The Hilton Straw

Paris Hilton broke the camel's back yesterday.

Finally, on national telivision, a journalist said, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take it anymore!"

Well, in a sense.

Check out this video.



Ok, if you didn't watch it. Basically, Jay Leno showed a clip of MSNBC's coverage of Paris Hilton going to jail being interrupted for less than 20 seconds of news about the replacement of the country's defense secretary.

This, my friends from the four corners of the world of journalism, is why people don't read newspapers.

I think perhaps this stuck in MSNBC's craw. Check out this video after her release:



Wow, a journalist refused to cover the Paris Hilton story. Wow.

This, I hope, is the bucket of water to the face of journalism.

Indulge me for a moment and try to keep up.

Journalism, the press, the media - whatever you label the world of information merchants - is quaking in its boots. I've been to a number of conventions and helmed a newspaper, so I have spoken with a number of the people behind the scenes. All the old timers are hugging themselves in the corner wondering what is going on. We newcomers aren't frightened at all.

Journalism is vital to any society with lofty aspirations. A free press provides access to the day's intelligence, context, understanding of the nuances and scope of the human condition, a forum - a marketplace of ideas. Journalists who understand and live by these ideals keep this great democratic experiment alive. Those who do not do it great harm.

So, in the end, journalists man the check valves of the endless pipelines of bullshit coursing across this great nation. As George Carlin once said, the media is at the hub of all the obfuscation in our modern word. Advertising, politics, public relations and corporate interests - they all meet here. Journalists must decide how to proceed. Some are decent, ethical people who have lofty goals and aspirations; others just want to make money.

This was the way of things until September 11, 2001. Since then, news changed. The Internet sprang forth with force, people became knee-jerk sensitive to anything anti-establishment, and we went to war. The generations brought up during this post 9/11 insanity see news differently, respond to it differently, because the news changed. Pundits rule the airwaves; fluff infotainment clogs our arteries; no one asks follow-up questions; independent blogs and fake news shows are better sources for the truth than either CNN or Fox News.

Apathy is rampant. Thankfully, a shift is taking place.

In the new market, every newspaper sits shoulder to shoulder with every other newspaper along the Internet. So, the New York Times is one click away from Possum Gorge Gazette. The audience sees no difference; they just want information. So, to the audience, the Internet is one huge newspaper. What separates each publication is how they cover the things the others have no access to. The big guys and the little guys need to understand that.

The newspaper business is really crappy these days. Newspapers readership has been declining for decades, but the Internet delivered the killing blow. This is the era of the slow bleeding out of the conventional press. The same will happen to television.

Newspapers like the Wall Street Journal still make customers pay to view their online content. That's monumentally lame. Journalists who fear the audience, people like Walter E. Hussman Jr., of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette will resist change. They will die off like dinosaurs.

Over the next few years many of the old papers will be edged out. In the old days, it simply cost too much money to topple one of these media franchises, but now anyone with a computer and a camera can provide news coverage of their area. You don't need a printing press to put a local paper out of business, just a competent staff.

I feel as though pundits like The Luddite have zero respect for the audience. I believe people are smart enough to pick and choose. The sort of people who give a shit about their news coverage and care about professionalism can dine at the great media buffet of the Internet and lose nothing.

Journalism is an 'ism' and not an 'ology.' Therefore, it means whatever the people who practice it define it to mean, and the meaning can change over time.

Sure, there are some brilliant writers out there who are also great at getting behind the scenes and telling us what they see. Those people make great journalists and elevate the 'ism.' But, journalists are not afforded any special privileges in our society as are doctors, lawyers or the clergy.

I love good professional journalism (The Luddite seems not to notice how awful most mainstream media has become), but I also love the promise of amateurs and dilettantes providing insight. I can tell the difference.

Again, I love journalism, but I have no love for the paper news. I see it as far inferior to the Internet in most of the ways I prefer to get my information, but I do not think it has no value. The paper news should provide long-form, in-depth coverage, while the Internet should be interactive, immediate, provide an open dialog with the audience and throw in all those nifty doo-dads and videos people love to play with. Television news will be subsumed by the Internet.

Newspapers must become more like magazines to survive, magazines that focus on specific communities. Many of them will not, and I say good-riddance.

People read more news now than ever - truly. Among my friends, little news stories are passed around as videos are linked and emailed. Everyone I know frequents a bevy of news aggregating websites and forums that discuss everything from current events, entertainment, and science to video games, horticulture and classic literature.

