Biella Coleman To Speak at ROFLCon

Good afternoon, ladies and chaps — we’re sorry to interrupt your regular internet programming to bring you an exciting late breaking guest announcement today. Happy to officially drop the news that Biella Coleman, NYU Prof of Media Culture and Communication (read: awesomeness), will be a featured guest at ROFLCon II!

Specifically, she’ll be taking the helm and moderating our final mega-blowout keynote panel “Mainstreaming the Web,” with moot, Know Your Meme, Ben Huh, and Greg Rutter. Which is excellent.

Biella has done a great deal of work on the eccentric interfaces of internet culture and mainstream culture, and has had the fine distinction of presenting slides on lulz in various srs settings. For those among you of the definitively geekier persuasion, her name will probably be familiar from her turbo-charged work on open source/free software communities.

Anyways, this is superb news. Welcome aboard!

photo courtesy sfllaw, CC BY SA

Lisa Nakamura at ROFLCon

So — today, we were going to claim that we had successfully confirmed Goatse for ROFLCon II, and then link to it. But we figured that’d be in poor taste (and not in keeping with ROFLCon’s general high standards for “professional” behavior). Besides, anything we could come up with would probably pale in awesomeness to what some of our guests are up to today (and elsewhere).

To that end, we’re extremely happy today to confirm that the University of Illinois’ very own Lisa Nakamura will be attending and moderating at ROFLCon II! Lisa is a professor over at their Communication Research and Media Studies program, and head honcho of their Asian American studies program.

Her work is all over the questions about race (real and fictional) and internet culture, and it’s led to some seriously badass stuff (see, i.e. “Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game: The Racialization of Labor in World of Warcraft“). Worth reading, if you haven’t seen it yet (pdf alert).

We could go on and on, but for now, just wanted to say that we’re thrilled to have her! We’ll have more details and schedule info out tomorrow (yes, it’s true: we’ve finally hammered it all out).

Fred Turner To Speak At San Francisco ROFLThing!

In the proud tradition of Jason Scott’s unbelievably kickass “Before the LOL” talk back in April, we’ve been looking for something geek/internet culture historical to round out the final slot of the rapidly upcoming San Francisco ROFLThing, and today I’m happy to announce that we’ve confirmed Stanford Prof Fred Turner to speak on August 29th!

Fred wrote a history of the early-early hippie San Francisco tech scene “From Counterculture to Cyberculture” and his talk, “Buckminster Fuller and the Technocratic Counterculture,” will be about Fuller’s dreams of comprehensive design and how they influence the trajectory of internet/technology culture today. The ROFLCon team saw him speak back last year — and it was pretty epic. Should be rockin’

You can listen to a talk that he did at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society a little while back here.

Alice Marwick To Give Keynote @ ROFLCon!

Fresh off her role as a moderator on this year’s SXSW panel “I’m Internet Famous,” I’m happy to announce today that NYU Grad Student Alice Marwick will be giving our Saturday morning keynote! Alice’s research delves into the intricate ties of tech and culture, identity and online social behavior. A hot delicious taste of what you’ll be getting is available here.

Bad. Ass.