted to point out I think one of the pieces that it's good not to lose vital that was so interesting about the law cats is that is that they were things that if you didn't know the previous ones would be very quickly inaccessible and it was this very very interesting case of this mass adoption of something that if you didn't keep following it it would be very very hard to keep track of because if you didn't know about ceiling cat basement cat the second slide that you showed made no sense and i think that's where the fact that it's on the net is particularly interesting because um you were having lots and lots of people pick up very very quickly on something that many people were changing you know if you didn't understand that there was something about cheeseburgers and cats that was funny you know the picture of a cat in a cage it says i is cheese burglar it just doesn't make any sense and so I think that's where it differs from some other popular culture memes that move much more slowly because part of the problem with these is there's always this tension between wanting to be non-obvious so that they function as a kind of boundary of who's in and who's out and but if they're too obscure everybody's out and if they're too familiar everyone is in and the law cats were very interesting in how they changed very rapidly to keep that boundary just at the right place I wanted to ask you probably you didn't touch on I mean all the memes that you mentioned are i guess we're looking for good memes right they're positive they're funny they're they make a stop but fortune has also been the source of many bad memes so the anti-scientology anonymous crowd the creepers who go to epilepsy forums and postflushing jpegs the sarah palan hacker and people trying to get that stuff can you speak at all to like the rise of evil memes and and maybe whether this is a good or bad thing in itself well I mean yeah there's actually a whole universe of I mean I guess evil memes that have always paralleled like the good memes I mean I don't want to like draw some kind of twisted you know star wars type metaphor but like you know I even sort of in even in the days of bbs right like there was there were there communities online that did bad stuff um but I you know one thing I think is actually really interesting is is actually going back to yokai which is like so he has this idea about the internet as aggregating a lot of things that used to be at the edges of society and turning it into really huge things at the center and in some sense I think the whole like for example the anonymous thing against Scientology was something that kids have always done right they've always kind of like you know oh they might have just gone and pulled a prank on the local church or whatever and that sort of thing but just anonymous allows them to to coordinate on such a larger scale that it seems that much more frightening and big nowadays just because I think the the network is a lot bigger and captures a lot larger group of people and I think that's one of the reasons you've seen these kind of bigger sort of evil memes I guess in some sense particularly in the last few years and I guess that that would probably be my my take on it yeah okay I like to talk a lot great talk I I thought it was really provocative that you tried to identify that this was sort of like a critical moment in time due to the economic crisis where in the next few years we might see an acceleration of meme culture with that the the sort of tip over to mainstream and by that also the tip over to being commercialized and I was wondering if you could say a little bit about what you think economic appropriation of internet culture will have an effect on the nature of internet culture if that scales up like crazy yeah eventually and how does a tron guy afford a plane he's apparently a sys admin who's really into anamaniacs memorabilia and like other than that I don't think he has much hobbies outside of like flying small prop planes and stuff so I think he just saves up I guess there's a very important lesson in saving there I think yeah I think I think that's a that's just admitting needs compound interest lessons from the YouTube stars I actually I think that's a that's actually a really big open question so I was really struck recently I finished reading here comes everybody and so Clay Shurkey has this really interesting discussion where he's like okay in the early days of blogs everybody's like there's going to be too many voices it's going to be terrible here and he says well okay but it's very interesting when you actually look at the distribution of blogs the way the top blogs behave is almost as a broadcast medium right so you're boing boings of the world and everything are very one directional right like Cory doctor doesn't have the time to email everybody back essentially and it's a function of stuff growing at that rate and that that's actually kind of interesting with regards to internet culture because one of the joys I think and particularly one of the joys at raffle con was that a lot of the internet culture people were exactly so reasonable about their internet fame right because once they stepped back on the street they were just normal people again and a lot of people were just surprised that so many people would actually fly out and see them and it was precisely this internet celebrities who thought of themselves as big celebrities that got the most like trouble at raffle con right so a great example was um during the planning of raffle con we tried to get new manuma kid right so new manuma kid's a great kind of original internet meme and he uh and we I've actually never talked to new manuma guy I've only talked to his publicist because new manuma guy now has a huge PR infrastructure around him and he has a site at new new man dot com and it's just kind of like user generated thing and his publicist was like we don't even talk until there's a few grand on the table um and as a result we didn't bring new manuma guy um and and I think it's very