Tuesday, April 7, 12:30 pm
Berkman Center, 23 Everett Street, second floor
RSVP required (rsvp@cyber.harvard.edu)
This event will be webcast live at 12:30 pm ET.
What's the link between Rick Astley and funny cat pictures? How about "alpaca sheep" and Anonymous? Is internet culture as a whole fundamentally random, or does an underlying pattern link these phenomena? This talk will look back on 2008 in the meme universe, explore the ecosystem of hardware and software that undergirds internet culture and will attempt to use this approach to peek into the trends that will shape web celebrity and culture in the future. Topics to be covered include: Digg, the crashing world economy, 4chan, stuff white people like, and Yochai Benkler.
About Tim
Tim Hwang is the founder of ROFLCon, a series of celebrations to gather the individuals behind various online phenomena and researchers to discuss the emerging space of internet culture and celebrity. For his work, he has been featured in Wired Magazine, the Washington Post, the Guardian, and was a speaker at this year's South by Southwest Interactive conference. He is also a researcher with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, where his work focuses on the mechanisms of online collaboration, internet filtering, and the networked public sphere. In his spare time he currently is organizing a research group to track the "environmental health" of the social layer of the web and is in the process of working on a book about online communities and the internet's cultural history. He blogs regularly on pop culture and technology at the USBFB and on Twitter @timhwang.
