Before you meditate away the whole weekend, come on out and see me at CAPE tomorrow in Dallas. I’ll have books and shirts, including How To Make Webcomics. Scott and I will sign ‘em!
Now, I want to share with you an event that, for some reason, I find extremely, extremely troubling. It’s been over for about a week now, and all I can think is “I hope it doesn’t come back.” I’m not saying this in a coy way. I find this event to be disturbing at a very real and palpable level.
ROFLCon 2008 ran April 28 and 29 of this year in Massachusetts. It was a convention to celebrate internet memes and fads. If you were tired of Chocolate Rain, Tron Guy, I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER and rickrolling before, imagine a whole weekend of it.
There is a science fiction short story I can’t remember the name of. I think it was Heinlein who wrote it but I could be wrong. It was about a subspecies of human that began to develop naturally as part of evolution. They were people, yes, but their major difference from normal people was that they had a completely orthogonal worldview, and they were obsessed with the dissolution of objects. They didn’t want there to be so many things in the world, so they started planning to blow up everything: towns, cities, continents, the Earth, the Sun, the galaxy, the universe.
This is how I feel about the side of internet culture that’s taking root in “meatspace,” as they would call it.
We’re over rickrolling, right? I mean… everyone knows it. Does it need to continue? It’s like a worldwide game of circle sign. Or The Game for Chrissakes. These are things that Kirk used against Mudd’s android women, not pastimes to build conventions around.
Society has seen this kind of thing before. It’s rooted in Dadaism, but… there’s something different about this wave of memoholism. There’s a vague malevolence to it. As if it willfully demands not to be fully understood; that it must contain the reflexive altruism of doing it for the sake of doing it.
Someone calm me down. There was a membrane in place that ruptured — this stuff used to have a home on the internet, and now it’s seeped out, and pooled, however briefly, on the MIT campus. It strikes some deep-seated paranoia in me. Why? Is it the same fear that must have gripped parents in the 1950s when their kids started listening to that dad-blasted rock ‘n roll? I’m almost 30 — am I that old? I thought I would be able to understand all forms of humor.
Okay, that’s not phrased right — while I understand the memes, I don’t find them very funny a lot of the time. I think they kind of peaked at YTMND, before they started to get conniving and self-aware. Artificial, even. So much of it seems like forced non sequiturism, which never works.
I feel like culture is splitting into factions that have no choice but to forever misunderstand and despise each other, for no other reason than to have a counterpart to misunderstand and despise.
Apocalypse LOL.
This has me fired up enough to hold some kind of caucus to truly understand what’s going on with internet culture. Did anyone attend ROFLCon? Was that discussed? Because I can only imagine people settling in for a good roundtable discussion about it, and then suddenly a screen descends, blasting Rick Astley while everyone cheers.
And I imagine it happening every three minutes until the world ends.
It’s almost bizarre that you bring up dadaism — part of me feels as though that’s the code word you stuffed in there to let me know you were just kidding. Are we conspiracy buddies now?
I’m honestly, honestly not kidding. I wonder if Dadaism was as obnoxious when it was making the rounds. It’s also probable that Dadaism was more in art circles and not really widespread, and more academically important than culturally. This new stuff is freely available thanks to the internet.
I agree 100%. I think a lot of it has roots in the crazy Japaniphile thing that seems to be sweeping the nation right now (or for the last couple years). I thought you guys summed it up pretty good in one of the Daily Affirmations where you talked about a girl screaming “THE MOON IS ON FIRE!” during a comics panel. It’s all narcissistic attention-grabbing without any real content to add to whatever is going on.
Plus the whole thing is tied up with crazy sexual fetish stuff that once upon a time was relegated to our darkest back alleys and phone sex lines. Parroting things that don’t mean anything in the first place is not clever or funny. Plus everyone who does it seems to have this “I am so blowing your mind right now. You don’t even know what is going on, you stupid square” attitude that is full of unjustified superiority and arrogance.
I had a wonderful time at ROFLCon, thanks for asking.
The one thing everyone there agreed on was that Rickrolling needed to vanish into history - yesterday, please.
I actually had a good time at ROFLCon too. I found that the guests who were involved with fads that were quite done some time ago with were just as annoying as you’d expect, and the people who provide more lasting content to the internet were interesting and entertaining.
