Michael Moore, I am no William Gibson.
That is for sure.
Four whole years ago, in August and November of 2012
respectively, we made episodes about the cultural singularity
and the Olympics' role in it and the effect of animated GIFs
on the US presidential election.
I made some predictions.
Internet culture has brought about the singularity.
Here's an idea.
Animated GIFs are an important part
of the presidential election.
Being now in the midst of both of those global events
yet again, I thought it might be nice to check in and see
where we're at.
Man, "Idea Channel" has been around for a while, huh?
I mean, look how much hair I had.
Listen to how I pronounce GIF.
I say GIF.
Maybe you say GIF.
That is just fine.
Different world.
Anyway, before we get started, a quick recap.
In the cultural singularity episode,
we argue that in response to major global events,
the internet content machine would generate endless memes
in a practically automatic process, one
divorced from specific humans acting as authors.
The 2012 Olympics were used as the preeminent example.
And in the US presidential election episode,
we discussed whether or not the animated GIF
could be an honest to goodness source of political news,
specifically as it relates to the marriage of talking
points and the actual physical presence of the candidates,
a thing which has been important since the '60s.
Where presidential candidates not only had to sound smart,
but also look smart.
So first, let's talk about this point brought up by Asa Forsyth
a while back.
In both of these videos, I use internet culture
as a shorthand for image macros et al.
That is something that I've stopped doing.
As Asa points out, such practices
don't comprise a culture of their own,
but are a reflection of pop culture practices,
global culture, various economies, and the culture
of the people making said content,
which is a word that I hate, so I say it like I'm a pirate.
Yar.
Content.
Anyway, to point at things like this
and call them internet culture is
to perpetuate the kind of online-offline dichotomy
we argue against here on "Idea Channel."
These things are not, in some way,
separate from culture or a different flavor of it.
They are fully a part of it.
At the very least, it's imprecise
and I think slightly denigrating to call such things internet
culture or digital culture or whatever, and in so doing,
imply that they're separate from culture
and the cultural situation of the people creating and sharing
them.
There are many internets, and there are many cultures
present on those internets.
I think it's important to recognize
that while they may all mingle and interact,
there is not one homogeneous internet culture.
And that fact is exciting and beautiful.
And by the way, if you need some reading material,
my friend Kristina Chai wrote this really great piece
on Chinese internet macros.
We'll put a link in the place.
I also talk in the singularity episode
specifically about a perception that the creation of content
is divorced from people, thus giving all the agency
to the technology, the memes.
They just appear.
Where are the people?
Nowhere to be seen.
It's like magic.
This works against another idea we've come to value a lot here
on "Idea Channel--" making sure the way we talk
gives agency to people and not technology.
Drackar 3 also points out that the economic situation
is more complicated than simply saying
creators don't expect recognition
beyond what's self-evident or monetary payment.
That's one, just literally not always the case, and two,
it's important to remember ye old truism--
if you're not paying for the product, you are the product.
And sometimes, even when you are paying for the product,
you're still also the product.
Individual image macro creators may not expect a paycheck
from the creation of their macros,
but their work helps generate value for websites, which
is to say if the impetus to create
isn't economically driven, the existence of locations
which host, harness, and nurture that creativity often is.
The appearance of visual humor is far from automatic.
It's designed for and invested in, which
brings us to the media itself.
Now, during the Rio Olympics, is there a glut of track memes,
as I predicted?
Are they used to great aplomb by the IOC and other broadcast
agencies?
Did animated GIFs have a lasting impact
on the presidential election or the people involved in it?
Is a particular brand of internet image
playing an influential role in this election?
I think the answer, in all of these situations, is no.
At work here may be something called the hype cycle,
a sort of controversial model for the pervasiveness
and overall interest in certain technologies over time
popularized by technology consultancy Gartner.
Four years ago, were we at the peak of inflated expectations
for GIFs and image macros as a communication technology,
thinking them handily capable of doing
more than just entertaining, which
was their agreed-upon purpose, it seems, at the time?
Or maybe myself and the "Idea Channel" team
specifically had inflated expectations.
That would not be surprising.
It's kind of our STEEZ.
Daniel McIlroy commented that the GIF seems a natural step
forward from television.
And while I agree with his points about repetition
and I think that they're very important,
it seems looping is increasingly invading online video as well.
The step forward may be online video
adopting some GIF qualities and not vice versa.
And true-- at present, there is still much left untold.
The general election debates haven't happened yet
and may themselves generate more shareable media
than the party debates have up until this point.
Really, though, the presidential race
has been dominated by video-- Twitter video, YouTube
commentary, Snapchat Discover page coverage, and depending
upon who you follow, maybe even Instagram
stories at this point.
What jokey conversations were empowered by image formats
are now being had with video clips.
Gwen Jocelyn pointed out a few years ago
that GIFs may take pressure off of civic involvement
through their de facto association with humor.
But I honestly wonder if that's the case anymore,
if people still feel that way.
The GIF has done a lot of growing up
in the last few years.
I reflexively think of blogs like Media Matters
and Skunk Bear as curators of serious
critical and educational GIFs.
And I wonder if its use as an informational tool
is reflected in its public opinion.
And just as a quick aside, in "The Age of American Unreason,"
Susan Jacoby attributes a strain of American anti-intellectual
in part to the growth in popularity of video
and its feelings, affect-based ways.
With print, one must think.
With video, one feels, the argument goes.
