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4 days ago
Mike Rugnetta
Posted project update #8If Book Writing Had A Horizon...
As required by our contract with Breadpig here is mine and Stephen's public shake-weight apology for being the slowest book-writers in the history of books about Internet Culture. This happened at O'Reilly's IGNITE TOC, and if you'd like to watch us talk about why No One Should Ever Write a Book About The Internet... you can do that right here.
BACK TO BUSINESS
Ok. So this update is long overdue, but luckily it is not both overdue and anti-climactic. Because guess what, you guys?
WE HAVE AN EDITOR.
His name is Alex and he looks like a normal dude (a very smart normal dude, fwiw) but he might as well actually look something like this as far as we're concerned:
This means we have actually written a number of things all of which are worthy of being edited. During our meetings with Alex we've been learning a ton about what we're lacking in the area of Meme Related Backstory, what we need to connect all of our ideas, how to develop a book wide through-line, the best order for all of our chapters and many other book-related housekeeping (book-keeping?) items.
There is also the looming übertask of media management, but we'll cower before that monolith once we're actually standing in front of it.
OK SO BUT REALLY WHEN?
I want very badly to say "Books in hands by Christmas!". But if there is one thing I have learned it is that writing a book is full of unknown-unknowns. Mostly probably because we've never written a book before and had no idea how hard it is.
What I will say is THIS: we want to start the process of opening the research database to backers, and then the public, sooner rather than later. During our next editing meeting we're going to have a talk about the role we think the database will play in the editing process and after that's been sussed out ... well, lets just say...
IN THE MEAN TIME...
If you have questions, want to know more about how we're doing, or what we're working on in fine detail (or if you just want to say hi) just drop us a line at memefactory at google groups dot com or on twitter at @MemeFactory or here on Kickstarter.
We love hearing from you guys; not to mention the occasional "Hey so um... whats going on over there?" is sometimes the candle-under-the-butt we need. :D
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on April 9
Mike Rugnetta
backed a project
Shadowrun Returns by Harebrained Schemes LLC
Shadowrun Returns brings back one of our most original & cherished game settings as a 2D turn-based RPG for tablets & PC.
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459% funded $1,836,447 pledged
- 36,276 backers
- Funded Apr 29, 2012
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on April 3
Mike Rugnetta
backed a project
blodeJazz 7" vinyl by Todd Treece
Help fund the production of a 7" record featuring music generated by the website traffic of sparkfun.com!
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114% funded $971 pledged
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- Funded May 03, 2012
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on March 28
Mike Rugnetta
backed a project
Beringer Guitar Museum (Interactive Site) by James Bolenbaugh
A user-generated and collaborative collection of the musical instruments created, and frequently invented by Ted Beringer (1921-2006).
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129% funded $7,761 pledged
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- Funded Apr 27, 2012
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on January 20
Mike Rugnetta
commented on a projectIt is! We've been exceptionally lax on the updates, haven't we? Rest assured it's because we're all working our butts off right now. We actually had a conversation w/ Breadpig yesterday about our EDITORS... which is very exciting. Suffice it to say hopefully within the next month or two everyone will start seeing PDFs of finished chapters - and eventually the whole book. Those w/ db access can see a bunch of it right now!
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on December 18
Mike Rugnetta
commented on a projectHooray! Congrats!
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on December 18
Mike Rugnetta
backed a project
2012 Avant Music Festival by Avant Media
Five nights of music from the evolving Avant-Garde Curated by Randy Gibson and Megan Schubert
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107% funded $1,070 pledged
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- Funded Dec 18, 2011
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on October 17, 2011
Mike Rugnetta
Posted project update #7Noses, MEET GRINDSTONES!!!1eleven
With the exception of a small work-vacation in Portland (gratuitous Put a bird on it joke here) for the great and educational ROFLCon Summit - at which we three hosted panels but did not perform an official MemeFactory show - MemeFactory Enterprises have been hard at work crafting what is possibly the longest opening sentence to a Kickstarter update EVAR. Also: WRITING THAT BOOK YOU'VE BEEN HEARING SO MUCH ABOUT. :D
If you've been paying attention you probably noticed that our promised deadline came and went with nary a book release. If we've learned anything during this whole process, we've learned that writing a book is hard. And slow. But an extreme amount of fun! But also hard. We're working with the folks at Breadpig to figure out our perfect new-release-date-which-we-promise-to-stick-to-for-real-this-time-maybe. It's looking like around the end of January. Of course we'll keep everybody in the know. <3
So Many Ideas!
