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Author Archives: Melissa_A

Well, Is the Internet Making Us Funnier?

In this travelogue, I’ve explored ways the internet-facilitated humor builds communities and draws people together across boundaries they might not usually cross. I’ve showed ways in which internet humor is invading the offline world. And I’ve also discussed networked features of humor on the internet (multidirectional communication, informality, chatter, and lingering distribution).

But I still haven’t answered the big question: “is the internet making us funnier?”.

Well?

If we’re only talking about quantity and speed, then sure. Online, we can easily create and share humor, and we can do it really really quickly!

But qualitatively funnier? In the real world? Maybe I could begin to answer this question if I had hours and months and years to do a content analysis of sitcoms or movies or standup comedy or books over the decades.

But honestly, I think the answer is no. When it comes down to it, people are still making the same kind of jokes, they’re just finding new ways to share and comment upon them. I think this video from the Library of Congress makes my point.

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Guys! People have been messing with cats since at least the 1880s! Which is when this video was made. Seriously.

I’d also like to mention: while there’s a ton of stuff that’s funny out there on the internet, there’s a lot of content that really, really isn’t. In some simplistic way, wouldn’t funny and unfunny create a counterbalance to one another?

Anyway, in an effort to create make something funnier, by building upon something that’s already out there, and then distribute it far and wide using, check out this hilarious video uploaded onto youtube, a source of networked comedy!

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By Melissa_A 15:36, Dec 1st, 09 4-travelogue 6 Comments

Networking Humor

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I found this week’s reading to be really relevant to my study of humor on the internet. As I mentioned last week, humor creates an in/out dichotomy – if you’re in on the joke then you’re in the community. If you’re not, well… as Lorink writes in “The Principle of Networking”:

‘Network struggle does not rely on discipline: creativity, communication and self-organized cooperation are its primary values.’ Its focus is primarily on the inside, not on the enemy. Hardt and Negri rightly note that organization becomes less a means and more an end in itself.

However. What I want to focus on this week is how enabling individuals to share humor across geographical or physical boundaries allows comedy to grow fast and big. When gets everyone involved, the joke just gets funnier. Read More »

By Melissa_A 02:10, Nov 24th, 09 4-travelogue 4 Comments

Bridging the Gap – Using Humor to Build On- and Off-line Relationships

I decided to start out this last travelogue with the question: “What is humor?”. Well, there are a lot of definitions out there, but I think the most important quality is that it is socially constructed – things are funny because the people around us think their funny. Maintaining social humor helps build rapport and community.

To start out, a very non-digital media example:

This summer I read a classic ethnography called Guests of the Sheik by Elizabeth Warnock Fernea. It was published in the mid ’60s, long before inexpensive, near-instantaneous, global, transcultural communication was made possible by the Internet. Fernea traveled to Iraq in the late ’50s as a young newly-wed to join her husband, an anthropologist. The book details her struggle trying to learn the language, culture, and etiquette of women living in a rural Iraqi village. Fernea’s diligent attempts to become a member of the community don’t go very well for her at first. After many months, she begins to grasp enough of the language and culture to learn that the women, while seemingly polite, have been making fun of her the whole time – right to her face! And it isn’t until she is able to crack her own jokes on the women that they begin to accept her, and begin to consider her a whole person. Read More »

By Melissa_A 01:20, Nov 17th, 09 4-travelogue 8 Comments

Crowdsourced Fact Checking: What Can the Bobst Digitization Project Tell Us about Digital Journalism?

Last week Washington Square News reporter Jane C. Timm wrote that Bobst Library’s entire collection would be digitized. Not only that, but the project was on the government of Abu Dhabi’s dime. She said the digital archive was being created specifically for use by NYU’s Abu Dhabi campus, but would be made available in some context for use by NYU’s global campuses.

Not so!

According to a comment left on “The Ticker,” a blog maintained by The Chronicle of Higher Education, specific works will be digitized as determined by the academic needs of NYUAD over time.

Read More »

By Melissa_A 13:00, Oct 27th, 09 3-Travelogue 8 Comments

NYU E-Books or NERD FIGHT

Hey guys, did you read about this today?

According to NYU’s student newspaper, the Washington Square News, NYU is going to be digitizing the entire Bobst library collection. The project is being undertaken so that all 5.1 million volumes will be accessible to students of NYU’s Abu Dhabi satellite campus.

We do plan on the future digitization of materials at Bobst, for access by those in Abu Dhabi, and elsewhere in the global network university, as curricular and research needs demand it,” NYUAD spokesman Josh Taylor wrote in an e-mail.

The project raises two questions. Read More »

By Melissa_A 19:03, Oct 19th, 09 3-Travelogue 10 Comments

Twitter as Business Tool

This week I decided to look at how Twitter functions as a business tool – both in terms of reputation management and relationship management.

I think the idea of the “middle space” is really relevant here because Twitter allows brick and mortar companies or organizations to connect to their customers or members in cyberspace. But the organization’s Twitter-er still needs to fulfill brand expectations – which exist both off- and online.

Read More »

By Melissa_A 15:02, Oct 13th, 09 2-travelogue 4 Comments

New Media for Productivity? Really?

fail-whaleLast Tuesday I attended the Women’s Network for a Sustainable Future annual conference. Most of the members of the group are VP-level women working in big business, in charge of sustainability initiatives for their respective companies. Which means, I was probably the youngest person in the room, not counting the interns running the a/v equipment.

Why is this relevant to this travelogue? Read More »

By Melissa_A 22:05, Oct 11th, 09 2-travelogue 3 Comments

How is Reputation Managed in the Absence of a Strong System?

(Sorry my post is so late, guys!)

Strong reputation systems (like those employed by eBay, Amazon Reviews, and CouchSurfing.org) reward “good” behavior (behavior desirable based on the mission of the system) with factors such as increased user influence, points, or other means of positive reinforcement. The greater your “score,” the better your user-experience with the site.

On the other hand, Twitter operates more organically, with a bare-bones approach to organized reputation management. When you sign up for Twitter, you enter your full name, username, and password… and that’s pretty much it. If you’re unfamiliar with Twitter, here’s their help page.

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You’re allowed a 140 character bio, an image, and you can adjust the look on your own homepage. Other than that, the only way users are rewarded for engaging in appropriate behavior is by the number of followers they accumulate. Behavior is regulated socially, by other users, rather than by system architecture.

The problem with strong reputation systems, is that users are keen to find ways around them, in order to improve their user-experience. Amazon reviewers cut and paste the same reviews onto different products simply to accumulate more points. eBay had to revamp their reputation system a few years ago because users would simply trade positive scores regardless of the actual sale experience – rather than risk being given a negative score as retribution for a less than positive user review.

With Twitter, there’s just no system to game. Or is there?

This week I am going to examine how users interact with Twitter’s non-reputation-system reputation system. I guess what I am saying is: GUYS. PROBABLY YOU SHOULD FOLLOW @dandybandit ON TWITTER.

By Melissa_A 11:35, Oct 5th, 09 2-travelogue 5 Comments