No. More evolutionarily mature fandoms are stronger, more resilient fan communities. They’ve been around a while and have regular customs, language, and practices. Newer, less organized fandoms are ones that haven’t developed many of these features yet. These fandoms are more vulnerable to outside influence and can have their development stunted by it. (See Tricia Wang’s #elasticself or this recent Pew Research study for all of the reasons why.) The fandoms that Aja’s article speaks about concentrates on the more evolutionarily mature ones. They have a season/book/movie release or two under their belts. They’ve had time to express their love for their fandom, identify other fans, and start sharing ideas and emotions and building relationships.  Repeated enough times, these practices grow and suddenly the fans find themselves with their own community, culture, and language. In Deleuze-speak, Tumblr has been territorialized with this fandom. Eventually, these fandoms get to the point where they become full-blown hierarchical societies so resilient that they will actively fend off anything that feels like an attack on their community. These are the fandoms that Aja speaks of. These are the fandoms that we as a Tumblr community are most proud of. These are the fandoms that can balance out and absorb a big corporation’s “official” presence and all of the advertising, marketing, personnel, and money resources they bring.
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No.

More evolutionarily mature fandoms are stronger, more resilient fan communities. They’ve been around a while and have regular customs, language, and practices.

Newer, less organized fandoms are ones that haven’t developed many of these features yet. These fandoms are more vulnerable to outside influence and can have their development stunted by it. (See Tricia Wang’s #elasticself or this recent Pew Research study for all of the reasons why.)

The fandoms that Aja’s article speaks about concentrates on the more evolutionarily mature ones. They have a season/book/movie release or two under their belts. They’ve had time to express their love for their fandom, identify other fans, and start sharing ideas and emotions and building relationships.  Repeated enough times, these practices grow and suddenly the fans find themselves with their own community, culture, and language.

In Deleuze-speak, Tumblr has been territorialized with this fandom.

Eventually, these fandoms get to the point where they become full-blown hierarchical societies so resilient that they will actively fend off anything that feels like an attack on their community.

These are the fandoms that Aja speaks of. These are the fandoms that we as a Tumblr community are most proud of. These are the fandoms that can balance out and absorb a big corporation’s “official” presence and all of the advertising, marketing, personnel, and money resources they bring.

Quote IconYou will never get a fan to care more about clothes, cars, shoes, or household products than they do about whether Sterek is going to happen on Teen Wolf.

Why Yahoo can buy Tumblr, but it can’t buy Fandom

The unspoken truth behind Yahoo’s much-touted bid to court Tumblr’s younger demographic is that for all intents and purposes, Tumblr culture is fandom culture. There are still plenty of other spaces where fandom exists, but we have never had such a megalithic and central social platform so visibly united under one umbrella. …

Even as Yahoo insists nothing will change, business analysts and media experts are speculating that the company intends to plumb Tumblr for its advertising potential. But if that’s the case, Yahoo should know that when you market to fandom, you have to adopt a whole new way of thinking about marketing, brand advertising, and consumer loyalty. [READ MORE]

(please read this article omg i have never wanted to *drop mic* until this day)

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(via dailydot)

Aja’s post should be required reading for anyone doing brand management anywhere outside of Facebook. That said…

… this article is about some of the more evolutionarily mature fandoms and not the less organized ones. There are still plenty of ways that this can (and probably will) go wrong for those fan communities and for that bad behavior to infect other fandoms.

But there are also ways that this can (and hopefully will) go very very right.

Quote IconThe feels are sexual, but not merely or exclusively so. They are distinct from pre-internet emotions in that they are more like feelings for feelings’ sake. The internet, with its wealth of intangible content, is the feels’ native land; an internet crush is the feels personified. You can’t do anything about the feels except feel them, then maybe go look at some more pictures online. They are an appetite that does not expect to be sated, an intensity without any perceivable end.

