@mikerugnetta

This work is licensed under a

Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

PREFLIGHT CHECK:
OPEN PREMIERE
OPEN CHROME TO DOGE GENERATOR

bit.ly/1gbVbuy
[GOAT VIDEO]

bit.ly/1gbVFRw
[GOAT VIDEO]

bit.ly/1gbWgm9
[GOAT VIDEO]

bit.ly/1eM2Ema
[GOAT VIDEO]

bit.ly/1gbX2zD
[GOAT VIDEO]

bit.ly/1aI2qJx
Ladies and gentlemen hello, my name is Mike Rugnetta and I am going to talk to you about
goats. Goats and

much more, actually. But before we talk about goats, and much more than goats, let me tell
you how and why I am, in fact, qualified to talk to you about goats, and much more than
goats, in the first place. I write and host a YouTube show called

Idea Channel for

PBS Digital Studios, produced by

Kornhaber-Brown. Idea Channel

is a weekly web show where I posit very strange questions entangling popular culture, art,
technology and philosophyquestions like

"Is Doctor Who a Religion?",

"Is Jurassic Park a warning about the inherent dangers of capitalism?"

and "Is it really possible to ever be "off-line?"and then spend the remainder of the episode
reasoning out whatever possible results that question might lead to.

bit.ly/1cOgVvj

In addition to writing and hosting Idea Channel I also talk quickly about the internet as one
third of a live, lecture-based performance art trio called

MemeFactory. Me and my friends Stephen and Patrick have traveled around the world talking
to many very smart people about the internet, what it means, what it does, how it works, and
why it's neat. Mostly people don't listen to what we say, though, because while we're doing it
we also show three simultaneous keynote presentations jammed full of as many funny
pictures of cats and animated GIFs[PAUSE]

or JIFs
as possible. Because of this, we decided to write a book.

Which should be out sometime within the next I have no idea because the process of turning
words on a screen into an object made of dead trees isas it turns outthe most confusing
and inscrutable one I've ever been through and I. am an AMERICAN. who has

HEALTH INSURANCE.

onion.com/1aI3YmP
Just kidding, no I don't.
Now, you'd be correct in your assumption that neither of those things qualify me to talk
about

bit.ly/1aI2qJx
GOATS, themselves. And you'd be correct. However they do qualify me to talk about funny
videos OF goats on the INTERNET.

bit.ly/1gbZBBF
[VIDEO PLAYS WHILE TAlKING]
And I chose goats specifically because theyve been experiencing something of surge in
popularity, but REALLY, theyre also a great standin, a perfect little metonym for much of the
culture well be discussing. When I talk about what it is I'm going to be talking about, I'm
talking about FUNNY THINGS on the INTERNET. Not simply because it is my particular area of
expertisewhich it is, along with being left handed and drinking coffeebut also because they
are a critical feature of contemporary global culture. As we'll see soon enough the number of
people engaged in creating, consuming and bonding over the shared experience of what
might otherwise look like silly jokes and funny videos online is nothing to shake a stick at. In
fact there are so many people you might not even be able to shake said stick. But for many
and very complex reasons much of this mediahas either gone largely unconsidered or had its
status denigrated, placed unfairly, I think, amongstand in some cases belowthe

bit.ly/190kWc0
Sunday Morning Funnies,

bit.ly/190l7nZ
Romance Novels and the

scribblings on bathroom walls.

These things, they are the things that FLEET. They are to many of us

bit.ly/190qG5C
small culture, as opposed to the big culture of

bit.ly/190qPWJ
museums and

bit.ly/190qXpb
operas,

newpapers and

Miley Cyrus, I guess? Culture... big, useful culture... is

difficult. And slow. And physical. And made by

professionals. The Internet is

easy. And fast. And there are LOTS of amateurs on it. In a statement rather representative of
this attitude, writer

[ANIMATING SLIDE]
Jonathan Franzen recently, famously, described twitter as *"unspeakably irritating. Twitter
stands for everything I opposeIt's hard to cite facts or create an argument in 140
characters." He similarly decried the "impermanence" of ebooks, and though I realize it's far
outside his area of expertise as a novelist, I dread to think what he might have to say about

animated GIFs or

What Does the Fox Say by Ylvis [ILL-VISS], a hugely popular song and music video whose
hook isliterally gibberish.

bit.ly/1er71Qo
[video]
Tech Pundit

bit.ly/17GHx08
Andrew Keen likens participation in online culture to being trapped inside
Hitchcock'sVertigo,saying in his book

[ANIMATING SLIDE]
Digital Vertigo that we're all quote *"victims of a creepy story that we neither understand nor
control." The point being: that if funny videos of goatsand the rest of the user generated
media universe existing on the internet, and in the social sphere specificallyare even
considered culture they are regarded as

bit.ly/190qG5C
"small culture", sometimes as

"would-rather-not-have-it-all" or even

"actually-kind-of-bad-for-us" culture. It all defies serious consideration for the very fact it is
not, itself,

_
"serious". Whatever that means.
And, I mean, this is a position you can appreciate on it's face.

bit.ly/1gbZBBF
[GOAT VIDEO PLAYS WHILE TALKING].
Here we have something serving no purpose except to distract you from something more
important. The goat video is funny, yeah, but is it MORE funny than, say, How I Met Your
Mother? Or a Buzzfeed listicle assembled by Internet Professionals? Should you even be
watching funny things? Go read the newspaper! And furthermore, to what economy is this
contributing, other than the economy of scale built on other things as silly and fleeting. It's
like a runaway train of pointlessness.

