So I'm speaking at WFUD today on Fair Use and the business side of Internet Memes (with Ben Huh and Tim Hwang.) Considering the subject, I figured that it would be a good time to talk about one of the core ideas behind the schema for Know Your Meme: Content, Code, Community.
In a nutshell:
+ Develop Code (software, mission, rules) to fill a Community need.
+ Create original Content based on the activity of the Community.
+ Use the revenue from that Content to continue funding the evolution of the Code and the activity of the Community.
Mind you, the general idea isn't new. It's reddit, Digg, and Slashdot. Any site that relies on community activity to generate pages (and page views) does this: bring in revenue by selling display ads (and sometimes branded merchandise but not much more) based off of the community activity.
What we did differently was create original content (meme episodes) based on the community work. The "Institute for Internet Studies" is a fictional universe with its own mythology that started with videos but then expanded into books, apps, and other properties. The content is high margin so it generates enough cash to expand the community and evolve the code.
And in all of this content, we wanted to make the community complicit in its creation. They know what we're doing, they know why we're doing it, and they're doing it with us. Their work is the basis of our scripts. Their curation are our clip montages.
And while the meat of the meme entries is original, most of the media supporting each entry is community generated, public domain, or created under Fair Use. When a community's work is non-market, their sense of ownership is often stronger than if they were being paid for it. We wanted to do Know Your Meme in a way that respected the original meme work and celebrated the community activity in a way that didn't treat it as commodity.
I'm announcing that after nearly four years I'm leaving Rocketboom. I couldn't have asked for better coworkers at Rocketboom and will always have fond memories of the videos we've created, the services we've built, and the community we've made. Thanks for that, Andrew. I wish you nothing but the best.
After four years, it is time for me to move on. I am looking forward to exploring new and exciting opportunities and projects and will take some time to focus on family and friends. In the meantime, you can keep up with me via blog, Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook.
Know Your Meme is a community obsessed with the Documentation, Accreditation, and Understanding of how memes spread on the internet.
To that end we've amassed over 2100 entries in the Internet Meme Database. While most are unconfirmed, this should give you an idea of how much is out there.
For each entrywe document everything we can verify about how these things start, how these things gestate, and how they change over time.
So I’m going to talk about internet memes as a phenomenon that is partially both anti-ego and anti-celebrity.
First, let’s have a quick refresher about Celebrity:
Celebrity (as we know it) is an invention of the 20th century.
I’m talking about people who are instantly recognizable because of their exposure through mass media. It’s emergent and it reflects a producer to consumer model that profits off of our scarcity of attention.
"The collapse of organised religion, the absence of having saints or a God to look up to, for many people in western societies is being filled by celebrity culture - they are the new saints."
Celebrity is about the Producer-Consumer dichotomy, believing in the scarcity of attention, and is very much tied to the technologies of Broadcast. So of course, it is also tied to the Dominant Culture.
But there is a side effect of cultural hegemony. Control is never perfect. There is always a counterculture.
And in this space, that was alternative media. While some of it was aspirational -- that is, it wanted to be just like the media it was in opposition to, For the most part it was
Anti-establishment.
Anti-corporate.
Anti-capitalist.
Anti-market.
What made it so? Well, it was hard to make popular b/c it ignored cultural norms. It was hard to exploit because a good portion of it ignored copyright. By re-appropriating many of the signs of the mainstream, they were carving out their own space where their own ideas could exist.
But this also meant that it was hard to sustain. It was this spirit that laid the groundwork for internet memes.
So let’s talk memes. What is a meme? Memes are units of cultural ideas that propagate through media, messaging, content, and communication. Coined by Richard Dawkins (the guy who coined ‘genes’). Spread of ideas separate from linguistics, separate from history.
Internet memes are just like regular memes except that they use the medium of the internet to propagate.
What’s the difference? Well, while the cost of acquiring & passing on an idea IRL has a real cost (if I want to pass along a bible, I have to buy a copy first), the effective cost of sharing and spreading that information within the online ecosystem is near zero. Therefore, ideas often spread on their merit before anything else.
While internet memes are ideas first and foremost, they take several different forms. These include but are not limited to Image Macros (images with captioned text.) Viral Videos. Catchphrases.
Like their offline alt brethren, internet memes are anti-exploitative. They often use copyrighted content that can’t be put back into the mass media machine.
Also, there is little to no central control over message. This makes them often resistant to corruption of meaning and form.
They mutate and iterate. Just because you’re first to a meme doesn’t mean that you get to determine how it will evolve. It can change without you. Last year’s 'Kanye Interrupts' started off as a viral video, became a video mashup, and then changed several times before eventually reaching a stable state of image macro + catchphrase.
“This is war to extermination - Fight cell by cell through bodies and mind screens of the earth. Souls rotten from the Orgasm Drug. Flesh shuddering from the Ovens. Prisoners of the earth, come out. Storm the studio.
His plan called for total exposure - Wise up all the marks everywhere Show them the rigged wheel - Storm the Reality Studio and retake the universe…"
It’s a statement of opposition to outside control of both our bodies and our lives, written for a 20th century equation. Like proletariat taking over the factory, it’s a marxist-anarchist storming the broadcast centers, and reclaiming the tools of storytelling and persuasion for our own.
