Results tagged “goatse”

From lolcats to goatse to the Zidane headbutt, I've been at least tenuously linked to some of the web's most notable and notorious memes. Naturally, when I heard about ROFLCon, a conference being organized at Harvard to celebrate online memes and celebrities, I knew I had to be there.

The thing is, every time one of these little memes pop up and I get involved, people always ask me "Why are you wasting your time on this kind of trivial crap?" And the truth is, any one of these memes by itself is a relatively meaningless distraction. (Although you'd be surprised how many people have said "Oh, I saw your name mentioned in The Long Tail!", where I'm quoted because of the Goatse T-shirt thing.)

But taken together, the propagation of memes through the Internet is a new channel for creating culture. I think that's a phenomenally important development, and one well worth taking seriously. If that can happen and we're having fun laughing at silly cat pictures at the same time, even better. Because prior to the ascendancy of television as the creator of popular mass culture half a decade ago, the primary method of passing along and popularizing new aspects of culture was through existing social ties. We're returning to that sort of transmission, to culture being mediated by our social networks, though obviously the existence of the Internet has radically changed the way those networks communicate today.

This intersection of silly internet memes and the reinvention of pop culture has taken a lot of interesting forms over the years. Efforts like (the late, lamented) Blogdex and The Contagious Media Project and eventually Buzzfeed were based on the importance of this kind of cultural transmission. Some of the very best blogs, like Waxy and Fimoculous are, appropriately, both propagators and consumers of these memes.

And, frankly, none of this social media stuff so many of us have been working on will have amounted to a hill of beans unless we can change the course of popular culture. The verdict is still out: We've never made a rock star -- if MySpace counted, those bands wouldn't consider getting signed to a major label with a traditional media company as a milestone of success. Snakes on a Plane tanked. Howard Dean is not the President. A funny YouTube video can get a couple minutes of play on a clip show on basic cable. But I think there's a future where we really can do a lot more than just contribute 10 minutes worth of ha-ha to your workday.

So, come join me at ROFLCon. I'll be the one taking everything a little bit too seriously. But don't worry, given the rest of the formidable guest list, you'll still have fun. And in perhaps the only fitting way to end this post, please see "Lolcat r full of win", one of a package of feature-length articles in the Louisville, Kentucky Courier-Journal, which has a bunch of quotes from me. I'm not positive the quotes from me are 100% accurate. Nor, for that matter, am I sure that the cat grammars described there are really accurate, either. But at least it's a fun read, and lookit silly memes, making their way into good, old-fashioned newspapers!

Background: I once wore a funny t-shirt for a photo that appeared in the New York Times, and a bunch of people thought it was kind of amusing, albeit juvenile. It's a reference to Goatse.cx, an extremely offensive shock site. As a result, I get sent virtually all Goatse-related news by my friends, colleagues, and readers.

• A few months ago, Giant ran This Week in Goatse, featuring Johnny Knoxville's cover image in Out. Of course, if Time really meant it when they named web geeks as the Person of the Year, they would have slipped in a hidden Goatse as they did in their infamous immigration cover two years ago.

• Then, two weeks ago, Niall Kennedy replaced an image on a Microsoft blog which had hot-linked to one of his Flickr photos. This one's not as open-and-shut (sorry!) a case to me. One, Niall used to work at Microsoft, which means these folks may well have been his coworkers just a few months ago, and it's not very cool to leave people you work with hanging out to dry.

More relevant, Niall's nominal justification for the image-swap was that the Microsoft team that was using the image in their blog wasn't respecting intellectual property rights. Now, I don't know exactly what percentage of the original Goatse image was used in Niall's modified version, but it was likely too much to be considered fair use. The original image isn't in the public domain. This means one minor intellectual property violation was likely converted into a second one, and the educational point of the image swap was likely lost. The parallels to Microsoft's (admittedly odious) anti-piracy campaigns seem like, well... a stretch.

• Finally, I never imagined when I asserted that you need a Malcolm and a Martin that someone would eventually be asking, "Does this make Goatse our version Malcolm X?"

A little over a year ago, I wore a funny t-shirt while posing for a photo that was published in an article in the New York Times. The shirt's a reference to a popular (and rather offensive) internet meme, and the reaction was immediate and passionate:

• "I can't believe you slipped one over The Man." - Grant Barrett, author The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English
• "Rather than the scary fragmentation of our society into a nation of disconnected people doing their own thing, I think we're reforming into thousands of cultural tribes, connected less by geographic proximity and workplace chatter than by shared interests." - Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief of Wired and author of The Long Tail.
• "@$!%!" - Mena Trott, President and Co-Founder of Six Apart.

I'm 30 years old, and this is now the single thing I'm best-known for in the world. Now, I'm not worried about being a one-hit wonder, but I do see this as a perversely entertaining example of getting what I deserve. I've always said my sense of humor thrives on the absurd, and it doesn't get any more absurd than having this stunt as one of the first things listed on my wikipedia profile. At this rate, my epitaph is likely to be something like "He told great fart jokes."

I'm reminded of this absurdity because I'd been reading The Long Tail. It was inevitable that I'd like the book -- I'm (briefly) in it. Page 182 has a nice nod to my Goatse t-shirt escapades, providing support for my hope that the in-joke worked on multiple levels. (Note to aspiring media hackers: You can't go wrong with a nominally subversive t-shirt if you're looking to gain a small degree of notoriety amongst your peers.)

As of today, 13 months later, there's approximately twelve thousand mentions of the gag. To all those people, and to those whom I've had approach me at various events and conferences, asking me about the picture, I have one request. Can we please make sure to say I'm "the goatse t-shirt guy" and not "the goatse guy"? There's a big difference.

So, I'm in the New York Times today, as part of the story called Loosing Google's Lock on the Past. I'm not a huge fan of how the story turned out, mostly because my quotes are almost incoherent. What I was trying to say is that the expectation for a lot of people is that, when they meet a new person, they'll be able to Google them up and find out all about them, just like you would do if you were researching a company.

And, if you know people are going to be looking you up, then you should have a place (like, say, a blog) that is a definitive source of information about yourself, instead of leaving it to chance. This is something I wrote about in Privacy Through Identity Control a few years ago.

Of course, the hook for the story is that the writer didn't like the picture of herself that came up if you searched for her name. Fortunately for me, the picture of me that accompanies the story will offer plenty of amusement for anybody who's familiar with Internet culture. (All those links are work-safe, but the things linked on those pages most definitely are not.)

Jim Wilson, who took the picture, was a really nice guy, and Stepanie Rosenbloom, who wrote the story, was really professional, so I was a bit reluctant to throw in an easter egg for all my web friends. But now that there's a giant picture in the Times, I'm finding it pretty entertaining.

Update: This post (and picture) got a pretty strong response -- a year later I described some of the reactions that it inspired.