In my conception these thingsareseriousfor one very simple yet very complex and isn't that
the beauty of it reason and that reason is that PEOPLE. MADE them. The cultural,
technological and historical aura that must, necessarily, exist around us being able to watch

bit.ly/1gc0OJe
this weird and cute animal go about its business is indicative of ideologies and available
technologies. These videos are are works of labor and works of sacrifice,

they're intimate and personal even if they are widely available and imminently copied and
copiable.
When we think of technology, today, we think of

bit.ly/17GJGJk
computer chips and lcd screens and data rates and the transfer of bits. You might think of
the size of transistors or the number of threads a processor is capable of dealing with
simultaneously. But! Lets not forget that just because today's technology is

sleek and metallic, that doesn't mean yesterday's useful and ground-breaking

bit.ly/17GMaHI

(PUN
DED)
INTEN
tools are not not ALSO technology. Lets not forget that at one point

bit.ly/1aI2qJx
GOATS were TECHNOLOGY. And now that those two things, which we might previously have
placed opposite one another, are meeting again, there's a kind of sixth world feeling to the
awakening thats happening. Which is not to say that agriculture isn't a technologically
advanced industryquite the opposite its one of the mostbut that for most of us this
relationship between tech and fauna is new. The internet: it brings us

bit.ly/1aYLgTI
animals.
So these factors will organize and frame this conversation about why goats and all these
other pieces of "internet culture" are meaningful cultural artifacts worthy of serious
consideration.I guess we're going to talk about how to take goats. seriously.
However, I find it helpful to begin with context, so lets get out of the corral for a second and
first talk about the common tendency to treat the internet itself as a

"place". And how some people think of of that place as a source of interaction and
consumption that isn't meaningful or awesome. Which for the record, I think it is. But then
again I am technically a

"millennial", [BANE RAISED BY SOCIAL MEDIA].

Which, actually-and just very brieflyreminds me of a much larger point for another
presentation on another day BUT, fact:

DIGITAL NATIVES
DO NOT EXIST
Digital Native is not a thing. So if this is a thing you say stop it.
[pause]
Anyway, there IS a strong tendency to think of the internet as something separate from "real
life". We've thankfully moved beyond the widespread use of the term

"cyberspace" to describe the imaginary, other-wordly zone in which Internet Action or

communication takes place, but we still tend to talkand as it follows, thinkabout the
internet in these terms. Sociologist Nathan Jurgenson defines this imagined, and possibly
damaging division between "real life" and "internet" as

Digital
Dualism
"digital dualism." It is most notably exhibited in a widespread dismissal of certain kinds of
internet or digital-only communication, culture or media as in-authentic, amateur or fleeting.
In a post titled "Digital Dualism vs Augmented Reality for Cyborgology, Jurgenson writes that

virtual
vs
real
"Digital dualists believe that the digital world is virtual and the physical world real. This
bias motivates many of the critiques of sites like Facebook and the rest of the social
web" (http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2011/02/24/digital-dualism-versusaugmented-reality/)In another piece, titled "Digital Dualism and The Fallacy of Web
Objectivity, he explains how

Technology
never
removes
humanity
from itself.
"Technology never removes humanity from itself, it never creates a space outside of
fundamental social structures, and the notion that digitality was ever somehow a new space
that transcends basic facts of social life is the height of digital dualism." (http://
thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2011/09/13/digital-dualism-and-the-fallacy-of-webobjectivity/)Digital dualism is most frequently exhibited by people referring to events taking
place in tangible or meatspace as having happened

IRL
"IRL" or "IN REAL LIFE", as though actions taken on the internet are somehow outside the
realm of a true or actual reality.
Of course it's easy to wave your hand at this dualtastic line in the sand and say one of two
things: first you might say,

"Who cares? Thats just how people talk! Using psychogeographic metaphors or indicating a
divide between online and not-online is necessary and convenient... [PAUSE]

YO
yo." Though you might not say psychogeographic. However, I'd say you might be surprised at
how deeply metaphors effect our understanding of the world and sense of what is right or
possible within it. In their book

Metaphors we Live, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson explain how most of our "ordinary
conceptual system is linguistic in nature."[4] And

help
+
hinder
"Since communication is based on the same conceptual system that we use in thinking and
acting, language is an important source of evidence for what that system is like."[3]
Furthermore "a metaphorical concept can keep us from focusing on other aspects of the
concept that are inconsistent with the metaphor."[10] To put this in simpler, and perhaps
more alarmist terms, as

bit.ly/1aYNtyy
William S Burroughs might have said

LANGUAGE
IS A
VIRUS
"language is a virus." Amongst the many concepts of the world it has infected, is the internet.
Second, you might take a more extreme position and say "Digital Dualism is TRUE....[PAUSE]

YO
yo. Internet communication IS separate or different than 'real life' communication and the
distinction is FERREAL." This is a much more entrenched, and much harder position to argue
against because at it's very basis is the discounting of the internet as worthy, even, of
consideration. It places the internet in a separate, and oftentimes subordinate, realm. A telltale sign of this position is a tendency to give agency to technology and not to peopleit is
the opposite of

Welcome to Night Vale bit.ly/18FA7Zi

"guns don't kill people, people kill it people", it is "we are not behaving differently with
technology; we are behaving differently BECAUSE of technology." Or, in the words of Sherry
Turkle:

[video, ends w/ ...who we are]

Now, just as an

informal poll how many people in this room have done something that they absolutely did
not want to do because their mobile phone MADE THEM DO IT?
Ok now how many people are

(PROBABLY ABOUT 1/10 OF US)

left handed?
Ok now how many people have seen the 2000 blockbuster film

DUDE, WHERE'S MY CAR? BE HONEST.