Rachel Monroe at The Awl. The Killer Crush: The Horror Of Teen Girls, From Columbiners To Beliebers (via protoslacker)

Here’s what I consider the brilliant bit because it’s the part I believe in:

Intensity without an outlet is a dangerous thing; it is also sometimes where revolution comes from. 

reblogallthenerdythings: we have literally created our own dialogue? language? here on tumblr and i think that is the most amazing thing ever please disregard my shitty editing skills Every web community develops customs but not every web community develops a pidgin. Web pidgins usually emerge from a mix of isolation from authority (nobody is policing speech or grammar) and an unbounded sense of identity (people feel free to experiment with new and novel forms of communication.) Most of the elements of Tumblr’s pidgin were developed and flourished elsewhere (LiveJournal, 4chan, slashdot, email, IM, MMOs, etc.) Once here, they mutated to better fit both the expanded space and new constraints of the platform (tumblr tags are longer than Twitter hashtags, emoticons became reaction gifs.) Eventually, their “important” features bared little resemblance to their predecessors and the resulting collection was seen to be Tumblr’s “own”. So the question I’m interested in is: what happens from here? As a user, my hope is that the culture continues inviting new language and behaviors and continues evolving. But self-awareness (as seen in the screenshots above) sometimes leads to an urge to protect the culture that’s visible.  And that protection easily devolves into elitism and power and authority (see Digg, reddit, 4chan). And if that happens — if people can’t find isolation from authority and an unbounded sense of identity — they’ll move on. Funny how that works.
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reblogallthenerdythings: we have literally created our own dialogue? language? here on tumblr and i think that is the most amazing thing ever please disregard my shitty editing skills Every web community develops customs but not every web community develops a pidgin. Web pidgins usually emerge from a mix of isolation from authority (nobody is policing speech or grammar) and an unbounded sense of identity (people feel free to experiment with new and novel forms of communication.) Most of the elements of Tumblr’s pidgin were developed and flourished elsewhere (LiveJournal, 4chan, slashdot, email, IM, MMOs, etc.) Once here, they mutated to better fit both the expanded space and new constraints of the platform (tumblr tags are longer than Twitter hashtags, emoticons became reaction gifs.) Eventually, their “important” features bared little resemblance to their predecessors and the resulting collection was seen to be Tumblr’s “own”. So the question I’m interested in is: what happens from here? As a user, my hope is that the culture continues inviting new language and behaviors and continues evolving. But self-awareness (as seen in the screenshots above) sometimes leads to an urge to protect the culture that’s visible.  And that protection easily devolves into elitism and power and authority (see Digg, reddit, 4chan). And if that happens — if people can’t find isolation from authority and an unbounded sense of identity — they’ll move on. Funny how that works.
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reblogallthenerdythings:

we have literally created our own dialogue? language? here on tumblr and i think that is the most amazing thing ever please disregard my shitty editing skills

Every web community develops customs but not every web community develops a pidgin. Web pidgins usually emerge from a mix of isolation from authority (nobody is policing speech or grammar) and an unbounded sense of identity (people feel free to experiment with new and novel forms of communication.)

Most of the elements of Tumblr’s pidgin were developed and flourished elsewhere (LiveJournal, 4chan, slashdot, email, IM, MMOs, etc.) Once here, they mutated to better fit both the expanded space and new constraints of the platform (tumblr tags are longer than Twitter hashtags, emoticons became reaction gifs.) Eventually, their “important” features bared little resemblance to their predecessors and the resulting collection was seen to be Tumblr’s “own”.

So the question I’m interested in is: what happens from here?

As a user, my hope is that the culture continues inviting new language and behaviors and continues evolving.

But self-awareness (as seen in the screenshots above) sometimes leads to an urge to protect the culture that’s visible.  And that protection easily devolves into elitism and power and authority (see Digg, reddit, 4chan).

And if that happens — if people can’t find isolation from authority and an unbounded sense of identity — they’ll move on.

Funny how that works.

