Results tagged “memes”

Starting last week, New York Magazine asked me to participate in a roundtable conversation with NYMag's book critic Sam Anderson, Improv Everywhere's Charlie Todd, the New York Times' Virginia Heffernan and David Rees, creator of Get Your War On. In the august company of these Actual Experts, we kicked around a conversation about memes and viral culture, inspired by Bill Wasik's And Then There's This, his newly-released book whose requisite explanatory subtitle is "How Stories Live and Die in a Viral Culture". We didn't talk too much about the "death" part, but the rest of it we got into in depth and it ended up being a blast to participate in the conversation.

Sam started us off with a strong intro, but I really lit up when Virginia cut to the heart of one of my biggest linguistic peeves with this entire topic of conversation: the word "viral". In her own words:

I see why virology is metaphorically convenient, but as a YouTube obsessive I’ve also been curious about a particular inadequacy in the analogical system. My problem with the analogy might seem trivial, but I think it bears on our understanding of Wasik’s justly celebrated Flash Mobs. ...

I understand how the chain-letter thing is vaguely viral: One person who is “infected” with certain information touches you, via e-mail, with that information and then you’re infected. But I don’t get how accepting a widely disseminated invitation to go somewhere—to a website, to YouTube, to Toys “R” Us—is like getting a virus. Viruses seem so yours, don’t they, when you have them, and you’re very much the host, even if your physiological party’s been crashed. By contrast, getting invited somewhere, willingly accepting the invitation, and joining a gathering makes you a guest and makes the whole experience, to my mind, not very viruslike.

From there, the conversation took off (perhaps thanks to the promotional graphic on the NYMag.com homepage, which I've reproduced here). There was some smart analysis of Wasik's book, but the standalone conversation was perhaps most interesting to me, and that's what I focus on summarizing here. Charlie followed up on Virginia's opener with a really insightful look into his experience with Improv Everywhere, including an important idea that I would key off of later: "It's fun to get together with a large group of people and try something you've never done before." Accordingly, my followup began, "Hey, wait: Isn't this shit supposed to be fun?" and from there I went into a little riff about how I like popular music and that people who make popular memes should think of themselves more like those who make pop music.

And then David took it to the next level. I'm pretty damn fussy about what kinds of PowerPoint presentations I'll praise, but the PDF of David's presentation is well worth the download — it's both funny and insightful. Charlie followed with a really thoughtful writeup from the standpoint of someone who can make videos that are both viral and fodder for memes, seemingly at will. His most resonant statement, for me:

The instant feedback through views, ratings, and comments is completely addictive. I think it's possible to learn from the data, but ultimately you just have to do what you find interesting and not worry about whether it's going to be an epic win or an epic fail (sadly, those are the only two possible outcomes in the eyes of YouTube commenters).

Obviously, fail has been on my mind of late, so Charlie's observations were especially resonant for me. Then Sam took us back to David's presentation with a follow-up that presented a series of visual explanations of a sort of grand theory of meme-making. While I must confess I wasn't persuaded by the argument that the infographics advanced, I was certainly entertained by the endeavor. From the smart-yet-accessible land of the charticle, we went to the other extreme as Virginia got to the heart of the "keeping it real" question, declaring "I don’t understand why male writers think so passionately and complexly about whether something like a band or song is ironic or authentic or produced by the right or wrong people."

That's an annoyance of mine, as well, and I tried to answer it in passing in my next update. But maybe the most useful part of that little essay was the part quoted by The Awl, where I said, "I like music that makes me shake my ass. I like my memes to be fun, created by people who are enjoying what they do."

David brought us back with a sharp but still entertaining riff on Twitter and Iran. He put a Blingee at the top of his post (dammit, I was gonna do that!) and then bookended it by closing with a question that counterbalanced my point perfectly: "Does anyone know of a viral smash that worked because it made people SAD or MELANCHOLY rather than HAPPY?"

The answer, of course, is yes. There are countless treacly and maudlin web memes out there, especially viral videos. Any given "Sad 9/11 Montage" video fits these criteria perfectly, and countless nominally-inspiring-but-actually-depressing stories of people triumphing over adversity fit the bill as well. But I submit that even those videos are meeting a positive emotional need for their audience, those people who really just want to have A Good Cry.