The press sucked up to the executive branch after 9/11. Fox News is an irksome joke. CNN spent seven weeks focused on Anna Nicole Smith. They created hysteria over an isolated crazy man with guns on a college campus. This Paris Hilton coverage might be the last straw.

It begs the question: Do we report what the people want to hear about, or what they should want to hear about? The answer seems clear to me. CNN shouldn't feel like a 24-hour Entertainment Tonight.

The public has been fed up with the media for years, but now they have the Internet. They can organize, share, create and comment on the news. The American people are pulling the rug out from under the mainstream media, and they should.

The press is frightened. They don't want to hand power over to the audience, but it is too late. The audience is taking over.

Those who recognize this will be the only ones left behind to report on it.

Macromaniacal

The lolcats phenomenon continues. This week there has been a redoubling of the meme and the pursuit of understanding concerning it across the Internet. I wouldn't be surprised if this soon landed in print somewhere like Time, Newsweek or a major newspaper here or overseas. Perhaps a small blurb on the nightly news is headed our way.

Here are some highlights:

Pop Semiotics
Lolpresidents (original)
Lolpresidents (Fark)
Slate slideshow
Information Week
Detroit Free Press (Freep)

Here are some things I missed when I wrote the original piece:

Lolsquid
Mental Floss
Roflemo
Lolbees
Lolbrarians

The Slate slideshow is remarkably similar to my original essay on the subject which appeared on icanhascheezburger.com, and it mentions most of what I mentioned, yet it doesn't mention my essay. Hrmph. With so much chatter over all of this, I suppose it is easy to fall through the cracks.

Anyway, I had some free time today and decided to put together a central hub for all things image macro we could all use to keep up with the phenomenon as it evolves.

Check it out here.

Original piece here.

Digital Elegies

A fellow college student died recently. He was killed in an automobile accident, and it took everyone who knew him by surprise.

Soon after, the Facebook page of Terry "T.J." Thomas started overflowing with messages of sympathy and remorse, electronic missives shot into the afterlife for all to see.

When I first looked over it in preparation this article, there were only a few wall postings. Now, there are dozens, most written directly to Terry as though the authors expect him to log on from the other side and smile back at the monitor from wherever he is now.

For those of you not in the know, Facebook is a social networking website. Think of it as a cleaner, more mature MySpace. It's extremely popular on most college campuses, mine included among them.

It is a sign of the times we live in. Our modern existence demands we have a cyberspace presence to go along with our meatspace one. Many people have several selves, one for each forum, message board, email and website. Anonymity helped build the web. With social networking websites, you turn the tables and put your real self on the Internet so you can connect with other real people.

It all seems natural; after all, we are social beings. But, reading Terry's Facebook page feels strange. I never knew him, never spoke to him and have never met most of the people who are writing on his wall.

Still, it's all there for anyone to see. Maybe that's a good thing. All those digital requiems floating in the ether for each passersby to ponder, perhaps this is a latent function of social networking, one we never expected to be so good for us, so cathartic.

There is a place on the Internet that collects the MySpace pages of people who have passed away. The site used to have an irreverent, darkly comedic theme to it. Those who had gone on were not honored, but made fun of. It gets lots of hits, and features lots of ads. Now the site is far more reverent, but you used to be able to buy T-Shirts there after perusing through the personal Web pages of those lost to this world, their sites still flickering like candles in a virtual cathedral.

When first logging on, you feel like the ultimate voyeur, rifling through the closets of the dead, looking under their beds and thumbing through their photo albums. Maybe it's just me, but I could only go through about ten before the weight of it was too much.

You read how they died: suicide, car wreck, aneurysm. You look at their photos: clear skin, their good side, that glamour shot they had made before they graduated, and you can sense their living intentions in the pictures they chose to upload, the likes and dislikes they slowly edited over the months and the flippant comments they left with their friends. Somehow, these peculiar, clunky documents keep them alive in a way foreign to us until now.

Then, there are those people who did terrible things. The man who shot up a gay bar and then turned the gun on himself, his MySpace page remained right where he left it for days. MySpace employees eventually took it down, but not before it was archived. The cheeky, giddy messages from his friends were replaced by angry insults from friends and loved ones of the victims. Strangely, some of the victims had their own pages too, commandeered in the same fashion by those left behind.

A few months later, the pages of many of the Virginia Tech students became social networking shrines.

For many of us, our autobiographical epithets are already written and hovering on some distant hard drive, and if there is anything that should clue you in on how different our lives are going to be in the twenty-first century, it is this.

The real-world whispers above your grave will be stolen by the wind, but the digital elegies will burn eternal.

