#DIGC 101 Final Blog How to create an internet meme; if a cat playing a keyboard can do it, surely I can as well.
50 internet means in under 100 seconds (Cloud Skull, 2009). A demonstration on how a simple idea becomes popular.
How to create an internet meme; if a cat playing a keyboard can do it, surely I can as well.
Despite the technical ease of filming someone pouring mentos into diet coke or dubbing a Rick Astley song over a random video, there is no simple formula for creating an internet meme. Over 13 weeks I attempted to establish my own internet meme that relied upon user generated content and this essay will explore the techniques and methodologies employed and the various levels of success and failure that came with it. The 13 weeks allowed me to develop the idea behind the meme, experiment with formats and web 2.0 technologies to try reach a broader audience. The project relied upon the convergence of specific ideas relating to folksonomy, language, the blogosphere and user-generated-content.
Five word reviews was started as a means to prompt discussion as well as providing a fun way to inform people about the articles that are reviewed. It was established as a transparent form that would be entertaining and encourage other internet users to participate. The rules were basic, simply write a five word review of something, tag it and post it. Reviews could have been on anything, from an everyday object like someone’s lunch to a Hollywood film, whilst making the review playful and interesting contributed to the success of the review and the eventual project.
Richard Dawkins first used the term meme to describe ‘unit of cultural transmission’ (Callahan et al, 2009, pp97). The analogy is given to compare how memes propagate themselves into a broad sense through imitation as well as their virus like distribution through a variety of modes of transmission (Callahan et al, 2009, pp98). Accordingly, as my meme was very lightweight in terms of technicality, the ability for imitation was not reliant on any strong technical or language skills.
The premise of the five word review meme was to establish a system that eventually relied upon user-generated-content. In order to gain leverage with this user-generated content an appropriate foundation had to be laid. Firstly, it was important to invite imitation, so to escalate the number of units available that could be imitated. In order to do this a lot of the five word reviews I was initially publishing were deliberately harsh and negative in the hope that someone would supply their own review in response. Burgess and Green divide YouTube content into two categories, media that has created from other media practices and adapted and media that is user created and this is the same idea I was attempting to explore with five word reviews and imitation (2009, p41). Whilst this did prove to be true on a small scale, this did not lead into large scale imitation. Secondly, the appropriate channels for communication had to be opened. In my project’s example, Twitter became the initial base. From here a hash tag was developed to allow for easy imitation and tracking. Thirdly, there needs to be widespread coverage. Van Dijk states that “when looking at user-generated content, we also need to take account of a site’s coded abilities to steer and direct users” (2009 pp42).This is one area where my project was lacking. There was not enough content to be imitated, nor was there only one place to source it. This indicates another flaw in my meme’s widespread capability stemming from a lack of central hub. Finally, the reviews had to be easy and playful enough for people to want to contribute
Relying on user-generated-content is one of the fundamental pillars of Web 2.0 technologies. The outsourcing of creating media content to the same users that consume it has an exponential effect on the online economy, as the more content that is produced creates more content in response. According to van Dijk, the multifarious roles of users relating to commerce, content and information in a media environment are currently being redrawn (2009 pp42). Kapila et al take this notion further and place high importance on the user stating that “all sites that rely on user-generated-content, and these trends will become more important as Web 2.0 technologies become increasingly available and widely used (2009 pp146). This indicates that my meme would have been more successful had more content been created. However, creating those high levels of content on my own was not attainable through the multiple online communication channels that were explored.
Limiting reviews to only five words was initially established to follow the web project’s quinary theme of top five lists and reviews. However, once the decision to scrap the lists was made, maintaining the five word limit for the reviews was employed to enhance imitation. Limiting these reviews at five words was also chosen due a familiarity internet users have with short form messages. This familiarity is born out of the extensive use of Instant Messaging, SMS Text Messaging and more recently, Twitter. These three formats all have character and word limitations and as a result, new forms of language and syntax have been developed. Baron et al state that stylistic forms of this communication include “abbreviations, acronyms, emoticons, misspellings, and omission of vowels, subject pronouns, and punctuation” (2007 pp292). This did allow for a number of different ways five word reviews that could be posted. The possibilities included simply listing five words, to the more popular five word phrase; for example “#5wordreview of Chevy Chase : much funnier in the 80s” (Isaacs, 2009). The reviews listed as phrases proved more difficult to write, but they encouraged other users to be creative and develop their own reviews. This phrase format evolved naturally and within the first few weeks proved to be the dominant form of five word review.
Exploring limited character user-generated-content is nothing new to the internet. Inspiration for my meme came from the New South Wales Government supported www.12words.com.au and the compilation of drunken text messages found at www.textsfromlastnight.com. Both these websites rely primarily on user generated content, but differed from mine as they had a central hub to collect all of this content. My meme relied upon multiple formats, such as blogging platforms like Twitter and Tumblr and did not offer any single place to submit or consume all of the content. This multi format approach was intended to broaden the audience of five word reviews, but over time a more central format should have been introduced once more content was being produced. Banks et al see this emerging co-creation as a source of innovation and not using a central hub for my project seemed to stifle this (, 2008 pp407).
To reach a broader audience and allow for expansion of the reviews folksonomy was introduced. This forced a shift away from Twitter and onto the blogging platform Tumblr. Oxford’s A dictionary of the Internet defines folksonomoy as follows:
The term used to describe the tagging of Internet content with some extra information that provides a description of the content, for example tagging is used to add keywords to the photographs in the online photo site Flickr . The term is formed by combining the words folk (the users who carry out the tagging) and taxonomy (a form of structural organization) (Ince, 2009).
