YouTube Celebs on South Park

Every so often, the ROFLTeam hears about a production or a development that lets us know that this conference is really happening in a pretty perfect and wonderful moment in culture. One of the more fascinating trends that we’ve been thinking about and observing has been the gradual incorporation of Web 2.0 stuff and - more generally - new media into more traditional forms of media - see “Web Junk” on VH1, Slate’s “Did You See This?” blog, the really creepy CSI:NY episode about Second Life, things like that. The older world is beginning to see the legitimacy of user-generated content as culturally significant, which is totes exciting.

So if any of you (like many of us on the ROFLTeam) are fans of South Park - an incredibly traditional and classic television show - we hope you watched last week’s episode, “Canada on Strike.” There was a pretty epic fight among several of our favorite internet celebrities, including Tay Zonday, Tron Guy, and Sneezing Panda. We like to think that ROFLCon’s existence nudged this plotline into place. In any case, we really hope our conference turns out a little better than what eventually happens. Like, we don’t want a bloodbath.

Watch the full episode here!

Finally, an explanation of 4chan

(The following is an ill-advised break from paper-writing. Please forgive any incoherency!)

In the throes of my hardcore procrastination (Harvard has its finals period after break), I was examining everything ROFL and found that a member of our Facebook group had posted a link to his research paper about lulz.

Research paper. Explaining. Lulz. 

This is really exciting to me because I must admit that 4chan’s mentality and culture were always a bit inexplicable to me. My old haunt on the internets was somewhat downstream of Something Awful and 4chan, so while I became familiar with the meme culture as it floated on by, I didn’t quite understand how it was generated and who the “cool kids” were that got to determine what was funny and what wasn’t.

And now, an insider’s detailed explanation! This paper is neither comprehensive nor academically rigorous, but it definitely does go a long way for those of us who understand the world that 4chan influences but not what exactly went on inside the black box. It’s like lurking moar but in a conveniently bite-sized package. I suggest you read it!

The day in teh internet!

Man, a lot has happened today in the internet world!

POTW (on Yahoo) has posted a great entry and accompanying video about the most memorable videos of 2007. They offer some pretty solid commentary about the role of the internet in contemporary culture and the ostensible democratization of fame — solid work. Start gettin’ nostalgic about the past year on the web, and start gettin’ pumped for THE NET 2008.

Viacom is taking their biznass to the online world. They’re releasing Paramount’s clear Academy Award nominee “Jackass 2.5″ over the internet for free instead of on DVD or in theaters. I suppose if you’re going to release a movie over the web like that, the Jackass movies are the kinds that’ll do well. Tons of the most watched viral videos on YouTube or College Humor are just people acting like douchebags. It also enables them to build up a community around the movie — the movie will certainly attract attention to jackassworld.com, currently under construction, where users will be able to submit original content (WONDERFUL idea — haven’t they gotten sued enough?) and blogs and such. It’s certainly one of the first experiments of its kind, and I’m excited to see how other major studios react. If it’s successful, we might see a whole new mode of expression for big Hollywood, which could be really sweet. Or it could crowd out the ‘little guy’ viral video that we have come to love so much. That doesn’t sound so sweet.

Top news on Yahoo shows a video from 1967 that supposedly predicts online shopping and email. Apparently because it’s so accurate, people think it’s a hoax. But nope, I learned rather recently (from a class, no less!) that a pretty similar conception of the internet to what we actually have was first conceived way back about 40 years ago. Check out the Wikipedia entry on the ARPANET, for example. Take that, Al Gore.

As far as developments on our conference, we’ve been doing some pretty exciting stuff behind the scenes. More to come later as things develop. Vague, no? I promise it’ll be cool. Be sure to subscribe to our feed to get the latest.

The word of the year, 2007 ed.

Merriam Webster announced the word of the year today, and we’re sure it’ll thrill the online community. As the press release describes,

“This year’s winning word first became popular in competitive online gaming forums as part of what is known as l33t (”leet,” or “elite”) speak—an esoteric computer hacker language in which numbers and symbols are put together to look like letters.”

It would seem that ‘w00t’ is the 2007 word of the year.

The AP article on the choice is a bit more interesting. The president of Merriam Webster, John Morse, makes a fabulous comment about why it makes sense that w00t would be the word of the year: “It shows a really interesting thing that’s going on in language. It’s a term that’s arrived only because we’re now communicating electronically with each other.” True that, John. That’s one of the things that we hope to examine in the image macro (i.e. the Lol-whatever) panel: how the internet has changed communication and language. Here’s a question, though — w00t has been in the popular lexicon for a few years now, why now?

Also of note to techies: ‘facebook’ was #2. Not the website or the noun, like the verb: “I facebooked her, and she deleted her relationship status last night! What could it mean?!” Or, “I facebooked my professor and he has no friends :’(.” Or, the ever popular “I facebooked your mom last night.” This is not to be confused with “[de/un]friend,” “[un]tag,” “poke,” or “drunk post.” I think “facebooking” in this sense is more akin to facebook stalking, also an amorphous idea (my conception is that it involves looking at the profiles of people you don’t know so well to acquire information that you would not otherwise get). So say most of the entries on the Open Dictionary, anyway; I tend to agree.