Emoticon, Emoji, Text: Pt. 1, I Second That Emoticon by Tom McCormack Tom McCormack does a deep dive on the early days of the emoticon: The conjuring of a voice where there is only actually just a bunch of static text is a huge part of the Magick of good writing. But much of the written word is not trying to be good, in this sense. 
 The CMU CS bboard could have dictated that all jokes be written with the skill for compression, mimicry, and understatement of James Thurber or S.J. Perelman, but this would have likely betrayed this bboard’s social function, which was to facilitate amusing or pragmatic and low-investment communication among people who seem, for the most part, not to have been humanities majors. 
       The question of what symbol or symbols can or should substitute for tone of voice was considerably worked over by the CMU CS BBS. What distinguishes Falhman’s from the previous suggestions is that it simultaneously accented the lyrical expressiveness of the word-substitute and added an element of modular variability, two of the most important qualities of the more involved longer-form writing the smiley was intended to obviate. Def worth a full read.
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Emoticon, Emoji, Text: Pt. 1, I Second That Emoticon by Tom McCormack

Tom McCormack does a deep dive on the early days of the emoticon:

The conjuring of a voice where there is only actually just a bunch of static text is a huge part of the Magick of good writing. But much of the written word is not trying to be good, in this sense. 


The CMU CS bboard could have dictated that all jokes be written with the skill for compression, mimicry, and understatement of James Thurber or S.J. Perelman, but this would have likely betrayed this bboard’s social function, which was to facilitate amusing or pragmatic and low-investment communication among people who seem, for the most part, not to have been humanities majors. 
      

The question of what symbol or symbols can or should substitute for tone of voice was considerably worked over by the CMU CS BBS. What distinguishes Falhman’s from the previous suggestions is that it simultaneously accented the lyrical expressiveness of the word-substitute and added an element of modular variability, two of the most important qualities of the more involved longer-form writing the smiley was intended to obviate.

Def worth a full read.

elasticself: Pei Ying Lin’s @ca3rine New Emotions Invented by the Internet is brilliant. What is the word for an emotional connection to someone you meet online? I’ve been trying to find the word for internet friendship. What’s that emotion? Is there a new English word for the equivalent to the 网友 Pei Ying?  But what about emotions that are conveyed visually? What if our emotions aren’t just words, but a mix of image files and culture are twisted into a file format, like GIFs? Kenyatta Cheese’s writing on reaction GIFs speaks to this new cultural practice:  “Being the advanced society I imagine Tumblr to be, we no longer have to use sentences and emoticons. We’ve figured out how to express ourselves by finding moments within common points of culture (movies, tv, YouTube videos) and posting that moment, that emotion, as a single 500kb reaction gif.” He argues that the emergence of #feels reflects a new form of emotional communication.  Many techies dismiss the GIF form. But Anil Dash thinks GIFs are the most portable and participatory image format ever in history:  GIF is the most popular animation and short film format that’s ever existed. It works on smartphones in millions of people’s pockets, on giant displays in museums, in web browsers on a newspaper website. It finds liberation in constraints, in the same way that fewer characters in our tweets and texts freed us to communicate more liberally with one another. And it invites participation, in a medium that’s both fun and accessible, as the pop music of moving images, giving us animations that are totally disposable and completely timeless. I agree with kenyatta and Anil. Something is happening with the way we are expressing ourselves online. I can’t help but think back to how hip-hop as a cultural form emerged as a new form of expression, and how GIF expression parallels this. A few months ago I wrote about how GIF attribution is a lot of hip-hop - authorship is rewarded through cultural practices.  So are GIFs, like hip-hop, a new form of cultural expression? YES. Absolutely.  These emotions are still emerging, but we’re going to eventually need to make a database of GIF-based emotional expression. That would be a super fun project. Someone, do this. Please! Start it!  Also, Pei Ying Lin started a database to document untranslatable words.  My favorite Chinese word from her database is 纠结 Jiūjié - worried, feeling uneasy, don’t know what to do. 纠结 is the feeling that two things are pulling at your - it could be a moral dilemma or something very pressing. I often feel 纠结 in my life and I don’t know how to describe it in English. When I feel 纠结 , my liver feels heavy and my feet feel paralyzed.  Other Chinese words from Lin’s database:  忐忑 Tǎntè   A mixture of uneasiness and worry, as if you can feel your own heart beat. 车嬌 Chē jiāo   being cute or super sweet with closed ones to get loving attention 加油 Jiāyóu - A form of enouragement as if you are fighting along with the person, backing them up. 
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elasticself:

Pei Ying Lin’s @ca3rine New Emotions Invented by the Internet is brilliant. What is the word for an emotional connection to someone you meet online? I’ve been trying to find the word for internet friendship. What’s that emotion? Is there a new English word for the equivalent to the 网友 Pei Ying? 

But what about emotions that are conveyed visually? What if our emotions aren’t just words, but a mix of image files and culture are twisted into a file format, like GIFs?

image

Kenyatta Cheese’s writing on reaction GIFs speaks to this new cultural practice: 

“Being the advanced society I imagine Tumblr to be, we no longer have to use sentences and emoticons. We’ve figured out how to express ourselves by finding moments within common points of culture (movies, tv, YouTube videos) and posting that moment, that emotion, as a single 500kb reaction gif.”

He argues that the emergence of #feels reflects a new form of emotional communication. 

Many techies dismiss the GIF form. But Anil Dash thinks GIFs are the most portable and participatory image format ever in history:

 GIF is the most popular animation and short film format that’s ever existed. It works on smartphones in millions of people’s pockets, on giant displays in museums, in web browsers on a newspaper website. It finds liberation in constraints, in the same way that fewer characters in our tweets and texts freed us to communicate more liberally with one another. And it invites participation, in a medium that’s both fun and accessible, as the pop music of moving images, giving us animations that are totally disposable and completely timeless.

I agree with kenyatta and Anil. Something is happening with the way we are expressing ourselves online. I can’t help but think back to how hip-hop as a cultural form emerged as a new form of expression, and how GIF expression parallels this. A few months ago I wrote about how GIF attribution is a lot of hip-hop - authorship is rewarded through cultural practices. 

So are GIFs, like hip-hop, a new form of cultural expression? YES. Absolutely.  These emotions are still emerging, but we’re going to eventually need to make a database of GIF-based emotional expression. That would be a super fun project. Someone, do this. Please! Start it! 

Also, Pei Ying Lin started a database to document untranslatable words. 

My favorite Chinese word from her database is 纠结 Jiūjié - worried, feeling uneasy, don’t know what to do. 纠结 is the feeling that two things are pulling at your - it could be a moral dilemma or something very pressing. I often feel 纠结 in my life and I don’t know how to describe it in English. When I feel 纠结 , my liver feels heavy and my feet feel paralyzed. 

Other Chinese words from Lin’s database:

  •  忐忑 Tǎntè   A mixture of uneasiness and worry, as if you can feel your own heart beat.
  • 车嬌 Chē jiāo   being cute or super sweet with closed ones to get loving attention
  • 加油 Jiāyóu - A form of enouragement as if you are fighting along with the person, backing them up. 

stryker:

2 Broke Girls - Memes (by hamad haroon)

Haha those are things I’ve seen before. 

Did they fire Molly and hire a robot that generates jokes according to an algorithm designed to seamlessly incorporate breaking pop culture references into the dialogue? AWK-WARRRRD.

I have an idea for 9GAG’s next thing: an image macro browser that plays a laugh track as it loads each image.

Quote IconIn [Tricia] Wang’s theory, a network like Facebook, which enforces real name registration and consists of a person’s friends and family from time immemorial, encourages bounded use. It’s like the small town you never left, the grammar school class you couldn’t pass out of, the first dead-end job. It’s a network mired in past and present, and by its nature it enforces a limited sense of identity and expression.

By contrast, something like Tumblr encourages unbounded use. It allows you to experiment and play. It’s the big city, and each new tumblelog you create is like a new bar or neighborhood where you can try on a new self and see how it fits. In one instant you can be a pug lover, reblogging the best animated GIFs of the flat-faced dogs. In the next, you can dive deep into the Go Pro snowboarding community and post snaps from your latest run.