So this judgmental attitude that exists with regard to the CONTEXT of the internet and its
related technologies, then, extends to much of the

media on it and that media which we associate strongly with it:

image macros,

internet memes,

youtube videos,

#YOLO
tags,

tweets and status updates

text messages,

snapchats,

gifs and of course funny videos of animals

bit.ly/1er8zK0
[VIDEO].
Things we might call "internet culture". If the internet is not real or authentic, is "elsewhere"
or is somehow controlling us and doesn't have our best interests in its robot mind, then the
media which is "very internet" is itself not real, not meaningful or even DANGEROUS TO OUR
HUMANITY. The Siren Song of low-depth/high-return communication is too much for people
to resist and so tweets are vainpeopletalking about their

bit.ly/1aYPBXd
lunch or posting pictures of

themselves. Status updates are people complaining or cramming their

politics down your throat, YouTube is for

cats, people falling down or

weirdos talking about nothing in particular, and so on and so forth. The medium is the
message and the mediums are kinda

vapid and so the message is also vapid QED.

I, for one, think this position is as vapid and dangerous to our mental well being as IT thinks
vernacular multimedia communication is. At the basement level of my reasoning is. that.
internet culture isn't REALLY INTERNET culture, it's simplyCULTURE. Saying "Internet culture"
is like saying

bit.ly/1fAkdGr
"Canadian Culture" or

bit.ly/1fAkyZx

"Pakistani Culture" or

bit.ly/1aEydGN
"College Culture" or

bit.ly/1fAl7T2
"Programmer Culture": it is "real" and significant and meaningful, but only insofar as it
signifies some imperfect and wholly

uhhh...
somethings missing

incomplete set of characteristics and attitudes assigned to a large, always changing, and very
disparate group of people within a much, much larger and much, much, much more complex
milieu. Internet culture is not outside or separate; it is within. And its milieu extends far
beyond computers and networks and in-browser activity. Sure, internet culture is

:D
smilies and

retweets,

blog posts,

comment threads and

xo, or Best,?
I NEVER KNOW

email etiquette,

flash games,

google,

bit.ly/1fAmS2N
amazon,

Netflix,

doge and Magibon Doing Nothing.

[magibon, nothing] 30s

But "internet culture" is also the

feelings, ideas, politics, ideologies and experiences of the people USING the internet. Which.
Y'know. Is a lot of people. All over the world. Some of whom are

bit.ly/1fAu2UH
bankers and engineers and technologists and some of whom are

bit.ly/1fAutyq

students, factory workers and

bit.ly/1fAuIt3
farmers.These people might have very different feelings and ideas and politics and senses of
what the internet is good and useful for, or what it should and can be used to do. There are a
few things everyone seems to agree on, though. The internet is good for

bit.ly/1fAvxlC
current events,

via metareddit.com
community organization,

Gangnam Style and

bit.ly/InkZYu
JOKES. The vast majority of that which is commonly and colloquially referred to as Internet
Culture is FUNNY. One study, which you should definitely take with a grain of salt, showed
that funny content is 25% more likely to get shared than the next most popular kind of
content: sports.
Which, I mean, that make sense, right?

bit.ly/Inl52d
1: people love to be entertained and 2: people love to entertain each other.

bit.ly/1fAxmz3
3: jokes are easy to share and share quickly

bit.ly/Inm1Up
4: jokes are self contained and generally quick to consume and be entertained by.
This is also, incidentally, why I tend to group

"joke"the common form of placing ideas in a certain order such that they provide a cognitive
shift that induces laughterand "cute animal media"the common form ofwelldepicting
cute animalstogether. They both have essentially the same base-level "rules": they are self
contained, transferrable and you're probably not gonna share either with someone only to
have them fire back with

"UMMM I DONT REALLY LIKE JOKES." or "I'm not really into

bit.ly/Inmrdj
cute. things" If they did, you'd be surprised, maybe shocked. Though, it is true: there ARE
specialized cute animals in the way there are specialized jokes. Many people find

bit.ly/InmLbX
SLOTHS adorablemy girlfriend hates them. Some people can't get enough of

bit.ly/InmZjs
HEDGEHOGSI think they look like weird a alien that could come from somewhere like the

Fantastic Planet. And as far as specialized jokes are concerned,I've heard rumors that even

bit.ly/InnDxo
accountants and engineers have inside jokes.
Any accountants or engineers? Here? That know a joke?[OR ANY EXTREMELY SPECIALIZED and
like PG-13? JOKES]

So this media, these jokes, organize groups of people, provide them entertainment and are
EASY to share; and whatever potential specialization doesnt excuse the fact that people
generallyenjoy them. Every group of people has their own jokes, the internet is no different.
Except, the way certain jokes are made using the internet is very different from other kinds of
jokes. Writing a joke is HARD, ask any stand up comedian. I mean, we have

robots that do it but they're only funny in their precociousness. What many of the particularly
internet jokes accomplish is to communicate and provide joke forms that OTHER PEOPLE
can participate in.
Like. You might watch some

bit.ly/1gc2DWK
goat videos and think to yourself well this is all fun and good but I don't live on a farm how
am I supposed to participate in the group of people making GOAT videos? EASY.An example
par excellence of GOAT media is the screaming goat pop music mashup.

bit.ly/1gc5O0n
[VIDEO]
I mean. We could do this. Very easily. Right now. Like ok can anyone think of a CURRENT
pop song that has a dramatically held note at one point?

[OPEN PREMIERE] -[KATY PERRY'S ROAR, LORDE'S ROYALS, WHO KNOWS WHAT ELSE]

But ok, that involves downloading and video editing software which can be intimidating or
expensive. Lets try some slightly easier things:

lets revisit, for a moment, our two examples from the end of our long list of internet culture
from a few minutes ago:

DOGE is one of many examples of a kind of internet meme or joke format called Interior
Monolog Captioning. The set of entities one might detail the interior monologue of is
essentially unrestricted:

this duck,

majestic woodland creatures,

the American Flag,

a pine cone and so on and so forth. Far and away the most popular interior monologue to
caption, is that of the shiba inureferred to affectionately as

"shibes" or simply

"doge".
After looking at a couple DOGE images, the rules of the game become immediately clear:

funny picture of a shiba inua breed known for being independent, rather intelligent and
somewhat funny looking

overlayed with colorful, misspelled text (a la the Granddaddy, or should I say GRANDCATTY
of image macros the

LOLCAT) describing, announcing or elucidating the situation.