interesting and the question is whether or not internet culture actually keeps its character as it scales up like that because there's a lot of things to indicate that as things grow to that scale there's difficulty in maintaining that dynamic that made internet culture so interesting in the first place um but you know I you know I I think it's still I think it's still an open question really because you know this is sort of I don't have any case studies to draw it to in some sense right outside of maybe like punk music right like people came up with punk then it got really big and everyone's like ah punk died um and and whether or not the same happens with internet culture or whether or not internet culture ends up being sort of a feed mechanism right so people people say oh this got too big and they basically just leave it to join something else and if they kind of constantly ride this chain um is also I think another possibility as well so so yeah and I think it's very big particularly now that you see a bunch of bloggers and the rest of that sorry to get that much attention and that much money um and and with it has also become come a lot of imposters too right people trying to be like I'm I'm intentionally famous online um we're sort of varying rates of success right and this is the thing that we battle with and it's actually uh one of raffle con's biggest strengths because when she's talking about internet culture anything that's on the internet becomes internet culture so you can basically end up bringing almost anyone um and and the more and more I've thought about the more I think it's actually okay to think about memes as as a kind of very broad category right to think about like sort of memes that were really big on sort of 4chan and then got you know turned into something else um because because you know for every meme there's also you know a micro meme right like the joke that you share with your friends or you're like remember that time that so and so totally did that and that um and and I think that that's an interesting universe as well and it kind of goes again back to that sort of yokai's metaphor right so like memes have always kind of occurred but the fact that that there's infrastructure to connect them all now means that memes can get a lot bigger as sort of cultural elements so so I that's at least the way I understand but I was wondering without dismissing the value of such entertainment um no seriously uh but I'm just wondering if you've thought about how this kind of energy and time on behalf of users could be turned towards certain other types of activities that might benefit from something similar I'm for example thinking of you know Ethan's issue of let's have people learn more about African nations and what's going on on the continent of Africa like is there a way to get some of those topics to or why is that not happening and is I mean I understand that a lot of this very we put up lots of interest in cute little nations and I'm using comments and it just wouldn't know where unfortunately right so um that didn't work but seriously right like I mean yeah and you know it's always really struck me so there there's kind of a a code of honor on 4chan right you're supposed to do stuff for the lol's um which which basically translates to like oh you should do things just for the fun of it um and like people who are actually too serious about it get like sort of widely slandered on 4chan and you know I today I actually haven't seen any good models for for trying to translate sort of the energy behind internet culture um into something productive which is really an interesting question right like is it just good for funny cats which is which is sort of interesting um but I think what's interesting about looking at it in this kind of view is that you might not be able to turn the people who produce internet culture into people who do something sort of socially productive but what's interesting is you might be able to use the the dynamic or like sort of the mechanism and the lessons that you learn to kind of promote something else um and and and I think that's probably more likely in the future right like as you get a better understanding of sort of the way these ideas form you might be able to say all right let's map those lessons on to sort of a new universe of like oh let's try and you know um help out developing nations or you know pharmaceuticals or that sort of stuff so yeah also just a thought on that I also think that internet culture in general lends itself to sort of intuitive um link clicking and fact checking and it is true that some of the top posting sites on internet are political blogs and in terms of what we talk about the blogosphere political blogs have the most attention so you know it's still a big question whether those are real objective and good sources of news or not but I would say that internet culture itself lends itself not only to this sort of insular lol cats type information but also more political and global news um but I wanted to ask you if you have any thoughts on the sort of generational issue because I know that we talked about this a little before but um our generation was sort of the first to really grow up on the internet in terms of like having AOL as a chat client so we can easily send things and forward things along to our friends and so what kind of um connections that fosters and the way we think about interacting with people who are maybe not like next door but in our suburb that sort of thing so whether or not there'll be a generation gap in internet culture I mean well whether there's an actual shift from the culture that happened before to this culture now the sort of web 2.0 culture that happens with our generation that has now graduated and now facing this economic climb oh like paired with this ideology that startups are an okayed way to spend your life right I mean it's it's tough to say and and a debate that I have a lot with this is um how much are we talking about the 50th percentile for technology when we're