This conversation might never end, of course, but that's as far as we've gotten to date. Best of all, the rambling discourse has inspired some terrific responses. My friend and meme-making kingpin Jonah Peretti, who is featured at length in Wasik's book, responded with some cogent points on Facebook. (You might have to be my friend or something to read that. I dunno.) The Assimilated Negro offered up a characteristically thoughtful take, from someone who knows the meme-making world intimately as well. And it seems appropriate to give the last word to Wasik himself, who was featured on NPR with a lengthy excerpt of the book itself, accompanied by an audio interview.

My friend Mat Honan amused and beguiled you a few months ago with Barack Obama is Your New Bicycle. As is the course of such things, he got a book deal for his efforts, despite having been responsible for the onslaught of unfunny ripoffs of the site which followed his success.

But, I take some very small satisfaction in this whole thing because Mat very graciously credits me (both in the book and in conversation) with having helped spread the word about his site. It's just another in the long string of goofy web memes for which I have become an unofficial ambassador. It's a good thing there's no Hell, or surely I'd rot in it for all that I've done.

At any rate, Mat's quite an entertaining and engaging interviewee, as evidenced by his recent stint on Internet Superstar, and as there's a totally gratuitous and flattering mention of me at about the four-minute mark, I felt obliged to link to it here.

You can buy Mat's book at Amazon and other reputable booksellers near you.

Following up on Cats, Comics and Closure, Meowchat and PetSpeak (which, surprisingly, came up during a panel on race and class on Friday), and of course Cats can has grammar, I've rediscovered the bizarre things that happen after a couple hundred thousand people stumble across a blog post.

Chief among the unexpected results is that I've become a reluctant dumping ground for people who want to share their lolwhatever sites with me. Please note: I am not asking you to send me more. Doesn't mean I don't like them, or that I won't look at the links you send; Some of them are interesting. But, being fully employed, married, and relatively sane, I couldn't possibly check out all the fascinating, inane, and useless web memes that have popped up around lolcats and image macros.

If you want to get a feel for what the realm looks like, here's a random sampling:

• Update: I missed a good one, just published today. Cat Power: You cannot resist lolcats just went up on Slate, a meditation on the meme in the form of a slideshow. I even got some props.
• I Can Has Corgan, for fans of Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan. Also the subject of a Stereogum contest.
• I Has A Tardis, for those interesed in Dr. Who cat macros.
• Research indicating that emoticons are tied to cultural context. Duh! The discussion on Ars Technica is a little less dense than the original research (PDF format), but that one seemed like an obvious call.
• Unsettling Gawker fave Kreepie Kats considers the meme.
• And there's even a nod in a recent episode of current geek-fave web comic xkcd.

And that's all I have to say about that subject for now.

Wow, you kids really like overanalysis of imaginary pet languages, huh? The best thing about writing Cats Can Has Grammar has been the responses.

• Mat sent me a link to this SF Chronicle story on MeowChat, the online language adopted by cat fanciers when they impersonate their cats in online chat. Note to whomever writes the headlines over at the Chron, if you have to say, "It's not just for crazy cat ladies", it's already not true.

• Danny also brought up MeowChat in my comments here, offering up this overview which gives us a "gives a reasonably good breakdown of that story, though unfortunately in heavily accented meow".

• I made it to Language Log! "After a bit of investigation, though, I've decided that I don't feel badly enough about this to undergo the lolcat immersion required to change it." NO LOLCATS FOR U LOL.

• Metafilter loves lolcats.

• And finally, I found the tags and descriptions that people used while bookmarking the post on del.icio.us to be delightful.

Speaking of memes from a year ago, last year I created a site called ishavingamassage.com. (That's "Is Having A Massage", not "I Shaving...") The domain is a (gentle) poke at Flickr, which uses the message "Flickr is having a massage." as its error/downtime message when the service is taken offline for repairs or maintenance.

The founders and several of the members of the Flickr team are friends of mine, so it wasn't intended by any means to be a dig at the site. (Except maybe for being so lighthearted and cheerful while so many Flickr addicts are panickedly hitting "refresh".)

At any rate, the massage site had a nice little run for a few months. It acted as a goofy inline link for people to use when making a point in a blog post, or as a little toy for people who like to kill downtime at work by typing in different URLs and seeing what happens. You know, something like yo.momma. ishavingamassage.com.