The three of us are all 2-or-more complete chapters deep at this point. If you happen to have access to the research wiki ( http://memefactory.org/research ), please do come and hang out with us. Comment! Send us emails if you don't like comments! Stop us on the street and tell us we're bad at grammar! We've learned through this process we're all very bad at mixing our tenses so those second, third, fourth and fifth eyes are always helpful.
For funsies, what follows are a few selections in various states of completion for those without access:
Patrick's Animal Economy
Patrick is working on a chapter about the Animal Economy of internet videos. He recently gave a talk at Web2.0 Expo about his research for this chapter!
Below we have reproduced a section from one of Patrick's other chapters tentatively titled Faces and Paralanguage:
In the thirty years following 1982, the number of methods for communicating online would go through the roof, but the vast majority of the bulletin board's successors would fall into one of three categories: post, message, or chat. Those individuals termed "digital natives" have grown up with these split modes of communication all around them, and have likely internalized the differences between them, but making said differences explicit is useful.
the Post -- most similar to the bulletin board ancestor, the Post is defined by being slow and public. Posts can be in dialogue or stand-alone, and can be truly public or just semi-public (public to a small community). The comments left of blogs are Posts, the discussions held on Wikipedia talk pages are Posts. Forums are made up entirely of Posts.
the Message -- essentially as old as the bulletin boards in question, the Message is defined by being slow and private. The vast majority of what we think of as Messages are emails. They are direct communications between two individuals, and often recreate the structure of old offline letters. While email tends to be viewed as a sort of basic feature or utility of the internet, numerous other companies and services have developed more proprietary versions of the Message -- Facebook, LinkedIn, even Flickr. Essentially any website/service that promises a social experience comes complete with its own method for sending Messages.
the Chat -- the youngest of the three, the Chat is defined by being fast and private. The earliest popular example was IRC (internet relay chat) but the form was ultimately popularized by AOL's Instant Messenger. This software brought the Chat into the lives of the most important group: teenagers and children. Since then the Chat has been integrated into other contexts. It piggy backs on top of Gmail and Facebook, and with the advent of smart phones the text message has become simply another instance of the Chat.
(Okay, okay...we have fast/slow and public/private, but no explanation as to what is fast and public? As gross as it may sound, fast & public is probably best defined as the Tweet, and is the youngest of all of the forms.)
Stephen's Thoughts On Trolling
Stephen is currently working on a chapter about trolling. Here is a brief little snippet:
A popular phrase of recent memory is “The Internet Is Serious Business.” This catchy little number means both itself and the opposite of its literal meaning simultaneously.
It is a warning - a warning that the internet is full of nightmarish awfulness: pictures, video, and text that will upset you, things so terrible that they may haunt you forever, things that cannot, as is also often said on the internet, “be unseen”.
It is also a note of encouragement, of reconciliation: nothing that happens on the internet really matters. Internet is Serious Business? Whatever anyone says or does to you on the internet, you’re the same you that sat down at the computer. Nothing of any significance has changed. And this is why, through one reading, the troll could be viewed as a kind of benevolent joker - fall in to his trap and suffer, but perhaps the suffering will grant you the epiphany that none of it really matters.
The internet is a game we're playing, and trolls torture those who forget.
