ROFLCon takes place this weekend at MIT in Cambridge. Kate Raynes-Goldie is there, blogging it for Spark. Here’s her first post:
Oh hai! I’m here at MIT where day one of ROFLCon is just wrapping up. But before I give you the highlights of today’s exciting events, let me just back up and tell you the story of what ROFLCon is and how it came to be.
All geeks know that crazy and hilarious things have been kicking around the internet for years, but it took LOLcats to introduce internet culture to the rest of the world. A lot of internet humour is technical and geeky, but everyone can love and appreciate the cuteness of cats saying silly things. In fact, Internet culture and humour has become so big that someone just had to put on a conference about it.
Enter ROFLCon, which I’m pretty sure is the first conference of it’s kind, not only for its subject matter, but as a unique mashup between an academic conference and a fan convention. Everyone is here: the internet celebrities, the people who create memes, the big brains who research it and of course the fans. The result is an experience that is very much like the internet, but in real life.
Last night I chatted with Tim Hwang, who along with a bunch of other undergrads at MIT and Harvard, created ROFLCon. Tim told me that like all awesome things on the internet, ROFLCon out started as a joke. They just started inviting a bunch of internet celebs, starting with Tron Guy (aka Jay Maynard, who is famous for creating and wearing a skin tight custom from the 1980s flick Tron, despite his less than latex-compatible physique). Tim told me that once Tron Guy was on board, everyone else wanted in, even the serious academics (you can watch Tim tell the whole story on video here).
On to today’s highlights:
David Weinberger, co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto and internet thinker kicked things off with a talk on the changing nature of fame and celebrity. Basically, we love internet celebrities so much because they are real humans who make mistakes and so they seem more real than the “old” Hollywood-style celebs who are too perfect to be credible.
My favourite panel of the day though was “LOLCats: I can haz case study?” which brought together the creators of all the big LOL sites (in this case cats, secretz, Trek, code and the Bible) to reflect on their experiences. Just like the LOL sites themselves, the audience was highly involved and yelled out hilarious commentary throughout the panel. Even Tron Guy was sitting there, in full garb, with everyone else. It was all topped off with a perfect internet message board ending – a comment from the audience: “I just want to say that everyone’s comments are really great. Now here’s how to get cheap Viagra”
Wish you were here? To watch tomorrow’s coverage, there’s a live video feed, Flickr photo group and a bunch of live bloggers who are posting short summaries of the talks as they happen.
Now I’m off to the ROFLconcert, starring Leslie Hall, Group X, Denny Blaze and Lemon Demon. Check back here this weekend to hear all about it!
Kate Raynes-Goldie is an internet researcher and pervasive game maker whose excuse to be at ROFLCon is that she’s doing her PhD in internet studies at Curtin University.