And I think everyone walked away from the event thinking pretty highly of Mr. Maynard.
Is there hope in the fact that I was not aware of any of the examples you mentioned? Because, with the exception of chocolate rain, I wasn’t. In fact, I had to look up the definition of “meme” and I consider myself a guy who spends a good amount of time on the internet. When I seriously consider what you’ve said here it disturbs the hell out of me too. I guess I just hope (desperately) that your views are mostly alarmist.
I may be confused but I thought Dadism was more about dealing with the horrors of World War I and the destruction of the previous social order.
But to deal with your main point, who cares? What you are referring to is one section of the internet. Or one part of internet culture.
Chocolate Rain, Tron Guy, I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER and rickrolling
I spend alot of time on the internet and I have not heard of any of these things except of rickrolling and I have never even seen it occur. Maybe you just need to find a new scene?
And people obsess over Survivor, Big Brother, and American Idol. So what?
Maybe this is only such a big deal to you because you spend so much time online. If it weren’t for that, it would be no bigger a deal than those other things.
Try asking someone who doesn’t spend much time online (your parents? your grandparents?) if they know what Rick Rolling or LOLcats are. Then ask them if they know what American Idol or Survivor are. Even if they don’t watch those shows, I’m sure they know about them, but they likely don’t know about the Internet memes.
I recently showed my Step-Mom icanhascheezburger, and while most of the pics were pretty dumb, she laughed at a few. But it’s not like she has any interest in joining the fad.
There will always be people who obsess over stupid stuff (just look at you and webcomics!), and the medium of the Internet has made it easy for these people to share and trumpet their obsessions. But so what?
Or is it that you would rather they be obsessing over webcomics?
…
By the way, I agree with you that most of these memes are over-played and dumb, even though a few have some funny moments. But if you’re obsessing over how many people are obsessing over them, then -insert Obi-Wan quote here-.
I think the reason these things are so inherently disturbing is because, to my mind at least, they parallel things like the future depicted by just about any book by William Gibson, but twisted by the lens of a Chuck Palinukh novel, author of Fight Club and Survivor.
Its a scary interesting time we live in. Also check Michael Moorecock’s Cornellius Chronicles for some interesting parallels of modern events.
Kris, the story you’re thinking of is Null-O by Philip K Dick. I thought it did a really good job of illustrating how the state of maximum entropy is the one where everything’s exactly the same.
Lord knows I’m not any kind of dada expert, but as kaiki says, the Dadaists had just lived through a horrible and pretty much pointless war, and didn’t want to go back to painting emotional states or multi-perspectives. They wanted to destroy the concept of art. I think you make the connection because you see the meme-mongers as destructive of culture, and you make the Null-O connection because you see them as reducing conversation to a vocabulary built entirely from catchphrases. I know how such things worry you.
I think what we’re seeing is a primitive collective intelligence created from a bunch of people who’ve pooled their senses of humor. Jokes are passed around the collective and refined at near-Singularity speeds, and as you and I discovered, the joke refining process quickly pushes the joke past the Richardson-Straub Boundary, so you quickly need another joke.
But you don’t have to join the collective. Even if you find some of the jokes funny, that doesn’t mean you’ve been assimilated. The collective can’t eat up all other jokes, because a single sensibility can only come up with certain types of jokes. And yeah, it’s aggravating, but the workings of a collective intelligence are worth studying.
Yes, thank you, Leonard. It was Null-O and that is the reason why this distresses me — it is a grammar based entirely on catchphrases and inside jokes. It’s like Darmok and Jalad at Tinagra, except there that alien was talking about building friendship and it’s a direct analogy.
Here, you’ve got some comment, and then immediately an onslaught of O RLY and HERE COMES PEDOBEAR. It’s like the conversation is a round hole, and the culture is just pouring a huge toy box full of blocks onto it, waiting to see if something gets through.
The thing that worries me is that ROFLCon is like, my core interest as far as mass psychology goes. It’s part of why I did Checkerboard Nightmare and Starslip the way they were done — both have some obsession with reaching a mass audience, be it via advertising or high culture. I would love to have a real social, economical, cultural breakdown of why this stuff can exist. I’m just worried it will be buried beneath a torrent of “who cares?” and then more noise.
TrentD wrote: Or is it that you would rather they be obsessing over webcomics?
