A bit of vindication today.

It was two weeks ago that Trish saw a picture of a cat on my laptop and exclaimed “No more LOLCats!” She is so annoyed with the cats (or rather the frequency with which I will make a cultural reference to one) that even an analysis of the visual rhetoric involved won’t warm her up to the topic.

Well, apparently there is a reason, and Yale researchers have provided it: Evolution Explains Why Lolcats Control Your Mind

Perhaps that is why Rae Maor predicted (shouting “LOLCATS will not die”, I might add) that 2008 will not see the end of our anthropomorphized friends.

Ahh, now that is nice. So Trish, this one is for you. I R B lulzin thrus the O-8s.

(via Digg/io9)

Hall Johnson, an American composer in the 20th century, is praised for bringing African American spirituals into the concert halls. It is interesting that this transition was not brought about by a wealthy financier, or changing cultural trends. It was Johnson’s arrangements that provided the ability for these spirituals to extend beyond their original community. But one has to wonder, would I have ever heard powerful pieces such as Lord, I Don’t Feel No Ways Tired, had it not been for Johnson? And if you consider his arrangements as more or less cultural translations, have I ever heard the song at all?

In Friedman’s book, The World is Flat, he describes an interconnected world that has emerged as a by product of “The Ten Forces That Flattened the World.” The list is comprised of technological and business innovations and the cultural implications of their adoption. Windows, the Internet, Out/In-sourcing, and even Blogs are covered by the wide net cast with each item on his list. The items on his list, however, serve less to isolate particular phenomena, and instead seem to capture an innovative trend or period. Each item captures a solution to some hurdle in production, and specifically, production of the self. (more…)

Approximately one year ago, Eric Nakagawa launched a site entitled “I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?” and provided one internet meme the focal point with which to start one of our quirkier fads.

A year later most people are familiar with the “LOLCat”, even if they don’t know it by name. The unmistakable combination of cat and garbled text that began with Happy Cat is now inextricably entrenched workforce culture. During last semester’s finals, when disclosed that I had wandered the library navigating browsers to LOLCats, what I didn’t mention was that it was the LOLCats posted everywhere in paper form (they were being used for some flier on stress) that had me thinking about LOLCats in the first place. Some how they had escaped from the ‘nets.

Last fall I had the opportunity to learn a distressingly large amount about LOLCats while writing do research on media comparisons. The resulting paper argued that the relationships between image and text in both LOLCats and silent films share striking similarities. Both captions and intertitles were introduced to augment and extend the possibilities of the visual content. Probably more important, the paper included plenty of pictures of really cute cats.

In the name of those cute cats, I am posting it here. Enjoy!

wants moar: the appropriation of text in the framing of visual media a comparison between LOLcats and intertitles

(cartoon courtesy of xkdc.com)

It’s official. I am presenting some of my craigslist research this Spring at the Space, Place and the Imagination conference at the University of Rhode Island. “Intimately tied to our understanding of ourselves and others, our environment(s), and our institutions, space and place shape who we are and how we understand the world in which we live.”

My presentation will focus on message production and content regulation in a space absent of persistent identities. Read the abstract after the jump. (more…)

At what point does the term “missed connection” abandon it’s craigslist roots and run a-muck with an evolving definition of its own? Over the past year I have heard the term increasingly used outside of a craigslist context, and so I ask you: What would you define a missed connection?

Take the recent Levi’s commercial:

(As a side note, Levi’s ran two seperate ads, one with a man and one with a women in the phone booth. You can see the other one here.)

I have spent the last few months fascinated with this ad, but haven’t been able to put my finger on why. (more…)

gnovis ran an article of mine today on Facebook Relationships. Here is a teaser to convince you go and read it:

It is an age-old story, boy/girl/* meets boy/girl/*, they go on a few dates, and all seems well. Then one of the two (or three?) brings up a daunting topic: the Facebook Relationship status.

Read it here!
Facebook Relationships and Information Architecture @ gnovis

Fred Stutzman on his blog Unit Structures mentioned an NPR segment on privacy issues online from the most recent Weekend Edition. Fred’s humorous prediction of paranoia in listeners is unfortunately not far off. While scholars James Rule and Kathryn Montgomery were both quick to point out that different generations have different notions of privacy, I am generally frustrated that we do not discuss the value of privacy in relative terms.

I am split on this issue. I find it disappointing to hear Dr. Montgomery (director of American University’s Center’s Youth, Media and Democracy project) answer these difference by suggesting that “we need to help them understand what privacy is and to make more conscious decisions about what they share.” (more…)

While I tend to blog along the more social and theoretical sides of technology, I thought I would share a post that Phil Windley just threw up on his blog, featuring the top downloaded content on IT Conversations for 2007.

IT Conversations provides some of the most insightful interviews and programs, including a long time favorite, Tech Nation. If you haven’t checked it out, you should. Phil, in an executive director role, has definitely poured his heart and soul into it.

I actually met Phil several years ago while I was doing the Dot.Com thing in “Little Silicon” (a.k.a. Utah Valley, just south of Salt Lake City). He would host (and I hope he still does) a monthly CTO forum that brought some wonderfully intelligent people together to talk about geeky, but always fun, topics. While Phil might not know this, it was here that I first began to consider the connections between culture and digital life on the internet. (more…)

One of the more difficult task I had this past semester was to present on the Lee Edelman’s daunting work No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Judith Butler shows us the way in which heteronormativity is performed, and Judith Halberstam explains how queerness situates itself is both space and time. Through Edelman, queerness is divorced from anything gay and reinvisioned as a disrupting force for heteronormativity, the children it produces, and the future into which we all invest.

Making his clever argument through a Lacanian psychoanalytic and semiotic framework, Edelman questions our conception of the future. If our notion of the future is constantly changing, he asks, why then are we mortgaging our present in the name of a future we will never reach?

Want more to know more? Check out the poster.

Coincidentally, I found a brilliant review of Edelman’s book on k-punk’s blog. Unfortunately I found it too late to help me on this project, but it is a great review of his work, and certainly worth a read.

If you had surveyed the Facebook status of CCT students during finals you would have seen something strange. During finals you always see a predictable number of Facebook/IM/<communication device here> messages that are mildly suicidal. I must admit that I took to wandering around the library in the middle of the night (taking a “break” from writing my papers) and navigating to this LOLcat on a dozen or so catalog computers. (I have been informed that this is not funny, but at 4:30 am I found it hysterical.)

1st year students in CCT, however, had a different type of project ahead of them. There were requirements, of course, but nothing to restrict the form of the final. I think Tatyana’s Facebook status captured it best:

Tatyana is I can’t believe i’m writing a monologue as a FINAL PAPER. :P.

There is a tale of former student (and by “former student” I mean my friend Molly Moran, and by “tale” I mean she confirm the story) who turned in a maniquine covered in philosphy quote for her final; a sculptural piece of sorts.

As for me? You remember this guy right? Well, would you like to the biography of the Dramatic Prairie Dog?