Impressions from ROFLCon III

Boston called last weekend for the internet to assemble offline at the third installment of ROFLCon. It was a blast in so many ways. For once, about 100 of the over 800 attendees had in some way helped shape internet culture by creating memes, accidentally being the focus of a meme, running related web properties, or otherwise being active in the arena. Secondly, while there was plenty to laugh material, the conference struck a nice contrast between entertainment and serious discussion. Race, politics, business, culture and plenty of other topics were brought up and it was amazing how fluent the discussion still remained.

Above are some personal highlights (not photos I've taken though, so thanks to the peeps who took them), and I'll capture a few more stories and topics in future blog posts.

Using Humour to Disarm

One of the things that came up several times at ROFLCon was about the power of humour to disarm serious situations and engage people. The same way an awkward situation can be lightened up by a well-timed funny comment, humour can disarm societal issues and allow for public discourse.

Xiao Mina discussed the issue of online memes and humour in China. In a regime where free speech is censored and people disappear because of their online social network activity, memes are used to encode criticism of the government. For example, there is a meme around grass mud horses and river crabs, representing the fight against government censorship. There are several layers of meaning in this meme, with the most basic one that grass mud horse in Chinese sounds similar to the local expression for "motherfucker", and real-world river crabs threaten grass mud horses habitats.

Another example was the recent meme that started out with the "Shit girls say" Twitter feed and video, and evolved to discuss various issues around race and sexuality with videos like "Shit Black Gays Say" and even "Shit Everybody Says To Rape Victims". While the initial video was about making statements about other groups (a guy dressed up as a girl talking about girls), later videos were created by the targeted group (a gay guy talking about gays). The meme became a humorous way to discuss all kinds of issues that could otherwise not be openly brought up.

And lastly, the fake Twitter account @MayorEmanuel created an imaginary storyline around the real Rahm Emanuel's run for mayor of Chicago. Serious issues around the problems of the city were the center of the storyline and brought local politics to a much wider audience in an accessible way.

I find myself many times being way too serious about my work and the things I create, but I'm thinking it may be a good idea to infuse a bit more humour into my thinking and acting. After all,what got me to ROFLCon in the first place was a goofy website about unicorns and rainbows .

The Speed Camera Lottery

"The idea here is capture on camera the people who keep to the speed limit. They would have their photos taken and registration numbers recorded and entered into a lottery. Winners would receive cash prizes and be notified by post. Better still, the winning pot would come from the people who were caught speeding... The result: A 22% reduction in driver speed in the first week after implementation"... Full article

Rate everything with Jotly

This is old news (last November), but still made me laugh. What started as a joke promo video for a non-existent app for rating random stuff, eventually turned out to be a real app. I'll just ignore the real app and see this as a very funny spoof on all the start-ups building local-social-mobile apps.

Uppleva by Ikea

This new TV/furniture combo from Ikea is smart. I think most people can relate to the issue they are trying to address, the mess of cables and boxes around the TV screen. TV enthusiasts, who want full control over their system may not be well-served, but for everybody else, this concept is great. It's doing to the TV what the iMac did to PCs - clean up the clutter in a simple, easy-to-use package.