I don’t, at least not like this. Not when you break a subject down into a pattern-match lexicon. The stuff I found funny about YTMND was that it did have a self-aware twist, and it deconstructed its subject into its obvious components. But now it seems like a lot of these fads are trying to do the same thing to themselves, and they’re just thrashing against their own invented necessity.
Also, to the uninitiated: Leonard and I developed the Richardson-Straub Boundary in college. It’s the point at which you have exhausted all possible riffs on the same joke subject, and to do another one would just be repeated a previous gag. The gag pretty much always hits metahumor by that point.
And if I remember correctly, the Richardson-Straub Point was the point during the riffing at which metahumor must be introduced to keep the flow going.
These memes seem to have a very very early RS point and a disregard for the RS boundary. It could be said that the RS boundary is actually pushed forward by treating gag repetition as a new line of gag.
Also, thanks Chris and Jay for any inside information you can offer. I’m an anxious guy and I’m worried that culture will soon be homogenized by a U-bomb distributed via social network.
I don’t have much to offer on the subject, because all of it mainly just baffles me. I suppose that, at least on the humor front of it, there’s just a certain mentality that some people have and some don’t, where the former group is capable of laughing at the same thing over and over, indefinitely. It’s not necessarily wrong, or something that can (or should) be overcome, but holy crap can it be annoying to the group that needs fresh ideas.
The RS Point is the first instance of metahumor on a particular theme. It’s a signal that the joke itself is losing its hold on you, losing ground to the comedic possibilities of the form and ritual of the joke. Then there’s a series of subsequent points where you have to go to metahumor about the metahumor, etc.. These points asymptotically approach the RS Boundary at which no more jokes can be made on the topic. The RS Boundary can never quite be reached, because you can always breathe a little life into an old joke by using it as the predicate of one of your new jokes. All of this is statistically proven with data derived from actual experiments.
I would argue that gag repetition jokes are regular metahumor because they’re jokes about the ritual of telling a joke. But someone who doesn’t really care about the craft of humor can repeat a gag repetition joke indefinitely, rocketing up the asymptotic curve, because a joke about a gag repetition joke is itself a gag repetition joke. It’s the e^x of jokes.
Yeah it bugs me, though I’m not totally sure it’s for the same reason.
I’m of the opinion that humor constitutes two similar but distinct forms of stimulation. The first is a minor intellectual growth induced by the countering of expected patterns with alternate solutions, like in a comic strip where the punchline in the last panel turns the narrative on its head. The second is a natural socialization technique that tries to approximate the first kind, but weakly - like how people tend to laugh at anything remotely jocular when they’re part of a large gathering.
So if a group of people can laugh at the same damn joke over and over, then their reactions have probably have less to do with the joke itself and more to do with the rush of fitting in. And of course, they don’t recognize the difference. That’s frustrating to anyone who has a serious appreciation for humor.
Memes are the secret handshakes of the internet.
You make a very valid point sir, about the nature of passing amusements of this internet that only one thing can add to this conversation.
Killroy was here.
I think you might be seeing the state of internet jokes and memes in absolutes?
There is some messed up and quite dark stuff in amongst it all, as some of the things that are joked about are completely inappropriate and quite sick in some instances. However, at the same time there is stuff that’s just silly and light-hearted, and even if you don’t get the joke is that much of a problem? Like Icanhascheezburger - the lolcat speak gets pretty annoying when its over board but its still just cat pictures with text over the top and I freely admit to having it bookmarked (maybe its because I’m a girl and just like cute kitties, who knows). Its total irrelevance but it makes me smile and I don’t see the problem with that.
As Blade said, it all comes down to the rush of fitting in that perpetuates it. I know some total /b/tards who say horrendous things just because its what other people are saying, and claim it to be the funniest thing in the world when its clearly not, and that’s the stuff you need to be worrying about. Making the odd motivational or ‘occasionally’ annoying someone by sending them a link to an 80’s pop video (I stress the occasionally, because Rick Rolling really does get old fast) isn’t going to destroy the world as we know it. Its just a different group of people with different bonding patterns.
Wags has it right. You cite Dadaism, but Freemasonry is probably also relavant.
