How to Have Popular Culture No One Actually Likes

From Kaitlyn Tiffany on The Verge:  The last joke is Tide Pods

Seems like a nice summary of how memes can get out-of-hand.  Or maybe I'm just old:

The Tide Pod craze is an example of the internet machine operating exactly as we have built it to. I’m sure you are familiar, but it goes like this: Meme becomes somewhat popular on Twitter or Reddit or a body-builder forum; bloggers talk about the meme because it is their job; national morning shows try to understand the meme because they’ve been told to start treating the internet like a real thing; local businesses participate in the meme because maybe they’ll be on TV for doing so; nightly news programs drive irrational panic about the meme because this is the purpose of the nightly news; bloggers are obligated to comment further, with needlessly detailed explanation, because now the posts will get oodles of search traffic; the subculture from which the meme originally sprung splits into two factions: people willing to debase themselves by making lowest common denominator versions of the joke that will spread quickly and keep them in the spotlight, and people who will double down on encrypting the meme with in-jokes and croissant-intricate layers of irony and sarcasm that make it indecipherable to an outside world that will, nevertheless, attempt to decipher it. All the while, everyone is getting angrier and more boring.

Who in this assembly line is having any fun? Now you have Tide Pod cookies on Instagram and Tide Pod Jell-O shots at the local pub. Now you can’t buy laundry detergent without Wal-Mart’s special “opening the Tide Pod case” guy hovering at your elbow, asking you about your day. (Not that it’s any better to be him. I can’t even imagine the number of times he’s had to smile at some doofus who says, “I swear I’m not going to eat them, haha!”)

Now you have a popular culture founded on something nobody likes. Remember when all the cultural critics were worried about things like “highbrow vs. lowbrow” and “kitsch vs. art”? Bunch of snobs? Now we have to worry about whether everything we look at is something we elevated totally by accident and actively hate. We don’t even have time to debate the notion of “guilty pleasure,” because we no longer find pleasure at all.

Evening Edition

Bouncing around a few of the blogs I follow semi-regularly, (starting with Gruber, in this case) I discovered this:

http://evening-edition.com

It's designed as a concise summary of major news stories of the day, with a sober approach that avoids the list of linkbait that a lot of online aggregators can turn into.

As a bona-fide graduate from a "Journalism" school, the most striking thing about it to me was that although the site is gaining some cred among thoughtful techies for being so refreshingly "well written and concise", its "voice" seemed very old-school to me;  Read it aloud, and it seems to follow all the usual rules for writing good on-air copy...

Inside Facebook "Like" Spam

Update 6-1-10:  Looks like Download Squad caught the story now too.  They're calling it "likejacking." Cute. According to them, security experts have confirmed that this is simply an annoyance, and there appears to be no real security threat at this time.
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Be careful what you "Like" on Facebook - there's a new exploit someone out there has discovered, and it seems like people are falling for it in droves!

A couple hours ago, I was taking a look at my Facebook news feed, when I noticed some of the usual silliness:

[So-and-so] likes "LOL This girl gets OWNED after a POLICE OFFICER reads her STATUS MESSAGE."

Eh, seemed like it could be funny, and I was bored.  So I clicked on it.  This brought me to an external website, with an empty white page with black text reading "Click here to continue".

Hovering over the text didn't show any destination URL in the address bar.  Naturally, I was suspicious, but since Macs are immune to most viruses, I clicked to see what would happen.

Nothing happened.  Or so it seemed, until my brother informed me that I now liked this page...

At this point, I felt a little silly, but also curious as to what was going on here...  how had the site made me Like something without clicking on a Facebook "Like" button?  And who was running these things anyway?

Well, I did some digging...

From the HTML of the "Continue" pages, it was fairly clear how the trick was working.  The words were just plain text - not even a link.  However, the pages also contained an HTML "IFRAME" which was used to embed the on-Facebook page that is used to confirm a "Like".  This page element was rendered invisible, and positioned underneath the page's text.  Any clicks on the words would pass though them, and into the actual "yes, I want to like this" button on Facebook.  Clever.

The particular bit of spam I fell for was hosted on a Blogspot blog, but there were quite a few other popular ones, such as The Prom Dress That Got This Girl Suspended From School!  That one was hosted on thedatesafe.com/promdress.  When I went to the top-level, I found folders for several other similarly-set-up scams...  as well as a running tally page, at thedatesafe.com/stats.htm

Whoever runs this server has since locked it down, so you can't see these pages anymore.  But I was sure to take screenshots...