1337 Katz0rz

I keep sane by having a kaleidescope of friends who make sense of reality in drastically differing ways, often in total opposition to each other.

For example, I have friends who hate hippies, love hippies, are hippies and don't believe in hippies. This week, I had conversations about the advantages of the old "Killer Instinct: Gold" combo system, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, fractal quilt design, the editing test for Men's Fitness magazine, the devolution of the Democratic Party, the best way to deal with Hamlet's father's ghost in a modernized production, how to cook a perfect pot of greens, sexual dimorphism in angler fish, whether finding Elvis attractive in the 1968 Comeback Special hints at homosexuality, habeas corpus, the right and wrong way to make prehistoric paper mache animals with coat hangers, continuity in the "He-Man" cartoon series, the origin of the word testify, the connection between "Sasuke" and "Takeshi's Castle," and the advantages of using MDMA in marriage counseling.

I need this sort of thing, or I might explode. I'm an information omnivore. Oh, thank you Flying Spaghetti Monster, thank you for the Internet. Thank you for net culture.

This is why I was an early convert to Internet-based journalism and literature. This is how I became addicted to Wikipedia and Rotten.com.

If you spend/have spent as much time as I do/have online, you begin to sense some of the latent functions of this medium. The Internet (yes, it is capitalized according to the Associated Press Stylebook) is the true melting pot, the true mixing bowl of subcultures and deviance. Out of it have emerged new cultures.

Sure, people self-segregate, but for people like myself this just makes it easier to buzz from flower to flower. I love to visit the Furries and the Kirk/Spock gay erotic art groups, the Bible thumpers and the body modifiers.

Sociologists must go through a lot of pants when they cruise the digital realm because subcultures are constantly spawning subcultures to the point there is a sort of electronic gravy made from all these people meeting online and simmering in the juices of screen-to-screen communication.

Leetspeak and macros are two of my favorite aspects of Internet-specific subcultures.

Like most Web-based subcultures, shared aspects arise in places where people interact the most directly - forums, social networking websites, chatrooms and Web 2.0 incarnations.

Strangely enough, though American culture is far less literate than in previous decades, we read all day long and communicate through written language possibly more than ever so in history. Words are the currency of text messaging, emails, blogs and websites. This may or may not be a good thing, considering how our communications within these arenas are so economical and utilitarian. The long-form, eloquent email is a rare bird in the cyberjungle.

Still, a fusion of sorts between learned, direct language and rapid, practical digital missives takes place with leetspeak and macros. Both relay a great deal of information in a small burst of code. Each depends on the receiver of the information having working knowledge of the culture and its references. In a sense, these serve as argots, and help identify both sides of the information transfer as belonging to the subculture where they appear. The in-joke is part of the communication. The separation of ingroup and outgroup helps drive the rapid evolution of both leetspeak and macros.

Although leetspeak has been around for a while, it has mutated into several formats, thus creating a continuum of Internet prose. At its most basic, leetspeak is pure written language slang originally used to get ideas across faster than spelling out commonly used terms like, "away from keyboard," which became AFK. Over time, usage of the acronym allowed for descriptive expressions like "He's gone AFK."

At the high-end, elitist leetspeak features letters and numbers mixed together and references to computer hacking skills are applied to everyday life; at the low end, cute terms used in text messaging and MySpace are filled mainly with acronyms for common phrases.

High-End Example: p43ar my l337 sk11lz0rz!!!1!!1
Translation: You should be fearful of my powerful computer hacking abilities.
Fear = p43ar; elite = l337; skill = sk11lz0rz.

Notice also the exclamation points include intentional errors simulating the furious smashing of the 1 key while holding shift to get the ! symbol. Someone really going crazy on the !!!!! often misses a shift press in there somewhere. Other words commonly used like "pwnd" follow the same architecture. If you defeated someone at a video game, you might exclaim the slang term, "owned!" This word has its own evolution, but once it enters into the leetspeak lexicon, it gets a new life. People rapidly typing "owned" during online game play commonly missed the o on the keyboard and typed "pwned" instead. Eventually, this became the preferred spelling along with "pwnd." Now, there are several derivatives of the word including the state of defeat as delivered by the utterer of, "Pwnage."

In the beginning, the whole phrase depends on your understanding of not just the language, but the etymology's of its terms and symbols. After repeated uses, the etymology no longer matters, just as it doesn't in normal, common English. The difference with leetspeak is how it evolves at a rapid pace so it may remain fresh and full of in-jokes and references. There is a non-directed, systemic quality to leetspeak encouraging people to play with it, experiment and add. With leetspeak, we have finally created a written language where the rules of slang are dominant.

