March 27, 2008
Fono got me playing zefranks new project, colorwars which he’s doing entirely through Twitter (which is pretty cool in itself… earlier this year I wanted to run a pervasive game through Twitter but that’s another story entirely) anyway, you have to add zefrank on Twitter to play. So I did and to my surprise:
Hi, kate raynes-goldie.
zefrank (zefrank) is now following your updates on Twitter.
Check out zefrank’s profile here:
http://twitter.com/zefrank
Best,
Twitter
At first I thought “!!” because usually when you add the internets famouses to your Twitter they don’t add you back. But then I remembered my Twitter is locked so he had to add me back for me to follow him, so it doesn’t actually mean anything. Interesting how we have to learn new cues and read between the lines in new contexts because of the new affordances of internet friendship. Ze is now “my friend” but I know he really isn’t because of the situation in which he added me back.
Tags: internet friendship, internet culture, academic, thesis
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March 22, 2008
Everyone wants to know what the next big thing on the internets is gonna be… At SXSW everyone wanted to know” what’s the new Twitter?” We’ll I’m not exactly sure, but I think it has something to do with lulz.
Why? One word: ROFLCon…
Mix up a bunch of super famous internet memes, some brainy academics, a big audience, dump them in Cambridge, MA and you’ve got ROFLCon…
It’s a group dissection of internet culture. What makes it work, why it works, how it works. We’ll talk about where internet culture has been and where we think it’s going.
Then, there’ll be parties. A music show, with memes performing their work live. And then a big blowout party at the end, with everyone dancing and rocking out.
Needless to say, this might be the most important gathering since the fall of the tower of Babel.
The lineup of serious biznass people includes David Weinberger, Josh Schacter (the guy who made deli.cio.us), Anil Dash from Six Apart, while the crazy fun internet memes include Leslie Hall, the Homestar Runner guys, Tron Guy and Leeroy Jenkins! It strikes me as totally weird, amazing and important that all these crazy fabulouses are converging for discussion of something so ridiculous and fun as internet memes. I mean, Facebook is so serious and corporate in comparison… and blue-coloured. What does it all mean?! I’ll tell you when I get back cuz all I know right now is that I’m going to throw up I’m so excited.
(PS there’s still room in the car if any of y’all wanna drive down with me and Lukezors!)
Tags: roflcon, internetculture, memes, academic, thesis, internets
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March 21, 2008
After our inaugural Psychogeographers of Ontario (POO!) walk, I dragged Helen, Luke and Dana to this used bookstore I’d been eyeing for a few weeks on College. I walked out with two old Margaret Atwoods and a Virginia Woolf for $3 a piece, but the real gem I found was Arthur Kroker’s totally ridiculous pomo philosophy of cyberculture from 1993 entitled “Spasm” which I bought as a prop for the talk Leigh and I are doing at Notacon in a few weeks about the how the internet has been (mis)represented over the years by academics and journalists.
Spasm one of those completely over-the-top-hype-filled books which proclaimed “OMG everything is going to profoundly change because of this cyber computer biznass!!” that were all the rage in the 90s. See also 1990s books that supposedly explained the entire philosophical underpinnings of the internet/cyberculture yet managed to do the exact opposite.
The jacket blurb says it all:
Spasm is the 1990s. A theory-fiction about the crash world of virtual reality, from the cold sex of Madonna Mutant, the pure sex of Michael Jackson and the dead sex of Elvis to the technological fetishes of Silicon Valley. Written from the perspectives of cultural politics, music, photography, cinema and cyber machine art, Spasm explores the ecstasy and fadeout of wired culture. Here, we suddenly find ourselves the inhabitants of a glittering, but vaguely menacing, technological galaxy where the machines are finally beginning to speak.
Spasm is a book/CD to take along with you on your hacker journey across the galaxy of the electronic frontier.
And yes, Baudrillard is invoked.
Tags: notacon, academic, thesis
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March 17, 2008
Okay, so SXSW is so last week, but I hate blogging while I’m at things because I like to digest and reflect, but also, I like to actually enjoy things while I’m there (you can blog when you get home!). Thus, I present part one of my fashionably late reflections on Facebook from SXSW interactive:
Last year the geeks were all abuzz about Twitter, arguably making SXSW the tipping point in the sites’ success. Facebook’s only honour last year was winning in the oddly titled “Classic” category at the 2007 web awards.
Facebook wasn’t exactly this year’s Twitter, but nothing else was either. By this year’s SXSW, Facebook had already reached it’s tipping point, especially in major English speaking urban centres, like Toronto. So basically, Facebook is already normal and dominant and is normalizing the social use of the web by everyone. And when I say normal, I mean normal like you-don’t-even-think-about-it-anymore-and-neither-does-your-mother. A lot of the excitement I saw last year was because everyone had this sense that we were doing something new and groundbreaking. Ze Frank’s opening video from last year’s web awards captured this feeling. When they played it, everyone freaked out cuz it struck a chord. But this year, not so much. People weren’t even talking about Web 2.0 anymore (much to my eternal joy, because that term is so ridiculous and ambiguous), but were instead opting for the more reserved “social media” or “social networking” (which speaks again to the dominance of Facebook). Sure, there were way more people and the party lines were longer. But Yahoo! didn’t even have a party and the schwag was few and far between. No free geek tshirts for me doesn’t mean much to the average person, but the fact remains that SXSW is a good indicator of mainstream tech use, kinda like how fashion shows are extreme examples of what kind of clothes people are going to be wearing that season. When things are normal people don’t tend to care as much, which is probably why there wasn’t a ‘this year’s Twitter’ (or, the new Twitter is… Twitter.) Facebook and the web more broadly are becoming just like everything else, normal and boring.
And you know what? The people at Facebook know it (well, not the boring part. They still think it’s pretty exciting). This was evident at the developer’s garage and friends.get party (both hosted by Facebook) where there were huge plasma screens showing a Facebook promo video (that Luke awesomely recorded for me). Aside from being blatant ripoff/nod to last year’s “We Are the Machine,” the main thrust of the video was that Facebook is a normal extension of everyday life.
The message in this video is echoed by a recent ad campaign by Canada’s Roger’s Wireless promoting their mobile Facebook service, which let’s you “tell the whole story as it happens” on your Blackberry. Canadian mobile carriers are so far behind the rest of the world that if they’re pushing something, you know it’s huge.
Stay tuned for part two: rethinking my hate for Facebook (after a chat with Mark Zuckerberg. lulz)
Tags: sxswi, academic, sxsw, facebook, thesis
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