But things have changed.
We’re not in the same century. We’ve built so much more. The broadcast machine remains very much the same but we’ve built an entire infrastructure outside of that.
So don’t burn it down. Leave the factory behind, that relies on tightly held control of message and copyrights, and escape the system that creates hegemony, celebrity.
BTW, this doesn’t mean that the factory won’t still be running. Lest anyone believe that the idea of celebrity will disappear within our lifetime, I leave you with this little gem.
Just because video is there doesn't mean that you have to use it. Do not start a videoblog if it doesn't make sense for your community (audience) and definitely don't do it if you don't understand the amount of work that will go into it (like lots of projects without end, fatigue will set in.)
+ Creation and Distribution
You can shoot for an Emmy just fine butjust as important and more attainable is shooting for Emilia and her Friends.
Shoot within your means. Create video that gets your message across.
+ Handing out cameras vs slick vids. It's all about how much energy/money/resources you can devote to it.
There is value in cheap video. Immediate, real. Either media training through existing staff. On the Internet Production Value Is Not Necessarily a Value.
If you want to win an Emmy, fine, production is cheaper.
In-house or bloggers.
Media training for existing staff.
Get into the habit of document existing work (immediacy sometimes more important than production value then let the pros make sense of it.)
Partner with existing bloggers, forums, content creators, peer orgs.
Outsourced/Partnership
Highly produced doc is fine, just produce it so that it can be repurposed for the web.
The rise of the fakedoc has created a new creative class of media maker, professional yet cheaper than traditional production houses.
If spread is more important than control, write once, distribute everywhere.
They post it to video sharing sites, embed them within their own pages, wherevermakes sense. When possible, they produce it in a way that allows it to be repurposed for multiple mediums, multiple platforms.rss, linkable, embeds. go to where they are.
Just like all new media communication, the video has to fit the audience, be it policymakers or the general public. Access is a filter.
Understand expectations differ with each platform. (YT vs Vimeo)
Web video for civilian audiences is different from web video for specialized audiences (policymakers, journalists, staffers). Web video for specialists should fit the purpose of their work (sound bytes, documentaries as top level surveys) and their use patterns. OTOH, web video for civilians needs to speak to their use patterns: at work, short filtering span (not attention) fashioned for the pipe (tend to be short form b/c of file sizes and time to engage)
Go to where they are. If you bring them back, give them action.
Partner with these people, get into the conversation b/c, like it or not, it's going to happen without you. (Journalists vs. acts of journalism.) Connect it to groups that will eat it up (God and Politics) Make sure the video knows its' place.
Stupid is not a new concept. Trolls were always out there. They're just indexable, discoverable, explicit. Example: Pedos Online. This is a good thing.
Narcissism, Information Overload, Fear of the Unknown.
What we're doing is making the tools, the talk, the relationships more explicit. The fact that we can't make sense of this mess is a failure of our filters. But as Holly said, the web is iterative. Some of the tools are fantastic. Other tools are bunk. The ecology is changing and we're constantly building new tools to sess out new user behaviors and forms of communication and curation. Use what works for you and work with us to build better tools.
A short email thread from earlier today that goes back five years:
On Jul 30, 2008, at 12:27 AM, kenyatta cheese wrote:
Hey Paul.
Likewise, I just found this email in an old folder. Please excuse the late reply.
We got pretty far with producing a bootable custom Debian disk using MPEG4IP as the streaming/encoding software. Unfortunately, it was too technical for most independent/activist/community media center staff to be able to use at the time. But also, fortunately, with the advent of broadband, 3G networks, WiFi, and everything else getting smaller/faster/better, the need for a quaint little project like ours quickly approached nil. Justin.tv allows you to do Flash streaming from the browser on your laptop. Qik.com and Flixwagon let you stream video live from a mobile phone. Who needs a DV camera and Debian anymore? Long live WiFi TV. ;-)
For the people involved, everyone on the project has moved on to other related projects, each continuing to push the tech in our own way. Drazen Pantic is creating and enabling networked art at Location1, Shawn Van Every is teaching things like interactive telephony at NYU ITP and I'm running ops for a internet video company called Rocketboom.
I hope this email finds you well.
-kc.
On Mar 26, 2008, at 11:33 AM, Paul wrote:
Hello I found this email in an old inbox. Wonder what ever happened to this project. Please advise.
Paul H.
On Feb 8, 2003, at 8:45 PM, Kenyatta Cheese wrote:
Hey ya'll.
I thought I'd share a project that might be of interest and use to some of you.
We're currently developing a system for sending live video and audio over the public [WiFi] wireless network onto the public access cable television network with little fuss.
The primary goal is to provide a way for community producers to go live on
location without needing a production van.
The secondary goal is to lower the time/energy/technical requirements to
create a show by allowing people in your community to using their home
computer, broadband connection, and a custom boot CD (no software
installation required!).
The software that results from this project will be free (and open source
when possible) for anyone to use.
Anyone interested in providing programming/time/energy/money/guinea pig
Thursday, January 13, 2011 at 11:51AM 