If you have ever heard someone say "l-o-l," enunciating each letter one at a time, you have heard the the pitter patter of the next steps in human language and this blog entry. People go so far as say the three letters as a word,"Lol," or "Lawl."

Leetspeak hinges on it being read and not spoken. But, as people spend more time online, and spend more time with others who also spend time online, it becomes acceptable to maintain in group status by using leetspeak in spoken form. Thus, I've heard people say (phonetically) "pawnage," "powned," "pawned," "p-owned," and so on.

Ok, thanks for keeping up. Here comes the kicker.

This has a cyclical quality as well. Eventually, these spoken versions of leetspeak are reintroduced into the written language of the Internet. Often, it goes something like this:

Someone uses lol, which turns into the spoken "l-o-l," which then becomes "lol" but sounds like "lawl," and at some point someone in a forum thread, in response to something funny, puts up an image of Lal, the name of Data's daughter from a single, obscure "Star Trek: The Next Generation" episode. It's a big inside joke on several levels, and the creator gets golf claps for pulling together all these references into one simple understatement. Everyone who gets it belongs in the in group, and the behavioral cycle is encouraged and repeated.

The image macro is born out of this cycle.

Forums typically put new posts underneath older ones. So, a direct response to someone's rant about the coming police state in America may be immediately followed by an image of Captain America crying. Everyone gets the reference and the idea. This is a very high-level, metacommunication format.

Consider how difficult it is for computers to identify faces. Consider how confirmation keys are now images so computers can't understand what is being communicated. Consider the new confirmation keys where a series of images are displayed and the user must pick which one of these is not like the other. Computers have a terrible time with this kind of task.

Communication through images is a powerful way to pass complex ideas back and forth. You see Captain America crying, and you understand a concept that would take several paragraphs of exposition.

So, image macros have really blossomed online in the last few years. Many of them take a slant on an existing meme circulating across the Internet. Of course, most of them are also designed to make you laugh along with solidifying in group status and also getting a point across.

For instance:

<-- Someone is being overly dramatic.

Someone has posted something you would like to see more of. -->

<-- Someone is being a dick. These image macros influence new leetspeak, which in turn influences new spoken leetpeak and new macros. All of this churns at a rapid pace and evolves with each new generation. Eventually, something like the "O RLY?" owls or the lolcats comes along and splinters the whole language schema into a new branch where all new in jokes, references and acceptable formats are born.

Lolcats are image macros featuring cats captioned with a specific form of language, one with no definitive label as of yet. I've seen it referred to as Kittahh and Kitteh before, but nothing has stuck. A clinical term, kitty pidgin, has also been coined because there seems to be some sort of order to the way sentences are constructed. The language may also derive from Meowchat, an IRC group who used to use similar diction when pretending to be cats online.

The phrase is usually white text with a solid black outline, and the grammar is consistently awful, as if the cat was trying to speak English but just couldn't get the conjugation right. Some have suggested these macros were inspired by the old cat inspirational poster, "Hang in there." Others suggest these simply fall into place with a long history of using anthropomorphized animals to get our kicks. Most agree the first examples of this meme appeared at the image-sharing message board 4chan where new cat macros were posted on what affectionately became known as Caturdays. These macros are used like any other, but for some reason, these have struck a chord and are mutating at an alarming rate. Now, there are several subgenres of lolcats including:

Invisible








Harbls









Oh Hai








I eated












I has...









I'm in ur...











In addition to the subgenres, new offshoots of the lolcats adhering to the same grammar rules are spawning:

Walrus (Lolrus) w/bucket

Lolgerbil/hamster

Lolgays

Loltrek

Lolgeek

Each subgenere and offshoot influences the others laterally, and the in jokes and references generated by the lolcats appear across the whole universe of macros. Some seem to have storylines. Some are direct responses to previous macro postings. For example, an invisible sandwich might soon be followed by a visible one.




Perhaps this chart will help to make sense of this.




















The great thing about all of this is how we can see new languages forming out of a new medium, and since the pace is abnormally fast, we can watch it evolve over weeks instead of decades.

It also demonstrates how the Internet changes the way we connect and communicate. These words and macros depend on the users manipulating not only the information being passed back and forth, but the format of the codes we agree on to represent the information. Strunk and White would probably be appalled, but then again, maybe not.

After all, a single image of a cat being struck by the sudden realization of how all this connects is the ultimate in clean, succinct and direct dialog.

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