Notes…
Favorite bad joke: “(Beyonce) put a NuvaRing in it”
EMERGING PLATFORMS
- Facebook said to be a consumption stream (other panelists disagreed) with many rehashed memes that come from email
- 4chan and Reddit, however, are said to be a reactionary stream
- memetic culture causes a transfer of perceived ownership; at some point, the readers/consumers consider themselves to own a meme or piece of content, instead of the original creators
- emerging topics (Bronies) will overwhelm any existing spaces and might need a new, dedicated space to “corral” this rising meme/trend
- Star Wars kid rejected fame, but Scumbag Steve accepted it; both made a guilty character from an innocent person
- memes go through a normalization process as more platforms join in on the consumption and creation processes
- a meme might not always spread, but its structure and mechanisms still can—memegenerator and the advice animals
- increasing population sizes for audience or demographic results in greater fragmentation
- “it’s not who you share *with*, but who you share *as*” —Chris Poole
- there are many people who the internet has found “guilty” that probably should be forgiven
- “what if zero ad dollars were on the internet?” (no mention of webrings and link exchanges)
- “what if there was only one *perfect* platform?” (no mention of Berners-Lee’s visions of a semantic web as the original platform)
INTERNET CULTURE AND GEOPOLITICS
- Biella Coleman: too awesome to summarize in notes
- rumors can build intimacy amongst a group, despite contributing to an increase in tension
- activity of the web, attacks, memes, and trends all wax and wane; expect it
DEFENDING THE INTERNETS
- heavy-handedness by government toward new technology mirrors their meatspace mechanisms, but they’ve failed to bring the rules of due process; technical workarounds and a lack of scarcity (thermodynamics) make the heavy-handed actions more harmful than good
- find the right voices, perspectives, and backgrounds to lend rhetorical/ego support to your arguments so you come from a relatable position that the mainstream can respect—don’t be the silly internet at all times
- “come back with a warrant”
- internet’s requirements of open, interconnected third party agreements create many vulnerabilities for corporate and government power structures to exploit the rights and freedoms of people
COLLECTING AND PRESERVING THE WEB
- best of the web is already gone from the live web (average lifespan of a page is 100 days before change or removal)
- the web is locked in a perpetual present; Orwell would acknowledge the people who control the present control the past and can also control the future
- redundant geographical storage provides the most effective and reliable hedge against disaster
- artificial intelligence or new systems/methods can come from a wealth of historical (linguistic) data (example Google Translate)
- “we’re not doing a good job” (Brewster Kahle, about archiving old software source code and ongoing, new developments in open/free software)
- web moving to a new, contextual (JS, client side tech, paywalls, or login required) framework of platforms and away from pages
- separation of search engines from content (institutionally and functionally) has been a good thing for the open, accessible web; trends to merge these two have been generally bad for all
WARD CUNNINGHAM
- the linguistic-focused software and tools behind wikis belies the old paradigm of math-heavy computer science
- the end-user facing linguistic focus of wikis (and interlinked content) has shown the value of navigating and reading in non-linear manners
- What is the schema of collaboration?
bad: adding content or writing comments in a single thread with chronological structure; Ward skipped this and allowed adding content ANYWHERE
good: consensus and voting mechanisms, but they need MORE progress
TODO: greater understanding of the mechanisms of decisionmaking
programming should be complete and good when it looks like it didn’t take a lot of effort - visualizations are useful and good, but make fewer of them static and start opening the datasets, source files, or just simply make them editable and expandable
INTERNET UNDERGROUND
- the underground exists to pay homage to a bygone era
users don’t just care about being sold to (advertisements), but who they’re being sold to - Sherrod DeGrippo wants fuckedcompany to make a comeback and encourages people to do it
- Sherrod DeGrippo is a bad person
- Rob Beschizza is really into Minecraft