Mike's Coming of Age of the Animated GIF
And finally I've just finished a chapter on the short but tumultuous history of the Animated GIF. Here are some of the final thoughts presented in that chapter:
As we have become more comfortable with the web, we have become more comfortable with the animated gif. And as the lines between text and image blur even further we see more creative uses of the animated gif (and other image formats) as illustration and sometimes even replacement for text-only sentiments. On platforms like Tumblr it is not uncommon to see posts made up almost entirely of animated gifs - maybe strung together with some conjunctions and appositive phrases here and there - which tell an entire story in moving images.
Tom Moody, a digital artist who makes GIF related works, is often quoted as describing the animated GIF as "ubiquitous mini-cinema". While the descriptor may verge a little on the hyperbolic, the claim does hold at least a little water and gets us started down a path to figuring out why we all love the GIF so much.
Until Next Time!
Thats all for now. As always, you can keep up to date with all the details of our work on twitter (@memefactory, @mikerugnetta, @str1cken, @patrickdavison). Feel free to drop any of us a line to say hi, otherwise you'll hear from us once there's more news to report.
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Doctor Popular on May 4
Hey guys, with ROFLcon here I just started wondering if there were any updates about this book. Can't wait!
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on August 10, 2011
Mike Rugnetta
Posted project update #6Off To The Races. If the Races Were More Like Writing a Book.
Hey Friends! Just a quick update to let everyone know where we're at. We're in a round of revisions right now which means we've all written something that we all agree is good enough to be edited. HOORAY! We consider this to be a great success.
The process is long and more than a little challenging (have any of you ever tried to write a book with your two best friends? HOLY MOLY) but extremely rewarding. We're hoping within the next week or so to send out a pretty-close-to-how-we-imagine-it-will-be-in-print Introduction Chapter. We're all three of us pretty skeptical of the word "done" at this point, so for those backers who are getting chapters "As They're Completed"... start mentally preparing your fine selves for giving us comments, because we'd love to hear them.
Speaking of which, as a fun teaser and also to serve as a little bit of proof for those of you without access to the MemeFactory research database, reproduced below are some paragraphs from each of the sections we are all currently working on.
We hope you enjoy! And are sufficiently teased, of course...
INTRODUCTION
An excellent example of internet meme development is the unofficial, unspoken codification of just what exactly LOLspeak is. The misspellings and bad grammar are not haphazard or random - they have been standardized through repetition in LOLcat iterations. The imitation of those errors found most pleasing or humorous build the LOLspeak language to the degree that LOLspeak itself became its own internet meme. For example, the LOLspeak standard misspelling of 'secret' as 'sekrit' became standard through the sharing and reposting of images containing the word 'sekrit' and the use of that spelling by people who had seen 'sekrit' images.
The standardization of the language has gone on long enough that it is possible, now, to incorrectly misspell a word in LOLspeak.
INTERNET FOLKLORISTICS
A major characteristic of folklore is the free license one is given to change and adapt well known forms. In the same way the performer might change a ballad to suit his or her need, internet culture also blurs the line between creator and audience. Where traditional folklore had cowboys to consume and distribute different version of ballads, internet folklore has the community member to share and mutate digital culture. At any point those consuming the media might become the ones performing or sharing the media; this makes the consumers and sharers of folklore as important as the forms and stories themselves.
HAIKU DOG
... So, to summarize, the Haiku came from a cultural practice where multiple people would collaborate to create new media that was in dialogue with one another and it just so happened that the most concise and expressive part of that practice became so popular that it became its own cultural form. Over 1000 years later Advice Dog can be described in exactly the same language. Once upon a time a set of friendly neighborhood internet users were exchanging posts on a message board (cultural practice, multiple people, new media, in dialogue) when all of a sudden someone published the first Advice Dog: this first Advice Dog is cute and concise and popular, and it isn't long before it too has become it's own poetic form.
THE END
Everyone get back to work! <3
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Randy Davison on August 10, 2011
Do you have a tense conflict in this sentence from the INTRODUCTION paragraph?