Humans evolved from apes. Apes live in social tribes; you don’t see very many solitary apes. That fundamental, instinctive need to be part of a group is a very basic human drive. And so that’s why “memes” like this one spread so quickly, and get picked up on so fast; it’s because it’s a way for us to prove to ourselves that A: there is a group, and B: we are part of it. It’s easy to learn who’s in your tribe, and who isn’t, just by saying “THE CAKE IS A LIE!” every time you see a piece of food.
And, in any tribe, there is a heirarchy. If there isn’t, then the members of the tribe will spontaneously generate one. Even if they aren’t at the top; you’ll always have someone who almost volunteers to be the low man on the totem pole, just so that they can live in the comforting knowledge that a totem pole exists and they have a place on it. Part of the way that the internet culture establishes their heirarchy is by declaring these various memes as being “old”–like, ew, man, “All Your Base”? Welcome to like forever ago.
This isn’t to say that things can’t be inherently funny. “All Your Base” was inherently funny; it was possible to laugh at it without making it be a part of tribal identity. Same with “lolcats”, and really with just about anything else.
PS hey, you know what? Eat shit. I don’t have a problem with IE, and I don’t see any way that Firefox is better. Oh wow, tabbed browsing, just like I’ve been doing since 1999 with “open link in new window”.
Yeah, picking on JayMay was kinda unfair.
also wait, Density, what’s with the firefox hate out of nowhere?
I caught a lot of hatred when the costume first hit the net from folks who carped from behind their anonymous keyboards about my having too much time and how I’d obviously never have any sort of a relationship. Ever since then, things got a lot better, and I was treated like a rock star by everyone I met at ROFLCon.
The gathering itself was more an affirmation that there’s a new kind of fame out there, and an examination of the causes and effects of that fame. One common thread through it all was that the only ones who achieve fame on the net are the honest ones; phonies and bulls***ers are detected and very quickly rejected.
As for aging of memes: I would have thought my costume would have become old a long time ago, but it still keeps going. Maybe it’s because it just gets me in the door, and then people listen to the guy inside it and decide they think he’s worth listening to.
The net is a culture, and every culture has its in-jokes and secret handshakes. That’s probably all there is to it.
Oh, and DensityDuck: One of the major reasons I’m glad I run a Mac is that I don’t have to put up with that gaping collection of security holes masquerading as a web browser called IE.
Update!
I went to the Canadian National Art Gallery this morning (one of the advantages of living in the capital is being surrounded by culture at all times, whether you like it or not) and found myself, as is not uncommon, in the contemporary wing. Now, “contemporary” art still encompasses that Warhol-esque sense of working with ready-mades and finding the beauty in the juxtaposition of variously-coloured flourescent lights, but there was a room upstairs that gave me pause: six television screens, each of them looping a different artistic group’s take on modern art in society. My sister and I spent seven minutes watching a video of three Quebecois artists who took the engine out of a yellow motorcycle so that two of them could push it around Montreal while the third pretended to ride it.
Most of the video did show the reactions of onlookers — a mixture of shock and amusement, mostly — but I was left feeling as though I’d just seen the everyday humdrum of existence. If a motorcycle being pushed by rollerbladers went past me on the street, I’d call it art, but someone making a video of the event? I call that YouTube.
Later, we saw another video of an artist who filmed himself driving in a circle in a parking lot all day, forcing other motorists to navigate around him (although he would stop to let them through.) “Tom Green did this ten years ago on cable access,” I said. “Or at least, he handed his microphone to a passing couple and forced them to watch him walk around a parked car for half an hour. It’s the same basic idea. How come it was comedy then but it’s art now?”
In a sense, it was the fact that we were in a gallery that made it “art” — the venue provided the legitimacy. So I can see why ROFLcon scares you as much as it does: lending credence to that format makes the statement that artistic merit can be qualified in the effortless process of sending someone to look at Rick Astley. I don’t know, we’re going to lunch now and I haven’t had time to properly analyse my own thoughts yet. Hell, we haven’t even talked about Joe Fafard yet.
Maybe it’s because I spend much of my time hanging out with seven-year-olds, but all I can think of is a classroom full of kids working a book of Knock-knock jokes to death, and then discovering dead baby jokes, only to find out that their older siblings did it all three years before them. Check out Ecclesiastes - there’s nothing new under the sun, just variations on the same themes/memes. Irony is funny, and laughter beats crying about it. Rejoice because you’re alive, and can use the interweb to have this discussion!