The understanding and technology needed to create a

DOGE image is so simple, the venn diagram of people who use the internet and people
possessing of the resources to caption the interior monologue of doges is almost a circle. I
mean, we could do it. Right now. So we will.

[DOGE AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION]

http://webrender.net/shibe/index.php

Alright. So but clearly funny and easy isn't restricted to still images. The proliferation of
lensesalmost everyone has one in their pocket

and at this point I'm pretty sure it's harder to buy a laptop WITHOUT built in camerameans
that capturing your own moving image and uploading it to YouTube for all to see and adore
is about as complicated as making guacamole or producing dubstep.

Ok but really I get it: not everyone is as charming or comfortable on camera as the Grace
Helbig

bit.ly/1gc3CpD

[video], or Hank Green

bit.ly/1gc3x5n

[video] or Gunnarolla

bit.ly/1gc4FpB

[canadian video]. So what if you don't have all these ideas about the

bit.ly/Inrfj4
nature of curiosity, or totally sweet song writing and singing skills, or a mastery of audience
development? Well. You could literally just get on camera and do nothing. 7 years
agoYouTube user

Magibon made her first "me doing nothing" video, and is still doing it today (as one of Japan's
most sub-scribed to vloggers no less). Whats maybe more impressive is that people are still
making Magibon style

Nicolas Sales

Just A Skinny Boy

Tommys World

Angela Long

[VIDEOS PLAY WHILE TALKING]

Me Doing Nothing Videos. This isdue in no small part, I'm sure, to the simplicity of the
format she popularized: camera, warm body, reasonable lighting. Which, actually, I mean, we
have all of those things. We have an abundance of warm bodies! Surely 1 would be willing to
come up here and do nothing for us I mean I would do it but

I already have a Me Doing Nothing.

And it's ten minutes long, soI filled my quota.
Alright, so, Who's it gonna be?

[ME DOING NOTHING AUDIENCE]

bit.ly/1erOLqz
The great thing about media that occupies the spot at the

bit.ly/1erPb0d

crossroads of simple and funny is that is that it provides easy in roads for people to confront
larger ideas and to PARTICIPATE. Take, for instance, the video blogger

Charlie McDonnell, his main youtube channel

Charlie is So Cool Like.

bit.ly/1erPR5T

Charlie posts the kind of things you might expect from a video blogger

bit.ly/1erPR5T

[video].

bit.ly/1erPR5T

These things are generally thoughtful, funny and of-a-kindthey include vlogs and short
films. but whatever weird, strange or offbeat ideas he has, they end up on his

SIDE CHANNEL Charlie is so Bored Like. Recently, Charlie made a video in response to a
comment left for him

[comment]. He *expected*, after making the requested video, a video very much in the style
of a me-doing-nothing, that the author of the comment would be proven wrong.

bit.ly/1erQHPT
[charlie eating cereal]
That they wouldnt want to watch him eat cereal for ten minutes.

bit.ly/1erQHPT
Instead, in a video on his MAIN CHANNEL, this happened:

bit.ly/1erRArU
[charlie explaining how important the video was to everyone - part 1]

bit.ly/1erRArU
[charlie explaining how important the video was to everyone - part 2]

bit.ly/1erRArU
This is a perfect, if idiosyncratic, example of what we in the biz might call

PARTICIPATORY
CULTURE

PARTICIPATORY CULTURE.In their 2006 paper

Confronting the Challengesof Participatory Culture:Media Education for the21st

Century,Henry Jenkins et al established and defined the concept of such a culture, describing
it as one "with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong
supportfor creating and sharing ones creations, and some type of informal mentorship
whereby whatis known by the most experienced is passed along to novices. A participatory
culture is alsoone in which members believe their contributions matter, and feel some
degree of social connectionwith one another (at the least they care what other people think
about what they havecreated)."
[PAUSE]
This describes

bit.ly/1erPb0d

doge and magibon and Charlie Eating Cereal and people inserting screaming goats into
music videos and Charlie's FANS contributing to the set of videos depicting their ostensible
morningor personally appropriate time of day during which cereal consumption occurs
routines. It describes the contributions of people everywhere to any growing set of media on
sites like

wikipedia,

urban dictionary,

reddit,

flickr,

instagram and in some weird but related ways

twitter and facebook. Users, and communities made up of those users,

make and share knowing that they are not (or most likely will not be) the only ones who do
so: that there is a network of people with whom they have a rapport and who will recognize
and value and be inspired by their creation, who will contribute similarly to the pool of media.
And, because of the nature of the internet as an endless supply of pre-exsiting media to
remix and recontextualize, if those creations need to involve

doges or

goats, you yourself do not even have to posses a shibe or a goat.

Which I guess is to say - making a video of

yourself eating cereal, or a video of a goat singing along to Usher,

bit.ly/1gc2XVg
[VIDEO]
might seem really silly when you describe it, but within certainand to pinch a rather vague
but helpful term"affinity groups", you are providing a service, communicating a sense of
belonging, and announcing your presence in a shared space. Which is to say: clever
multimedia creation is now a way to communicate a sense of, or aspiration towards,
belonging.

Jenkins and his crew cite a Pew Internet Research project in which the findings determine that
upwards of

57%
57% of teenagers using the internet could, in some sense, be considered "content creators."

33.3333333333%
"One-third of teens", the study showed, "share what they create onlinewith others,

22%
22 percent have their own websites,

19%
19 percent blog, and

19%
19 percent remix onlinecontent." Now, if you find that figure surprising, I suggest you hold
on to your hats slash butts because those numbers of are from

(YouTube was launched

on April 23, 2005)

2005. As of

(Apple announced the

first gen iPhone
January 9, 2007)
2007,

93%

93% of American teenagers use some form of the internet;

64%

64% of teens who are online, which themselves comprise

59%!