Hence Wang’s notion of the elastic self. Like rubber bands, when we step into Tumblr we can stretch and reshape ourselves into different configurations. Each new hat we try on stretches the rubber band just a little bit further, and over time it might evolve into a new configuration. This allows for remarkable opportunities to explore different potentials of self and self-expression.

From An Xiao Mina’s The Social Ties That Unbind

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Meme culture as the old guard knows it is dead. Memes themselves, in their new version of the word and new understanding, are flourishing and will for…well I’m not sure about that, but at least for awhile.

Evolution is a necessarily evil. I stand by the fact that the internet culture I grew up with is dead (no teenager now will ever understand America Online). I believe that a very small amount of people who participate in recent meme culture have a strong desire to understand where it came from. History doesn’t matter, history is not worth the same to younger participants. The social capital exists in the moment. It is fleeting and to gain it, you need to be there and see it unfold before it’s gone.

amandab!: Memes are Dead, Long Live the Meme  

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And memes are still a way to self-identify. Sure, more people are catching on to meme culture, but their grasp to it is limited. Sites and communities each have their own share of humor and interests. For example: Using the word “nigger” (no offense) is hilarious to 4chan, but Tumblr will most likely find it racist. What a person finds funny, and what interests him, shows how he identifies to the rest of the web and what website he likes. Just because the people you know disgust Advice Animals, doesn’t mean this is a mutual opinion shared by everyone. Things didn’t got big if there wasn’t a group of people out there who really like it.

Instead of becoming a way to seperate internet culture from IRL culture, memes have become more a way of seperating internet communities within that internet culture. And with a constant growing web like ours, that’s only a good thing, as it still allows us to self identify and show others where we belong. We are part of the same web, but we aren’t part of the same communities within that web.

Just Some Random Blog: amandab!: kenyatta: fridge-logic: continuants: chrismenning: chuckhistory: I…  

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Yes, WEIRD SITUATIONS happen with memes. I would cite WEEZER’S PORK AND BEANS VIDEO as the start of the panic I’ve noticed which I have never understood - people get very, very precious about things they see on the internet and assume that there is no bleed-through between online and real life. The internet used to be more exclusive in the ’90s than it is now, so to assume that memes would remain part of this “niche culture” is a bit preposterous, really.

I don’t want to call it “tumblr culture” because I think that sounds completely asinine for myself to be saying, but, as KENYATTA HAS POINTED OUT IN THE PAST, phrases like “the feels” have wormed their way into both general knowledge and offline speech. It’s language that is created, adapted, repeated, and spread…you know…

AMANDA SCURTI 

It should be noted that the ‘WEIRD SITUATIONS’ text linked to Richard The Cat.

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The New isn’t dying. But being The New, it’s just not doing the same thing it was doing 5 years ago. (Four years ago, I was shooting gif street, nightlife, and portrait photography. Now Viacom and Calvin Klein do that.)

I see lots of cultural pioneers struggle with this, sitting idly and resentfully by while others make fortunes pipelining oil they prospected, then complaining once all the oil is gone.

This meme cycle occurs with music, clubs, visuals, fashion, personal relationships, philosophies, and, yes, it didn’t suddenly become LESS potent now that there happens to be a giant electronic meme cyclotron called the Internet.

This is a force of nature. It doesn’t mean revolutions all fail; this is, in fact, the means by which cultural evolution actually occurs. You can try to fight it, like stubbornly resisting evacuation warnings before a hurricane, or you can grab a surf board and make some waves.

