Kevin Driscoll to Speak on Dance Crazes, History and Development of Soulja Boy

Kevin Driscoll, team collaborator and grad student with the Comparative Media Studies Department, will be participating as a speaker at ROFLCon!

He’ll be giving an unmoderated talk on the history and development of Soulja Boy, and viral dance crazes more generally. Kevin’s been closely tracking that particular meme through the digital space (along with some other members of the ROFLCon Team), and in fact produced one himself (which, pricelessly, features Richard Stallman performing the dance). Should be pretty badass.

Jason Scott To Be Speaking at ROFLCon!

ROFLCon has increasingly put us in touch with a bunch of people who do Cool Things. So, in addition to the central stream of internet celeb/academic discussion panels (see the Preliminary Schedule, soon to be revised after discussions with people way more talented than us and readers like you), we’ve decided that ROFLCon’s going to play host to a series of pretty awesome unmoderated talks/events on a variety of meme related topics.

To that end, I’m happy to announce today that the brilliant Jason Scott, the creator of the highly recommended, incredibly comprehensive cultural record BBS: The Documentary and director of textfiles.com, will be presenting on pre-Web 1.0 cultural phenomenon and celebrities.

The talk to be entitled, simply, “BEFORE THE LOL.” Very cool, considering our oldest meme is circa 1995. Should round this thing out a bit.

Want to Get To Know Your Favorite Meme?

Beyond being a cultural vortex enough to potentially rend the fabric of space-time, ROFLCon, like any other conference, is going to be it’s very own little feat of hospitality management for all you attendees out there and all our guests. But like most of the other things we’ve been working on, we figured it’d be pretty sweet to crowdsource this into something of an awesome opportunity.

We’ve had a couple of celebs that are interested in having someone with them during the conference to assist them with various logistical stuff (merchandising, videotaping, etc). So if you’re interested in networking your way in the internet celeb halls of power or just getting an up close and personal experience with some of them, this is definitely the thing for you. I think it’s pretty much worth it for the story alone.

So getting under way: anyone want to be the personal assistant to the Average Homeboy Denny Blaze at ROFLCon?

No really, we’re for serious. Act now while you can. Send e-mail to roflcon@gmail.com expressing your interest and any relevant experience. We’ll get in touch for an interview (and, of course, you’ll have to get Denny’s thumbs-up too).

ROFLCon Wallpaper INSANITY!

These amazing ROFLCon wallpapers are courtesy of Dino from Bert is Evil. He has agreed to let us share them as Creative Commons (CC-BY). Thanks, Dino!

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