Incorporating this idea into my web project would then serve a multiple purpose. Not only would folksonomy play a key role in categorising the content created through the meme, but the categorising itself was a form of user generated content. Gaiser et al agree and state that “authors characterized the playful use of tagging services in which the folksonomy is purposefully manipulated” (2009 pp328). This playful element was a contributing factor to the tagging of the reviews I posted on the Tumblr page. For example, the review of the film Titanic was “Big boat meets bigger iceberg” but the folksonomy included the following further information; Titanic kate leo avatar jim cameron celine dion king of the world 5wordreview (Isaacs, 2009). Tagging like this served a dual purpose, not only would it expand the review, but it was also used as an avenue to increase readership.
The aim of using folksonomy for my project was to increase the readership and to assist in the categorisation of all the reviews. Employing it for user-generated-content is often a calculated gamble as there is no singular controller. Whilst this is a disadvantage, the positives for my specific web project outweighed the negative. For one, as the reviews are limited to five words, folksonomy’s incorporation of metadata, data that describes itself, allows for an elaboration of the review.
Once folksonomy had been introduced, my web project explored another avenue. Flickr is a web site that combines elements of social networking with online image hosting. As the website focuses on the element of community, Flickr represented an arena where five word reviews could be applied directly to images as well as adding to the online community. Murray states that Flickr’s tagging system offers a different function to commenting and is a way of introducing users to different pools and contacts (2008, pp159). Murray continues to explore this idea of community and democratisation saying “bottom-up classification system that not only decentralizes control over many collections and pools, but also contributes to the development of a non-hierarchical community aesthetic. As an example of folksonomy, Flickr’s tags help connect people with similar interests” (2009, pp159). Flickr employs an ‘interestingness’ algorithm that calculates an images popularity through the number of comments left, times an image is favourites and how many galleries it has been added to. Using this function, I would search for the most interesting images, add them to my own galleries, favourite them and leave five word reviews. This served a dual purpose, as the images popularity would climb and so would the potential audience for five word reviews. According to Elmer, this same technique has been used exclusively as a means of increasing the visibility and user traffic to the site via search engines by popular websites for some time (2009 pp778). As this was performed late, the success of using Flickr has been difficult to meter, however, the account has proved more popular than my personal one, which was created earlier.
A cause for concern when generating content for the web project was spam. It is almost de rigueur to detest spam and the flooding of content onto the internet and this became a key factor in producing content. Grimes states that despite the scorn associated with spam, most users do not alter their online activity (2006 pp514). This was something I found differed on Twitter. When a separate five word review account was established independently to my personal one I found the number of followers would fluctuate. Whilst producing greater amounts of content was establishing more attention and ‘re-tweets’, it was also causing followers to depart due to the spamming of their twitter account.
The success of this project was varied. On a small scale a mini five word review community was established and began to generate its own content. To this extent, a search on Twitter for the #5wordreview will indicate how much content was created by myself and how much was user generated. However, at this stage, the project has failed to make a widespread impact. Castells says the global public sphere is built around media communication systems and Internet networks, particularly Web 2.0 social networks and this was an area that five word reviews took aim (2008 pp90). For all intents and purposes, five word reviews did function as a meme. Although I started it, I had little control on how the reviews were chosen and developed, adhering to Dawkin’s definition. However, whilst laying the foundation for the meme was strong, adapting to a widespread level proved difficult in the 13 weeks.
References:
Banks, J, Humphreys, S 2008, ‘The Labour of User Co-Creators: Emergent Social Network Markets?’, Convergence, vol. 14, pp. 401 – 418
Baron, N, Ling, R 2007, ‘Text Messaging and IM: Linguistic Comparison of American College Data’, Journal of Language and Social Psychology, vol. 26, pp. 291 – 298
Burgess J, Green J 2009, ‘YouTube: Online video and participatory culture’, Polity pp. 38-57
Castells, M 2008, ‘The New Public Sphere: Global Civil Society, Communication Networks, and Global Governance’, The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 616, pp. 78 - 93
Callahan, J, Sandlin, J , 2009, Deviance, Dissonance, and Détournement: Culture jammers` use of emotion in consumer resistance in Journal of Consumer Culture, Mar 2009; vol. 9: pp. 79 - 115.
Cloud Skull 2009, ‘50 internet memes in under 100 seconds’, accessed 3/11/2009,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_6XQp08pgM
Elmer, G, Langlois, G 2009, ‘Wikipedia leeches? The promotion of traffic through a collaborative web format’, New Media & Society, vol. 11, pp. 773 - 794
Gaiser, B, Panke, S 2009, ‘”With My Head Up in the Clouds”: Using Social Tagging to Organize Knowledge’, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, vol. 23 pp. 318 - 349
Grimes, G 2006, ‘Online Behaviors Affected by Spam’, Social Science Computer Review, vol. 24, pp. 507 – 515
Ince, D 2009, ‘Folksonomy’, A Dictionary of the Internet. Oxford University Press, Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. Wollongong University, accessed 3 November 2009, http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t12.e4197
Kapila, D, Royal, C 2009, ‘What’s on Wikipedia, and What’s Not…?:Assessing Completeness of Information’, Social Science Computer Review, vol. 27, pp. 138 - 14
Isaacs, l 2009 ‘#5wordreview of Chevy Chase’, weblog post, fivewordreview, , 24 October, accessed 3/11/2009, http://twitter.com/5wordreview /
Isaacs, l 2006 ‘#5wordreview of Titanic, weblog post, 5 word reviews, 26 October, accessed 3/11/2009, http://5wordreviews.tumblr.com/
Murray, 2008 ‘Digital Images, Photo-Sharing, and Our Shifting Notions of Everyday Aesthetics’, Journal of Visual Culture, vol. 7, pp. 147 - 163
van Dijck, J 2009, ‘Users like you? Theorizing in user-generated content’, Media, Culture & Society, vol. 31, pp. 41 - 55