How it works

For those who've never tried it, the behavior is simple. You type in your.site.ishavingamassage.com into your browser, and it displays a custom Massage Message, coloring the text of the your.site part of the address Flickr-style, converting any dots in the URL to spaces, and removing a penultimate "e" character if the last letter of the site name is an "r". Not rocket science, but it amused me for the hour or so it took to build.

On a lark, I decided to log the massages after the first hour or so that the site was running. I didn't keep track of timestamps or the IP addresses of people who accessed the site or anything else that might start people fussing about privacy, etc. If I'd have planned ahead, I probably would have thought more about that.

Anyway, the amount of analysis and actual understanding of user behavior that I can do is limited. What becomes clear is that some popular sites really encourage people to click on links, and others that seem equally popular are mostly frequented by people who are less active clickers. Note, I also special-cased one or two websites where the site owners took down their websites entirely and redirected all of their traffic to sitename.ishavingamassage.com. Those sites were bounced to google.com and the requests weren't logged, due to volume. Those are removed from the data set.

The Data

Thanks to Ben, I was able to crunch the numbers a bit about what things people were massaging. The Top 10:

1. kottke: 6843
2. flickr: 6412
3. jasmeet: 5187
4. yanni: 3422
5. upcoming: 3012
6. my wallet: 2065
7. aelki: 1831
8. mathowie: 1495
9. brice: 888
10. arvind: 854

If you're looking for raw data, I've got the log file here: massages.txt (750k plain text file). We've also got the raw data of counts, as an Excel file. massages.xls (839k Excel spreadsheet). All of this data is from approximately one month ago; There's a live data feed, but I'll link to that later.

The bottom line

So, what conclusions can we draw? Jason Kottke is a very popular blogger. And the audience that responds to this kind of web wankery has a fairly high percentage of people who like to try at least some primitive-level hacking. There were a surprising (to me, at least) number of people trying to escape characters or add commands to the script that runs the page, along with a healthy number of people who just wanted to mess up the HTML on the page. There are also a surprising number of people who want to redirect all their traffic to another site for at least a temporary period of time.

Not surprising? Lots of people like to talk about body parts belonging either to themselves, their friends, or various people's mothers.

Some items that might be of interest:

• Flickr has far fewer massages these days; To understand why, please see Cal Henderson's Building Scalable Web Sites. Cal's on the Flickr team, and reveals a lot of his secrets here.
• Rafe Colburn says "Log it, don't count it". He's completely correct.
• The massage site didn't originally have ads on it. I put them on now since I believe you should start paying rent after you graduate.
• I got through this whole post without mentioning power laws or the Long Tail! Aw, crap.

A little over a year ago, I wore a funny t-shirt while posing for a photo that was published in an article in the New York Times. The shirt's a reference to a popular (and rather offensive) internet meme, and the reaction was immediate and passionate:

• "I can't believe you slipped one over The Man." - Grant Barrett, author The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English
• "Rather than the scary fragmentation of our society into a nation of disconnected people doing their own thing, I think we're reforming into thousands of cultural tribes, connected less by geographic proximity and workplace chatter than by shared interests." - Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief of Wired and author of The Long Tail.
• "@$!%!" - Mena Trott, President and Co-Founder of Six Apart.

I'm 30 years old, and this is now the single thing I'm best-known for in the world. Now, I'm not worried about being a one-hit wonder, but I do see this as a perversely entertaining example of getting what I deserve. I've always said my sense of humor thrives on the absurd, and it doesn't get any more absurd than having this stunt as one of the first things listed on my wikipedia profile. At this rate, my epitaph is likely to be something like "He told great fart jokes."

I'm reminded of this absurdity because I'd been reading The Long Tail. It was inevitable that I'd like the book -- I'm (briefly) in it. Page 182 has a nice nod to my Goatse t-shirt escapades, providing support for my hope that the in-joke worked on multiple levels. (Note to aspiring media hackers: You can't go wrong with a nominally subversive t-shirt if you're looking to gain a small degree of notoriety amongst your peers.)

As of today, 13 months later, there's approximately twelve thousand mentions of the gag. To all those people, and to those whom I've had approach me at various events and conferences, asking me about the picture, I have one request. Can we please make sure to say I'm "the goatse t-shirt guy" and not "the goatse guy"? There's a big difference.