RONENV.COM Postbox: No memes no mo?  

fridge-logic: continuants: chrismenning: chuckhistory: I feel like the meme is dying. Anyone else feel like that? I think I am probably just imagining that, right? Or is it the clumsy attempts by giant corporations to co-opt the meme for advertising purposes that is killing it? Is the same thing happening to the GIF? *clears throat* Discuss. Internet culture in the way that we (ie: the old guard of internet studies) knew it died a long time ago. People don’t know who Boxxy is anymore and people don’t care. Internet culture now is all about sharing tiny bits of content that are completely ephemeral and, at times, meaningless. Memes began as a way to be part of a niche group, a secluded section of the internet that was more like the artsy kids table at high school. With the popularity of advice animals and rage comics, they became ways to self-identify, means of social capital that were still limited to a section of the population, but still kept from the entire group.  Now, memes are micro-bites of the ideas they used to be, a larger piece of social capital where the “inside” part of the inside joke has now taken over a larger section of the atmosphere. The popular table has found all your shitty, artsy jokes from two years ago and made them their own. They’re making fetch happen and they do not care about what internet culture was or how it got here. They are stomping on history and turning any picture with words in Impact font on it into a “meme.” The majority of the population has co-opted our language and changed all the meanings.  Yep. Pretty much.  I feel like eventually Know Your Meme should become a site that attempts to preserve what was great - and still is - about internet culture, instead of banking on the idiotic trends of today.  For example: do we really need a new entry on every single advice animal that becomes popular for half a day on Reddit? Is that what the zeitgeist has become?  Why were the biggest memes of last year all based on hit songs? Is there even such a thing as a “niche” meme anymore? Is measuring the validity of a meme by its spread and infiltration into the mainstream even viable anymore?  It’s a guarantee that 85% of the population wouldn’t know the first thing about internet culture as it was when memes started popping up on 4chan and Something Awful. Now that the meaning of the word has been generalized to such a substantial and frankly damning degree, there’s no turning back. The cat’s out of the bag, and it’s chasing the golden cheezburger.  So basically the argument is: NOBODY GOES THERE ANYMORE ITS TOO CROWDED. ?
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fridge-logic:

continuants:

chrismenning:

chuckhistory:

I feel like the meme is dying. Anyone else feel like that? I think I am probably just imagining that, right? Or is it the clumsy attempts by giant corporations to co-opt the meme for advertising purposes that is killing it? Is the same thing happening to the GIF?

*clears throat*

Discuss.

Internet culture in the way that we (ie: the old guard of internet studies) knew it died a long time ago. People don’t know who Boxxy is anymore and people don’t care. Internet culture now is all about sharing tiny bits of content that are completely ephemeral and, at times, meaningless. Memes began as a way to be part of a niche group, a secluded section of the internet that was more like the artsy kids table at high school. With the popularity of advice animals and rage comics, they became ways to self-identify, means of social capital that were still limited to a section of the population, but still kept from the entire group.  Now, memes are micro-bites of the ideas they used to be, a larger piece of social capital where the “inside” part of the inside joke has now taken over a larger section of the atmosphere.

The popular table has found all your shitty, artsy jokes from two years ago and made them their own. They’re making fetch happen and they do not care about what internet culture was or how it got here. They are stomping on history and turning any picture with words in Impact font on it into a “meme.” The majority of the population has co-opted our language and changed all the meanings. 

Yep.

Pretty much. 

I feel like eventually Know Your Meme should become a site that attempts to preserve what was great - and still is - about internet culture, instead of banking on the idiotic trends of today. 

For example: do we really need a new entry on every single advice animal that becomes popular for half a day on Reddit? Is that what the zeitgeist has become? 

Why were the biggest memes of last year all based on hit songs? Is there even such a thing as a “niche” meme anymore? Is measuring the validity of a meme by its spread and infiltration into the mainstream even viable anymore? 

It’s a guarantee that 85% of the population wouldn’t know the first thing about internet culture as it was when memes started popping up on 4chan and Something Awful. Now that the meaning of the word has been generalized to such a substantial and frankly damning degree, there’s no turning back. The cat’s out of the bag, and it’s chasing the golden cheezburger. 

So basically the argument is:

NOBODY GOES THERE ANYMORE ITS TOO CROWDED.

?

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