Of course, I disagree that video is inherently
unintellectual or responsible itself, in some way,
for anti-intellectualism.
But I've seen plenty this year to remind me
that video-- especially broadcast video,
especially the news media-- has an unparalleled power to gift
authority, even and often especially when it
isn't deserved.
Ideally, audiences seek to understand
how video is able to be as convincing as it is, can create
the affect that it does.
That understanding allows us to determine
if the authority that surrounds moving images, the subjects
of those moving images, and the outlets making and broadcasting
those moving images is truly deserved.
Often, I believe it is not, which brings us--
in a sort of roundabout way, and at the risk
of some serious tonal whiplash-- back to the Olympics,
which have spent no shortage of resources trying to make sure
there aren't additional unauthorized streams
of any format of their events.
The IOC even banned the creation of animated GIFs
of their footage.
Though semi-relatedly, if you haven't seen this "New York
Times" info GIF fic explaining how fast Katie Ledecky is,
it's great.
I have watched it many times.
It is mesmerizing.
The IOC has been copyright striking
high profile Olympics-related videos
and has been working with Twitter to even remove
offending tweets.
And by the way, if you are a brand TM,
your tweet might be offending if it simply
includes hashtag Olympics.
So yeah, just be careful out there.
Twitter doesn't have the resources
to deal with harassment.
But when a broadcast organization
tells them to jump, they ask how many
tweets would you like deleted.
Perhaps as a result of their iron content fist,
at the time of filming this video,
there has been remarkably little multipurpose, remixed,
or re-usable Olympic content, the exact opposite
of what I predicted four years ago and some of us hoped
would be the case today.
Sure, there is Phelps face, that Usain Bolt
photo of him smiling, and some reaction image-like
uses of the Spanish synchronized swimming team's entrance,
which have been amazing.
But for the most part, those are single jokes shared widely,
not serially and infinitely recontextualized.
And certainly, it doesn't feel like we've
moved forward from where we were during the London Olympics.
Of course, there are many potential reasons
why this might be the case.
American broadcast audience-- specifically, at least,
for the Olympics-- has dipped 15% since London,
though they do claim that digital audience has
significantly increased.
Arguably, also, meme-making itself
is in the hype cycle's trough of disillusionment, which is not
a thing that I made up, leaving us only
with memes of the dankest variety, which
disappoints Michaela greatly.
But perhaps also after the meme-heavy 2012 London
Olympics, the IOC developed an expertly-executed plan
to maintain tyrannical control over their brand and media
presence.
There's been a relative lack-- or it
feels like at least stagnation-- in the amount
of user-generated content.
And where this year, users are so bold as to generate,
there's a good chance they'll be met with takedown notices
and tears.
Maybe Olympic broadcasters saw in GIF creation a challenge
to video's authority-- not a threat to its audience size,
no, but an indication that far from an authoritative broadcast
stream, it's just simply available material.
If meme creation is as principled as Peace Blaster--
and really, me from four years ago
would have claimed the locking down of Olympic streams
would conceivably result in an increase
in this kind of thing-- it seems that's very much not the case.
Dan Angle asked on Twitter if the ban is in some way
antithetical to the enjoyment of the Olympics.
And in some weird hyper-modern sense,
I may say yes, or maybe, depending upon who you are.
But it's definitely disappointing, and perhaps
more importantly, boring.
We're not going to do a comment response video for this video,
but I am really curious to hear what y'all think about
the state of President meme creation and how it's reflected
in the current US presidential race,
if that's a thing that you've been following,
and the Olympics if that is a thing that you have been
following-- two major political events that, I think,
if my sense is correct, in the last instances of them,
we saw tons and tons of UGC, User Generated Content.
God, I just hate that phrase.
And it feels like now, there's a lot less of that.
And curious about what you think has happened, if anything,
or if I'm just completely off base here.
Let us know in the comments.
And I'll be there hanging out.
I'll say some things.
I want to-- I'm curious.
I want to talk it through.
Let's talk it out.
In this week's comment response video,
we talk about your thoughts regarding
the internet as a public space.
If you want to watch that one, you
can click here or find a link in the doobly do.
Hey, to everybody who was involved in the book club
discussion, that was super fun.
Let's do it again.
I think probably what we're going
to do is I'll make a thread to discuss how it went,
what you thought, how we could improve.
And then based upon that, we will probably
do another Borge short story in the near future,
iterate a couple times, and then move on to something longer.
But I just wanted to say super rad.
I'm so glad that it happened and we did it.
Let's do it again.
If you're in or around New York next Wednesday, August 31st,
I'm going to be part of the Atlas Obscura live event
that's happening in Brooklyn at Union Hall.
If you want to check that out, buy tickets.
We'll put a link to that in the doobly do as well.
We have a Facebook and IRC and a subreddit,
links in the place where the links go.
And this week's tweet of the week
comes from macloo who points us towards an article asking
whether or not "No Man's Sky" is infinitely boring.
So at this point, I've logged, I think,
maybe close to 20 hours, maybe 15 in "No Man's Sky,"
and I'm having a great time.
I can absolutely understand, as this article very, I
think, accurately describes, why some people would not like it.
I love it.
I think it actually kind of is exactly what was described.
But I don't know.
Maybe I'm alone on that one.
I think it's dope.
I think infinitely boring is itself very interesting.
And last but certainly not least,
this week's episode would not have been possible or good
without the very hard work of these gold medalists.