Honestly, this is just a bit of overreaction, perhaps because you went to ROFLCon and therefore overestimate the scope of the problem. I’m sure everyone’s known a guy who hears a joke that’s pretty funny, so they throw that same joke into every conversation they have for the next month. Since most of the world is on the internet, it stands to reason that most of those guys are ALSO on the internet, where it’s harder to just walk away or avoid them, and thus memes become the annoyance they are. On top of that, socially speaking, the internet is far greater in size and scope than most people’s personal or public lives, the average age and maturity of people on the internet is a lot lower than you’re used to, and angering people isn’t something that most people on the internet go out of their way to avoid, so a meme lasts for a year or two before the main internet communities start considering it to be stale, and another year or two passes before no one’s really posting it anymore. Thing is, the stuff isn’t THAT hard to ignore, since the period of posting a new meme nonstop lasts a couple weeks tops on any upstanding community.
Something I need to emphasize is that these memes DO die. And, on the whole, today’s memes aren’t nearly as bad as the memes of yesteryear. Sure, rickrolling’s kind of annoying, and a lot of people aren’t used to checking links before they click them. But I’ll take it over Goatse any day. Likewise, Chuck Norris and LOLcat aren’t exactly the pinnacle of wit, but at least they’re more varied than “DESU DESU DESU” was. The internet’s average IQ isn’t exactly jumping up in leaps and bounds, but at least it’s climbing, however slowly.
Leonard,
Kris,
I find the prospect that your analysis of humor and the development of the R-S boundary are the result of a serious endeavor to be disturbing.
Is it OK if I just assume that you guys indulged in non-liquid refreshment as college students are want to do and this is merely an enduring fragment of the usual insane ramblings of an intoxicated mind?
On time we wrote down the stuff we came up with during an enjoyable evening. The next day we read it, and then vowed never to write down such things again.
i think a lot of the *persistance* problem stems from creatives that were once before charged with creating fads (tv and now net) have realised they no longer need to be “creating”, so much as finding a fad-in-the-making and grabbing hold as it crests.
online memes were fine when they were allowed pulse out, then quickly die when they hit the mainstream wall where the vast majority didnt give a crap enough to understand it, but now that they’re being absorbed by places/things/shows that have monstrous audience sizes, and where not being the in-crowd can make someone an outcast, people tend to laugh along until its just the natural thing to do, whether its understood why or not.
meanwhile the places responsible (surely known by many here) are burning away non stop, generating, sometimes unwittingly, netwide meme fodder.
could meme-ism become so prevalent that it be considered a meme itself? in a meta sort of way.
im definite there are all sorts of errors in there, i can only hope some valid observation was made.
i think kris straub is a pretty cool guy. eh observes meta-memes and doesn’t afraid of anything.
I’m no expert on dadaism, but this all brings to mind the more drug related subculture twin of it that is present in discordianism. the memes are there for the humor and entertainment of those who have it, the difference between the two is that once people have found a meme they are satisfied with, they leave it at that, they have no creative drive. i would find memes to be perfectly fine if people would continue to think of new, funny ones, rather than try to boost their e-penis contest rating by citing the oldest meme they can. try checking out the illuminatus! trilogy or the principia discordia, these are the artworks that were produced by this, and they are full of creativity, and the people who like to continue the traditions of the culture are the creatives who make new traditions for it, the ones who don’t think for themselves are weeded out.
Off-topic, but I think it’s valid:
Are these posts moderated? The average post quality is surprisingly high. Maybe that’s just Starslip readers, but I have a hard time believing that any large group could be without its total morons.
Hey, I was on one of the panels at ROFLCon, and it was a little hard to get into real analysis in that venue, mostly because the weekend was framed as an appreciation of the memes and internet celebrity. What you bring up is really interesting, though (especially cos dada was brought up: I love absurdism in most forms, and my creation was consciously an absurdist act).
I could fill a blog post with all of the things I wanted to talk about but couldn’t (and maybe still will). One of the biggest things I had in mind was on web comics: utter, utter respect needs to go out to folks like you who show up multiple times a week to hit Teh Funny, time and time again. It seemed strange to be lauded for one silly idea (that I almost immediately laid my hands off) without a fuller appreciation of the folks who come up with silly ideas day in, day out. (Yeah, Randall Munroe and Ryan North got a headlining panel, but it could have gone even broader than that.)
