ROFLCon encore

Photo: centralsq, CC by-nc-sa

The internet was rolling on the floor and laughing out loud this weekend, as ROFLCon filled the MIT campus with live memes discussing Net culture and fame. Berkman Fellow David Weinberger delivered the opening keynote, "Famous on the Web," having previewed his talk at Joho:

Fame has been a property of the broadcast (= one-to-many) system. Fame is based on the math of many people knowing you, so many that you can’t know them. But it’s not just math, of course. It’s also economics. The broadcast economy has a fiduciary interest in building and maintaining the famous. They’re “bankable.”

Because of this scarcity and the fact that the one-to-manyness of the relationship means the knowing is one-way, the famous become a special class of person: mythic and not fully real. They are not like us, even ontologically. Fame is a type of alienation.
Continued...

Wired weighed in; the Guardian offered in-depth coverage; ROFLCon team members conducted interviews with internet celebs throughout the weekend; and the Boston Globe talked to the ROFLatti and attendees.

Berkman folks were also there, thinking it through. Persephone Miel, of Media Re:public, blogged Jason Scott's "Before the LOL" panel; Doc Searls liveblogged the panel on web leadership; and, at the Internet & Democracy blog, Mary Joyce gave us a rundown of David Weinberger's keynote.

Video will soon be posted to ROFLCon's main website. In the meantime, you can troll the ROFLCon flickr pool or roll through the ROFLCon and ROFLCon2008 posts on Technorati.