Cute.  This particular shot was taken around 11:50 pm on Sunday May 30th.  The one with over 130,000 "likers" is the prom dress one.  Six minutes later, the number had grown by another 6,000.  Facebook admins finally got wise and started blocking the page shortly after midnight.

I found similar scams spread across a number of domains:

• Several Blogspot blogs, including girlownedbypolicelike.blogspot.com
• thedatesafe.com - probably the main site, since that's where the stats page was located.  WHOIS information (a public registry of who owns what websites) was anonymized on this one.
• mprosperstats.info - this one did have valid WHOIS info, but I won't post it here, since it's unclear whether the owner of this site is involved, or just an innocent victim who had their website taken over by spammers.  It would hardly be the first time.

I suppose it's possible that these are separate spammers, unrelated except in the method they use.  But I think they're all connected.  Facebook recently gained a feature that lets you "hover" the mouse over a link on the site to get some brief info on it - for example, if you hover over someone's name, you get their picture, and a list of some friends you have in common.

Hovering over these spam links also gives some info, including a picture... the same picture, across pretty much every one I have seen...

So uh.... anyone know this face?

What Was I Saying About Twitter?

A little bit ago.  And now, from a friend of mine from Syracuse...

My count...

Responses from people who want to follow him:  2.

Responses that are sarcastic or dismissive about Twitter itself:  4.

And one of the people who wants to follow him is slightly snarky about it as well.

Re: Social Media Revolution

My father is the General Manager of WDUQ-FM, the NPR-affiliate public radio station at Duquesne University. Over the last few years, he's been bombarded by people in his business worried about "what's happening" with social media, and where traditional media fits in. A few minutes ago, he e-mailed me a link to this video, noting that he'd "love your reaction to this."

Here's my reaction (posted on my blog, for that extra kick of "meta"-ness!):

Personal computers have been used to improve communication almost from the beginning. Even a lowly, non-networked IBM PC with a word processor and a spreadsheet improves the efficiency of crafting office memos and accounting reports drastically over that of a typewriter and a ledger. Networks made computerized communication faster, and spread it farther. The internet kicked things into high gear.

The biggest mistake people make when talking about digital communications, is in calling things "revolutionary." Technology as a whole is the poster-child for evolutionary thinking. Unfortunately, to the uninitiated, there appears to be more going on than that, because the rate of evolutionary advancements taking place also increases.

Perhaps the biggest advantage held by people my age, who grew up with all of this well into full swing, is our ability to take it in stride. Sure, we use facebook on a many-times-a-day basis, but we don't fawn over it. Already, we usually give it little more thought than previous generations did to how many times a day they used the telephone. (Though, like them, we do still retain the ability to, once and a while, marvel at how ridiculous it is that you can actually do this. Tech is cool.) We don't analyze how each new innovation is going to change the entire world and the nature of humanity - we just use it. If it works for us, we keep using it. If we get bored, or it doesn't seem interesting to begin with, we move on. Are there downsides to this approach? Certainly. But I do think we have a more level-headed appraisal of things.

I think growing up in the nineties has tended to create a perspective that is difficult to impress anymore, when it comes to the internet. "Things are suddenly happening twice as fast and in twice as many ways as before? Ok... this is supposed to shock me? It's been that way for most of my life."

The internet, like people of my generation, is a product of the nineties, and in many ways still operates like it. On a recommendation from my girlfriend, I recently read Douglas Coupland's Microserfs. It was lauded as a portrait of a cultural microcosm specific to its time and place, but honestly, I didn't find the world all that different from the one we live in today. "Dot-Com" start-ups have been replaced by "Web 2.0" start-ups, but the tale is largely the same.

One more thing about my generation - having lived through the "Dot-Com Era," we have grown to truly loathe transparent buzzwords. Seriously. "Socialnomics (tm)" actually made me cringe.

I'm not sure where exactly I'm going with this, (commentary on the stream-of-consciousness web I find so little unnerving about?) but I've already ranted for much longer than I intended to, so I'll leave it at that.

Also: I've always liked that Fatboy Slim track. (also a product of the 90's...)