The other idea that went around in the wake of the marketing panel is that the webcomics guys selling merchandise “get it” more than any hip, viral marketing people ever will.
Agreed with Green William, the post quality is super-high!
I will try to not dilute it.
I do think you are over-reacting a bit Kris, since I don’t find this particular strand of internet humour very strong in any other part of life.
The reason why this conference got picked up by MIT is not that MIT thinks this stuff is funny. MIT for a long time now has been hugely interested in media studies (take a look at the MIT Press or the journal Leonardo), and this… thing (I won’t call it a phenomenon) is clearly new and interesting enough to host a conference for. Whether the conference was good or not, I have no idea. And by new and interesting, I mean that these strands of humour are developing and spreading in way that is unique to the internet. This is so far up MIT’s alley they probably felt an itch in their collective throats.
But I agree with Kris in that this humour is remarkably thin. I’m sure everyone agrees that it runs out of steam real fast. The times I do find it funny I have noticed one thing. It’s funny when it’s *not* being ironic. Pure, unabashed stupidity is what I’m getting at - no pretenses to ironic comment. Sometimes that’s real nice. The most brilliant LOLcat macros are probably the best examples here.
I think the only time I found Rickrolling funny was in the opening paragraph to the interview with Astley about the Rickroll jokes. To read a nicely written description of someone with a speaker strapped to their chests enacting a Rickroll… now THAT was funny.
And I’ll echo the other commenters here about how unrelated to Dada this thing is. Dada was on a whole other level, and it is now so far away in time that I think no one can understand the cultural forces that spawned it. The reference to discordianism is dead-on though, as much of this humour seems rooted in counter-cultural absurdism that started in the early 70’s. Unfortunately all this internet humour has rarely come close to the kind of “sub-genius” that much of the culture-jamming jokes of the past did. I would really like to see some of this stuff approach the level of Operation Mindfuck.
Also, while I’ll admit that this humour consists of memes, the idea of a meme is I think far more complicated. The jokes are not memes, the entire concept of how these jokes evolve/devolve on the internet is the meme. The jokes are just jokes (bad ones).
Wikipedia’s article on memes sucks, btw (surprised?). Just pick up “The Selfish Gene.”
Now that I think about it, Dawkin’s idea of the meme might be a bit outdated and in need of revision.
I shut up now.
I really considered posting “NO U” as a comment, but apparently irony is what makes memes unfunny.
I really think that this discussion is a completely melodramatic take on the subject. The destruction of culture? Hidden malevolence? Kris, they’re pictures of cats making funny faces, chill out.
Pretty sure they’re at least spam-modded, since I left a follow-up about my trip to the art gallery yesterday and it hasn’t shown up yet. I knew I shouldn’t have added that link to Joe Fafard…
For some reason it makes me think of the story of the Tower of Babel.
You mean, the internet brought us too close to being able to achieve anything humanity put its mind to - so God cursed us by letting juvenile delinquents onto the net to introduce and popularize really stupid memes for annoyingly long stretches of time? It makes a certain amount of alarming sense, I suppose (But it doesn’t make for a very effective curse). I would go with Dan Electrode’s comment, personally. And, of course, Leonard and Straub.
A big part of it, as well, is the reaction generated by bystanders; whether that’s laughter, confusion, or annoyance. There seems to be a lot of discussion here about culture, “meta-art”, etc…this may be deep analysis, but it’s also completely divorced from the psychology of the actual people who perpetuate memes. No one posts lolcats because they think they are making a “meta-artistic” statement.
The kind of confusion, frustration and melodrama on display here is EXACTLY what encourages memes. I imagine that everyone who’s into memes who reads this must feel, in some small way, “I cause this reaction.” I know I do.
If you want to understand memes, first you should understand griefing.
Actually, the Tower of Babel was a story about the consequences of operating in direct conflict with God’s purpose for the earth. That actually puts another slant on the comparison, but I digress. I don’t think there’s much relation either way.