59% of the total number of teens, make some form of "content". As of 2009,

38%

38% of teens share content, as do

30%

30% of adults, and as of this year roughly

33.333333333
3 3333333333
3333333333
33333333333
33333333333
3333333333%
a third of all adult internet users are have uploaded a video they, themselves, have created.
And sureWe're mixing and matching sample numbers and sets, we're differentiating
differently between adult and teenaged users. We're not talking about the

bit.ly/1c3rDP4
global internet, for which these numbers could be and surely are VERY different. But I hope
you will allow me, at least, the declaration that of the internet's

~34% of the
Global
Population
2.481 BILLION users, it would appear, based on the above figures, as though a notinsignificant portion is involved in some kind of PARTICIPATORY CULTURE and though it is
not made explicit by Jenkins et al or the Pew Research Center,in my professional estimation
it is more than likely that a majority of the media being made and shared within that culture
is, in its basic nature,

bit.ly/1aI2qJx
HUMOROUS or ENTERTAINING. Meaning:

doges and vines

[A VINE]

animated gifs of popular TV shows,

unpopular opinion puffins,

videos of people doing nothing, videos of goats, and of course of the goats ALSO doing
nothing.

[VIDEO]
They make these things, yes, as Jenkins et al point out,because there is a degree of

bit.ly/1c3ulEb
social connection and they feel as though their work is valued by their peers. And. Yes. Yes I
agree. But I thats not really the whole story, is it? Can't be! Saying people do thing X because
reason Y is to immediately, and through that very statement, prove or conjure Reasons A
through X.

To impress, to woo, to celebrate, to divert, to distract, to prove, to disprove, for self,

selflessly and so on. I LIKE to thinkand so running the VERY same riskthat at the HEART of
all these reasons is, rather, the desire to

entertain and be entertained. Which is maybe the same as perceiving some value held by
others with regard to the things you make; but maybe its not? Either way, people certainly
like to laugh and they like to laugh TOGETHER even if it is not simultaneously and cospacially. In his book

Comic Relief, John Morreall describes humor and laughter as "essentially, a social pleasure."
He describes the importance of the

bit.ly/1ci5gDG
studio audience or laugh track in contextualizing sitcoms so the viewer, alone and at home,
feels permitted to guffaw. He writes "it seems that thingsare more likely to amuse us, and
more likely to make us laugh, when weare with other people." [*cue audio]
I tend, generally, to agreethough would counter with the possibly controversial assertion
that to look at a webpage or to sit without anyone else in my darkened studio watching

bit.ly/1gc6v9Z
Buttermilk play with her friends is to do so with my friends. I am this videos audience but
also have ACCESS to this videos audience; I am part of THEIR audience. In the words of my
friends Kenyatta Cheese and Kevin Slavin:

THE AUDIENCE
HAS
AN AUDIENCE
the audience has an audience. The laugh track has been replaced with the

comment thread, my twitter feed and the knowledge that this media has or will have been
seen by my friends and organizes a group of people just like me, some of them having
contributed themselves or simply having the same good, old laugh.
But Ah! Ok! With all this groundwork laid, here we finally are, ready to spend some time on

bit.ly/1ci5WJn
laughter. The chuckle, the chortle, the giggle, that most recognizable sound of celebration, of
play and enjoyment. In short: THE VERY DOWNFALL

bit.ly/1ci68Ir
OF HUMANITY.
There's a long history, in the West at least, of not wanting to take that which makes us laugh
SERIOUSLY. Jon Morreall, again, points out that certain schools of early Greek thought
forbade "irrepressible mirth", and "unrestrained laughter" [MORREALL, 4]. Monastic code
similarly not only forbade laughter, but any action which might encourage or produce it.
Morreall references the Syrian abbot

bit.ly/1c3vTOs
Ephraem who describes laughter as no less than the "beginning of the destruction of the
soul." [MORREALL, 5].
It's an attitude rather effectively captured in Umberto Eco's

The Name of The Rose. It in, Jorge, one of the elder Monks of an Italian Monastery argues
with Brother William of Baskerville about the nature and danger of laughter. He argues
that"The spirit is serene only when it contemplates the truth and takes delight in good
achieved, andtruth and good are not to be laughed at. This is why Christ did not laugh.
Laughter foments doubt." [ECO, 80]It is no coincidence that evil, and the devil, take the
shape of a

bit.ly/1c3wbou
GOAT and now here we are, talking about such a bold and forthrightly despicable herald of
his presence:

bit.ly/1aI2qJx
SILLINESS.
The evils of glee actually factor pretty into Eco's novel, which, SPOILERS AHEAD (but it was
published in 1983 so kinda its your bad) explains the disappearance of the

Second Book of Aristotle's Poetics, which legend has it dealt with comedy.In locating a
mysterious, locally infamous book in the heavily guarded,

labyrinthine library, William and Adso, the narrator, discover it contains ancient, forbidden
thought which not only permits, but lauds laughter. The tome includes ancient Egyptian texts
which attribute the beginning of the world to the laughter of a

massive god. Some excited page turns later and they encounter what appears to be

Aristotle's lost text. It reads

"we will now deal with comedy (as well as with satire and mime) and see how, in inspiring the
pleasure of the ridiculous, it arrives atthe purification of that passion. That such passion is
most worthy of consideration we havealready said in the book on the soul, inasmuch as
alone among the animalsman is capable oflaughter."
I can't help but make a comparison between anti-mirth monk Jorge and tech pundit

bit.ly/17GHx08
Keen, again, who in an interview for blogcritics.org in 2007, described the social, usercurated link and media sharing site reddit.com as "inane and dangerous".Harper's
Magazine's president

bit.ly/1ciccRd
John R. MacArthur compared the damage done by the internet and its "content" to that done
by global warming (http://harpers.org/archive/2013/10/publishers-letter/3/).

bit.ly/1cicHKY
Nicholas Carr wrote for Wired that "Dazzled by the Nets treasures, we are blind to the
damage we may be doing to our intellectual lives and even our culture." (http://
www.wired.com/magazine/2010/05/ff_nicholas_carr/all/1)

Mark Bauerline wrote that "Digital natives ...