"The imitation of those errors found most pleasing or humorous build the LOLspeak language to the degree that LOLspeak itself became its own internet meme."
The verb "build" is present tense? But the verb "became" is past tense? Could it be something like, "The imitation of those errors found most pleasing or humorous build the LOLspeak language to the degree that LOLspeak itself is becoming its own internet meme."
or
"The imitation of those errors found most pleasing or humorous built the LOLspeak language to the degree that LOLspeak itself became its own internet meme."
Or was it a simple spelling error, "build" instead of "built"?
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on July 27, 2011
Mike Rugnetta
Posted project update #5Guys! We're Still Alive!
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Wow! Yeah, we're really sorry for leaving everyone in the dark there for a bit. But trust us, we got crankin' between then and now. Updates were scheduled but then guess what? EVERY MEMBER OF MEMEFACTORY HAD APARTMENT DRAMA. D:
Long story short Patrick and I had to move and Steve "dodged a bullet" as he put it. And now we're back to work after an extremely real-life-stressful couple weeks. On with the news!
CONTRIBUTORS
We are extremely pleased to announce that we have secured not one, but two amazing contributors for the MemeFactory book. Biella Coleman will be writing the MemeFactory Book introduction, and Tim Hwang will be painting some pictures of the possible future of the internet. We are sure the talents and genius of Biella and Tim will serve to improve your reading experience and also make us - the MemeFactory guys - feel slightly less smart.
RESEARCH WIKI
The research wiki is fully underway. Everyone who should have gotten a username has done so and we even have some comments on in-progress chapters (see next heading for details on that stuff). If anyone feels as though they should have gotten a username and didn't, please drop me a line and let me know! Those who have access, you can keep tabs on us by checking the writing meeting notes. Links are posted on the bottom of the front page.
Also! Steve has started a writing process tumblr at http://memefactorybook.tumblr.com/ He calls it the "extracurricular writing blog for thoughts about process unrelated to the actual topic of the book itself."
We've also been working really close with friend and developer extraordinaire Greg Leuch on a piece of software which will allow us to save and track media as we are doing research and working in the wiki. The project which has come of this is called MetaFetch, and was inspired by our need for citable, attribution friendly media collection and local storage. We think it's the coolest.
CHAPTERS IN PROGRESS
We currently have a few chapters in progress.
Patrick is working on a chapter trying to suss out the idea of the Internet Haiku, using Advice Dog as the central media specimen. He is also working on a chapter which tackles the idea of reaction faces, and the way the media related to them and other facial expression memes can be used as a kind of para-language.
Steve is working on a comprehensive introduction chapter which covers all the ground work for understanding what a meme is, how they operate, where you can find them, why we think they're important and the million other things which fit in at the ground floor of this book.
I'm working on a chapter relating the study of internet memes to the collection of folk songs, and setting up the idea of Internet Folklorism based upon some ideas I co-presented with the former Know Your Meme crew at Web 2.0 in San Francisco this year. I'm also working on a chapter which asks more questions than it is seeming to answer about the nature of media "ownership" on the internet.
STEVE GREW A BOOK BEARD
But then he shaved'ed it. Too hot for book beards!
Holy moly, this was a huge update! Hopefully there will be more, smaller ones in the future. For anyone who is interested in keeping up with us on a day to day basis, you can follow us on twitter at @MemeFactory or individually at @mikerugnetta, @patrickdavison and @str1cken
And once again, thank you all so much for your support! Without you guys none of this would be possible. 1,000,000x <3 and Thank You!
Mike Rugnetta
Brooklyn, NY
I am 1/3rd of MemeFactory: a performative lecture about the Internet. Memefactory is produced by WhatWeKnowSoFar - which is three dudes who live in Brooklyn. Stephen Bruckert – The middle. Neckbeard. http://srsbsnss.com Patrick Davison – The t... view more
heh... that's one I haven't been called before... thanks.