I think a lot of internet memes and the like typify a humor type I’ve read about in Scott Adam’s books. He calls it ‘Broken Logic’. Successfully executed, a punchline is WAY off in left field, but tangentally connected to the topic at hand, so one’s brain insists it must make sense, but when forced to actually LOOK for the logic in the punchline, the brain flails about like a dog on an ice rink.
Unable or uncertain how to react, instinctive laughter is a usual response, even though you might not be able to say exactly WHY, or it’s not ACTUALLY funny.
It can be done, and done well, but I suspect that someone, somewhere observed this in action, and reasoned that 1+1=3. Or, in essence, ‘Random = Funny’.
This combines with the frustrating trend of the general intelligence of people tending to decline, the larger the group they’re in. (Mob mentality) Unfortunately, the Internet, for all it’s positive aspects, is the world’s largest mob. With our general habit of following people we see as ‘pretty’, ’smart’ or ‘cool’, trends like these tend not to die off until the Leaders (Said pretty, smart, or cool people) get tired of them.
And with the anonymity of the internet, Someone we might view as one of those leaders could be anything but. They could be a mental four year old, who is endlessly entertained by Randomness.
Now, if you don’t agree with any of this, there’s no reason you have to. It’s just my perspective, and I’m obviously not as educated as some of the people in this thread. But I think the only way that we can keep things from eventually REACHING Kris’s vision of the end result is if we make a conscious effort to think on an individual level, and detatch from the ‘rush of belonging’ mentioned earlier.
Parents say it all the time ‘If Everyone Jumped off a cliff, would you?’ It’s a mocked old chestnut, but I fear a lot of these people actually WOULD.
There are too many momentious events in motion in the world (economic, political, and technological) to justify alarmism on the subject of Rickrolling. Seriously, if there are events in motion that are going to culminate in the apocalypse, these events almost certainly don’t involve LOLCats.
Any discourse that treats internet subculture as a serious problem runs the risk of becoming even more absurd than its target. At least the “O RLY?” owl knows he is ridiculous.
Actually, the reason why MIT would do something that most people would consider utterly stupid is because MIT had memes before the internet was created. The antics of the MIT students rival the actions of any unsuspecting kid swinging a lightsaber around.
Memes can be funny. The problem starts when people take them off the internet. When I hear someone yell “longcat is looooooong” out in IRL I RAGE and want to beat the person to death with a rolled up picture of the lol wut pear. Firstly, rules 1 and 2. Secondly, nothing is sadder then the internet in real life. The context in which a meme is used is the important part. Just randomly screaming out “DO A BARREL ROLL” for no reason is catching the fastest train to failtown. Memes used in congunction with other humor, or to illistrate a point is fine, having an entire conversation consisting of nothing but memes is faggotry.
Kris, Mr. Straub, Scion of the Times, don’t forget that men and women in our age demographic are piled into cubicles ten hours a day, numbing their minds on information-gathering jobs, so it should come as no surprise that in their spare time they take their laughs where they can get them. I have a feeling you are enjoying your job a lot more than I am enjoying mine, which entitles me to act a lot stupider than you when I leave work–or when I log onto the internets on my breaks.
My first instinct was to respond to this post with “LOL!1! NERDS!1!1!” but I remember reading a Clive Thompson (”Collision Detection”) column in WIRED about the benefits of time-wasting as a leisure activity–basically about how games with no constructive purpose are more fun and healthy for exercising the brain after-hours–and I realized that this is what the internet is for now: porn. Whoops! No, I mean: play.
It’s not supposed to make sense. It’s just play.
By the way, thanks for the link to the hand-circle game. The next time I’m in Virginia Beach visiting my family, I’m taking that game to the next level.
Yeah, you have to keep in mind that MIT is the origin point of the Smoot marks on Harvard bridge and other wonderful nonsense, much of it predating the internet. Their fascination with internet memes, tired and oddball humor, and their urge to host ROLFcon should be understandable. These are the same folks who once pushed a piano off a dorm roof just to see what would happen, and planted a full size mock-up of a campus police car atop the main building dome, complete with red and blue flashing lights. Silliness seems to relieve study stress for many of them; the sillier and more pointless the better. I see the same kind of behavior during final exams here at the local high schools. We should count our blessings when it DOES NOT involve alcohol or drugs. Your (and by extension, much of our) humor tends to be at a higher intellectual level.
Also, thanks alot Straub, I just lost the Game. Fuck.