DIGITAL NATIVES
DO NOT EXIST
[PAUSE]

... go to the Internet not to store knowledge in their minds, but to retrieve material and pass
it along.''
The implication underlying all these complaints is that on the internet everything is

LOL
INTERNET
frivolous and freewheeling, distracting or folly. That "real" entertainment is

bit.ly/1cigtUX
paid, curated, manicured, produced by professionals and handed down from on high; it is
certainly not... silly things.
This is the Ideology of Mass Culture: even it's jokes are serious because they were seriously
considered before being broadcast by professionals. Their devil is not

bit.ly/1cihexg
Baphomet the goat-beast encouraging in men that most pitiful and abominable act of
laughter, it is rather

bit.ly/1gc6v9Z
Buttermilk. The teacup nigerian pygmy goat. Uploaded by a normal person somewhere in the
United States. Watched 10 million times and turned into an iphone game.
The problem is that on the internet, no one knows you're not "actually" a media maker or
comedian. Or everyone knows. And you get laughs anyway. And that's the

problem. So! To solve this problem and all the othersthe problem of the internet and its
culture standing in opposition to real life, to having no real purpose, to laughter itself evading
serious consideration, and funny internet media doubly so because it's lack of serious
broadcast or editorial context; to exorcise the demons from the humorous media of the
internet, what follows, in the last bit of my time up here with you guys today, are three ways
in which one might take internet culture seriously. With jokes.

#1:

INTERNET JOKES ARE SERIOUS

BECAUSETHEY AREA
TRANSFER OF KNOWLEDGE.

Far from being "inane and dangerous", the internet joke is a surprisingly suitable conduit for
knowledge. That is, of course, assuming that you consider the transfer of knowledge itself
neither inane nor dangerous. Many folklorists and theorists have written about the knowledge
of and subsequent telling of jokes as means of elevating the status of the

bit.ly/1bgVDZe
teller. The joke they are telling is one, hopefully, their friends do not know, and so being in
POSSESSION of such PRIVILEGED informationbeing able to cause the cognitive shift which
produces the desired response of roaring laughtermakes the

bit.ly/1bgVLYx
joke teller a desirable character to have about. Now however you slice this, there are at least
two, if not many more, transferals of knowledge in the telling of the joke. Most obvious is the
joke itself: when someone tells someone else a joke, the second person is now in possession
of the joke. To put it succinctly, and in particularly modern terms, the joke is a

bit.ly/1bgW7yq
poorly encrypted form of communication. If you "get" the joke, you getto possessthe joke.
This, certainly, accounts for some of the drama in professional comedy: in order for a joke to
work it needs to be told, communicated, released into the world. As such, this makes the
stealing of the joke by an unauthorized party

bit.ly/1ergWFF
Dennis Leary if you ask Bill Hicks (if... Bill Hicks were not dead),

bit.ly/1bgWqcF

Carlos Mencia if you ask Joe Roganincredibly easy, and in some cases arguably

WHOOPS!
accidental. Does the joke stealer know they stole? Did they just happen upon a similar
construction, floating there in the unencrypted ether, as was maybe the case between

bit.ly/1bgWidf
Dane Cook and Louis CK?
It is significantly more straightforward with much media on the internet: in many, many
situations, to

bit.ly/1bgWHfJ
transform or mutate or remix is to participate. To participate is to

G
N
I
H
T
Y
R
E
EV

bit.ly/1bgWRnp
"steal". Much like with TRADITIONAL folk joke formats, to be told the joke, is to be given
implicit permission to use the joke. But unlike the traditional joke, the construction and
transmission of jokes made on the internet is mediated; it involves more than sound and
muscles and vocal chords. It requires materials, albethey

bit.ly/1bgXgWG
digital materials, in addition to knowledge of the joke itself.The beauty, then, of the internet
being both a source ofand distribution platform forthese joke materials is that they then
exist in contexts which are directly and literally linked to each other. They are easily mixed
and matched, transferred and transported,

hybridized and cross pollinated.Knowledge of the corpus of multimedia internet humor can
be something of an asset: to know all the joke forms is be able to parlay new jokes into older
formats, thus making a new kind of joke. Like

[SOUND OF APPROVAL RATING SKYROCKETING IN

THE DISTANCE][

[AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION - MAKE THESE AHEAD OF TIME]

Like, ok so here we have rob ford, a shibe and DESCRIPTIVE NOISES. Descriptive Noises is
where you put yellow text at the bottom of an image to indicate the presence of something
usually unexpected; heres Gatsy with muffled rap music playing in the distance. Someone
choose one of the three.

[AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION - MAKE THESE AHEAD OF TIME]

Ok. Now someone flip a coin to decide which of the remaining two well combine it with.
Heads is [WHICHEVER].

[AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION - MAKE THESE AHEAD OF TIME]

Ok. Now someone flip a coin to decide which of the remaining two well combine it with.
Heads is [WHICHEVER]. [MAKE THAT]

But beyond the usefulness of this knowledge to create stronger, better, faster jokes there is
also a fair amount of technological know how required simply to MAKE them. Like: to put all
the

pixels in the right place and then put your masterpiece in a location where countless people
can behold its glory. Far from being simple diversion, the creation of these things encourage
a real kind of technological literacy. Even if the people creating these images are using simple
online tools like

MemeGenerator or QuikMeme they are confronting the idea that it is possible for THEM to
make MEDIA with SOFTWARE. And if they are going the additional step to use

professional level software, more often than not they will have to search out a tutorial or
lesson; this involves googling, or some kind of search, which is in and of itself an important,
meaningful skill worth developing.
Making entertaining stuff for the internet is the reason many peoplemyself includedknow
how to use photoshop to make animated gifs, illustrator to add text to an image or create
outlines, or video editing software to create a remix or edit originally shot footage. In short,
in order to make jokes on the internet you need to know how to

MAKE jokes on the internet.