talking about internet culture right like people who really geek out about lol cats and and that entire universe I have I have a hard time actually saying how small of a universe it might actually be in in the long stretch of things and I think there's there's a whole universe of internet culture that's not really captured by what we normally think of internet culture here when we say internet culture and so you know there's a lot of other small pockets and other things and and so you know I'm hard pressed to say whether or not it is really different in some sense on on when you when you zoom out to the 30,000 sort of foot level um you know whether or not internet culture only applies to the small pocket of people and then there's there's internet cultures that of elsewhere that more or less reflect what happened before and more or less are doing something new um and uh and again it's again it's one of those empirical questions that there's really it's tough to get a good fix on um so that's that's probably what I'd say and you looked at various means did you find any like sort of a reason that would cause some sort of some micro memes to become big and some not other than the obvious like 4chan memes that wouldn't be appropriate for other places or well this is sort of the interesting thing and and something that actually bears more research right so you've had a whole generation of people who are social media experts um but the thing is you find with most social media experts that they're they're either operating off of an n of one right they're talking about one case they know very a lot about or worse it's just completely anecdotal and there's not there's not enough quant work being done in the space and and I think that's something that would I would love to do more work on and at least not that I know of um I mean I believe that it might exist out there already but so I mean building on sort of David's question right one of the things we're hoping to do with media cloud is to try to figure out what new political memes for instance come out of the blogosphere and whether they'll ever die right and uh one of the arguments is that we think that most of them die right you know I mean I uh I start a new meme today uh saying you know um I don't know I can't even come up with a funny example but it's probably not going to get traction you could probably do a similar study essentially looking at new threads formed in 4chan right and something like 99.9997 of these threads never gain any traction one of the interesting questions might be can you figure out which ones gain traction on 4chan is that consistent with gaining traction outside of 4chan uh are there evolutionary forces at work that essentially in some ways you'd have a much better constrained model than we would we're trying to look at thousands of political blogs right you can look at a fairly simple system that turns out to be one of the more creative cesspools on the internet that has already spawned some of these things could you get to the point where you pretty consistently could call a 4chan meme that was going to cross over in some ways into that culture that would be a fun long-term quant study yeah I think that'd be awesome and and actually there's a paper that I've actually really been meaning to wanting to follow up on um I heard this presentation this weekend that was actually quite interesting of a paper that was done a number of years ago in the journal memetics um and basically what he did is he went on sort of use net forums and did term associations and he found that um certain memes actually certain pairs of memes actually compete with predator-prey relationships so that one would get really big um and and they would basically follow each other in a pattern that's very typical to the way sort of animals behave um and and that was kind of like a sort of an early example and there's some methodological questions about that but his approach I think would be totally interesting for something like uh 4chan so yeah absolutely um Joel a lot of this is sort of humor content amplifiers been in business for about eight years trying to figure this out for commercial reasons because we're seeking folks who can sell merchandise from these from these engines so Penny Arcade you showed Aikwood he's recently become a client so we've tracked this and what's one thing that's interesting is we've seen in general the space sort of professionalized over the last eight years because right lawcat starts as on 4chan organically and now there's a company that's has this mission Penny Arcade was two guys in Seattle doing a webcomic and and wonderfully they they paired with a business manager who now has really helped propel them forward they now have a huge gaming convention a huge charity in terms of people taking social action they raise a tremendous amount of money every year now so the professionalization that's occurring is somewhat interesting because a lot of this is just sort of amateur fringe stuff but it becomes a commercial enterprise at some point and the notion of can you then can any of these professional organizations reverse engineer what might become a hit it reminds me I've been trying to find this there was a a documentary I saw on pbs there was like a maybe a six hour thing about songs and they had a number of technicians who were just looking at sort of the the waves of song and trying to determine could they reverse engineer right now what what's necessary to make this song propelled forward and I just stood out for me was a quote by Paul McCartney who he was saying look I hope you they were asking him just grilling him what makes something a hit and in the end he's just kind of surrendered to you know I don't know and frankly I hope you never figure it out and and so there's kind of that element to this as well what's really emergent and what's what's manufactured what's reverse engineered that's interesting I think cool so we're tying up around 130 right now but if anyone has any other comments cool well thank you