[PAUSE]

#2:

INTERNET JOKES
ARESERIOUSBECAUSE THEY
ARE AN ACT OF SACRIFICE

In the process of its telling the joke is itself "destroyed" in some sense. This is true for the
internet joke and the traditional joke. It is as true for How It Met Your Mother as it is for
Animated GIFs. Georges Bataille wrote of sacrifice, like actual sacrifice:

 The victim
dies and the
spectators
share in what
his death
reveals.
The victim dies and the spectatorsshare in what his death reveals." In the sacrifice of the
joke, what is revealed is the joke itself, the workings of it and the insight it precipitates. The
mark of a good joke is several fold: perhaps the insight is particularly meaningful. Or
especially hilarious. Or perhaps the joke itself is somehow

resistant to the sacrifice, reproducing the previous two effects with every subsequent
retelling. With the first sacrifice, maybe only a portion of truth is revealed. A joke is not a
person, it can be sacrificed again and again and again. The human punchline is fatal; not
always so with the joke.
We can be surprised or entertained only once by

KNOCK KNOCK

"Knock knock" [WAIT]

IM SURE YOU KNOW

EXACTLY WHERE THIS
IS HEADED BUT IT
WOULD MEAN A LOT
TO ME IF YOU PLAYED
ALONG ANYWAY...
"Interrupting cow" [WAIT]
One mark...

SORRY
bit.ly/1bh0Znp
...of a good joke is its resistance to mortality:each time it is heard, each time it is sacrificed,
the amount of the joke, the amount of mortality that sloughs off is negligible. Or minor. Or,
in the case of a rare funnier-the-more-times-you-hear-it joke, it grows. With each sacrifice,
what is revealed is the strength of that which has become sacrificial.
Such a thing is possible, though difficult on the internet. On the internet a

good joke is told constantly. Posted and reposted frequently. A common lament on a certain
infamous image board was that

"every day is repost day". In the great deluge of content, original contributions to the corpus
were referred to as

ORIGINAL
CONTENT
"OC" for "original content." That newness must be named, announced, says much about the
speed of this particular community of people trading, largely, in humorous media. On the
internet a great video is posted about on buzzfeed and slate, the atlantic. Your friends share
it on twitter and facebook. It front pages on reddit. It is

WOW VERY
EVERYWHERE
inescapable.
GIFs loop endlessly and the most meaningful ones become stand ins for sentiments which are
difficult to communicate in text alone. Your friends replace their own face with

David Tennants or Emma Stones and suddenly they become your friends. The internet is
witness to so much sacrifice, so much media at such a pace, many images and formats seen
so frequently, over such a small amount of time that the

life force of a joke has much to stand up to; more so, or more so in such a compacted amount
of time, I might argue, than the standard joke format. In other words, on the internet, every
exceptionally good joke is under threat of becoming the interrupting cow. Maybe, in some
cases, they are serious simply because they are not funny.
This is, of course, not to say that no joke or humorous media ever has any staying power. I
could watchDavid Lewandowski's "Going to the Store" once a day, every day, for the rest of
my life and still find it hilarious.

bit.ly/1bh25PY
[GOING TO THE STORE]

The combination of absurdity and horror, humor and disdain for the conventions of
Lewandowski's 3D-rendered medium makes my head spin. The details are great and I don't
know the return on re-watching investment is high. I'm not going to say that Going to the
Store is something like 50 seconds of meditation but its close.
On the other handand some people will absolutely disagree with me and thats the beauty of
humor, isn't it?I could go the rest of my life without ever hearing about or seeing Turtle Sex
ever again. Specifically, and most never again-y, the turtle and the croc.

bit.ly/1bh22n6
[TINY TURTLE HUMPING A SHOE]

bit.ly/1bh22n6
I get it. It's weird. Maybe even the same level of weird as Going to Store and maybe all the
more weird because it is not a 3D rendered invention of some auteur but an actual event
which took place between an actual turtle and an actual croc in someone's actual yard,
captured on an actual camera. But there is something about the actual-ness and the
happening-ness of say ...

bit.ly/1gc6v9Z
Buttermilk, by comparison, which attains an infinite rewatchability, as if she were a different
baby goat, or if her actions will inspire a new reaction, though the media object itself is
static. Buttermilk and Going to the Store are, for me, resistant to sacrifice.
I have learned what I need form the death of the tiny turtle who, regardless, will always

bit.ly/1bh22n6
be here. Just humping this shoe. Which, fair enough, is it's own kind of sacrifice.
[pause]

#3:

INTERNET JOKES
ARESERIOUSBECAUSE THEY
ARE AN EROTIC ACT

Which segues rather nicely into the last of our final and incredibly serious subsections.
Continuing in true Bataille-ian fashion, we're going to discuss how sacrifice, death, and the
erotic act are intimately

bit.ly/1bh3dmK
linked. Bataille characterizes eroticism as

 Assenting
to life,
even in
death.
"assenting to life, even in death." Life, for Bataille, is "discontinuous": we exist as separate
beings, apart from one another. Death brings us a final continuity, a return to to some shared
state of... something. The while-living erotic act seeks to "destroy the self-contained
character of the participators", the very thing maintaining our discontinuity."The whole
business of eroticism", Bataille writes, "is to strike to the inmost core of the living being, so
that the heart stands still."
Bataille describes how in the erotic act it can be seen how one partner is the victim and the
other the sacrificer. In our previous example,

bit.ly/1bh22n6
[turtle video]
I think the arrangement is rather clear. What Bataille means to do is cast the erotic act as
something which is simultaneously destructive and, of course, productive. By this measure
alone, the joke itself, internet or otherwise, is an erotic act:

bit.ly/1bh4mL2
destroying itself and producing within it's audience a KIND of life, though of course not
literally LIFE ITSELF. Furthermore, how convenient that both the joke and the erotic act,
alongside the sneeze and fright,

have the potential to cause those experiencing them momentarily loss of control over their
own bodies.
The French have the phrase

Le Petite
Mort
Le Petite Mort as a euphemism for orgasm and the moment immediately following for a
moment, the body is as though dead, completely vulnerable. Is the same not true of laughter?
To have watched a shouting, screaming, fainting goat and to have laughed so hard you begin
to cry means you have lost control. The joke is in charge now.
The similarities between the joke and the erotic act, which pale in comparison to the
differences admittedly, I think are very elegantly contextualized online by the common
opinion that the internet is for two things:

bit.ly/1bNWM5A

cats and porn. It's off-handedly the stuff of "common knowledge" that the internet is home
to a critical mass of two different media types: pictures and videos and animated GIFs of cats
and pictures and videos and animated GIFs of people doing it.
Does this somehow change the meaning of the humor we consume on the internet? That it is
in such a close proximity,

proximity
to pornography... is its meaning or use or value somehow different? I don't know. I provide
no answer except to say that

"context" for our content is a vexingly complex and hugely important factor. Its how we
understand the meaning of tweet, a status update, an image macro a

bit.ly/1gbVbuy
video of a goat, and depictions of erotic acts. When videos of goats and videos of going at it
like animals are similarly contextualized

nearby a share button, a comment thread, a like buttondo their differing contexts somehow
collapse? Is it possible for one to take on the meaning or attitude or joissance of the other?
And in what direction is it more likely to move first?
[PAUSE] MAYBE NEITHER. /shrug
As far as many are concerned the internet has worked to encourage and exacerbate the
problem of "discontinuity": those on the nay side of Digital Dualism say it pushes us apart.
But as much as the consumption of media while oriented, solo,

towards a computer screen does push us apart... does it not also bring us back together?
Both laughter and erotic acts are actions which encourage and reinforce social bonding. Is it
perhaps that the erotic act of the jokethe sacrifice, the lack of controland the erotic act of
erotic media at once divides buts also joins us? Assenting to lifelaughing and dying
togetherin death, in a remarkable discontinuity, mediated by machines and their wires.
[pause]

CONCLUSION
[PAUSE]
Now, to say that these are THE three ways you might take funny things on the internet
seriously would be irresponsible. There are dozens, maybe hundreds of ways ranging from

reddit

tumblr

bit.ly/1jBFexB
internet utopianPEOPLE WORKING TOGETHER, BUILDING A COLLABORATIVE FUTURE THAT
MIGHT ONE DAY HAVE AN EFFECT ON THE WAY WE RUN GOVERNMENTSto

facebook

wherever the
memes come from

bit.ly/1jBFPzr

internet alarmistPEOPLE WORKING TOGETHER ON MEANINGLESS DRIVEL THATS MAKING US

STUPIDER AND WORSE AT CONCENTRATING. And

THE
INTERNET:
PRETTY NOT
BAD IT
SEEMS

every position in between. However you look at it, the set of widespread entertaining media
on the intertubes is certainly serious in its size and impact, if it is not in its nature.
Which is, perhaps, the ultimate factor in considering the creation and sharing of something
like

HEY,
LADIES.
bit.ly/1gcanId
funny pictures of goats. It is not that the goats themselves mean or symbolize a thingthey
are goats, they do something weird, the owners have a camera and an internet connection
but rather the existence and number and popularity and context and technology delivering
the goats means and symbolizes and IS a great, great thing. It is a great, great thing that WE
built and use and maintain and evangelize. It is not a thing that uses us; we pour ourselves
into it, it does not lead us along by the hand.
When analyzing media we learn that this is step one, the starting point: the creator of the
media necessarily puts

themselves, their view of the world, their ideology into the work they construct. They do it if
they do not mean to and frequently even if they do not want to. But we tend to apply such
high minded concepts to work

"deserving", buh what an ugly word, of such scrutiny, though it is just as true for "internet
culture" as it is for Inglorious Basterds or The Handmaid's Tale or Catcher in the Rye or Dude
Where's My Car.
The point being that the most frequently and understandably analyzed works are made by
such a small subset of the population. And they're very skilled and incredibly adept at
communicating many different messages from many different points of view BUT there is SO
much MORE media, now, and it is so much

bit.ly/1gcaROA
closer to the ground.
And so more than the internet's brand ofknowledge transfer through joke forms, the
internet's version of humorous sacrifice, the internet's comedic erotic act is it more useful
to think of these things as something approaching the

bit.ly/1fAkyZx

bit.ly/1fAkyZx

bit.ly/1fAl7T2

bit.ly/1aEydGN

bit.ly/1fAkdGr

people's transfer of knowledge, humorous sacrifice and comedic erotic act? In keeping with
our theme the the internet does not

COMPUTERS DONT
CHANGE PEOPLE;
PEOPLE CHANGE (AND
HAVE COMPUTERS).

have agency but rather provides it, it is not the the internet allows these things to happenit
is that these are things

bit.ly/1cigtUX
we have built the internet to do, for us, and in service of our ideas about what media, and
comedic media specifically, are good for: coming together to laugh and learn, fight a
separation inherent to life, and depict and see depictions of the world outside our own
sphere. And those of us who are lucky enough to be able to avail ourselves of that service,
that small, but large but growing portion of the world... it just so happens we sometimes do
that around videos of goats.

bit.ly/1gcdtMb
[GOAT VIDEO]

This presentation contains

CC-BY and PD Licensed works by:
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Thank you.

@mikerugnetta

This work is licensed under a

Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.