#smcs2015

This week in class we discussed the Internet organization “Anonymous” which is a group that conducts shenanigans on the Internet for various reasons. These reasons include anything from doing it for a laugh to actually changing a social issue.  In anonymous, there isn’t a person with a position of power. Everybody has an equal say so nobody abuses power. This way, they accomplish what they set out to do as a group effort.          

      The article “Now Ten Years old, 4chan is the Most Important Site You Never Visit,” discusses how many Internet memes and phenomena’s start on 4chan. 4chan is essentially the heart of the Internet.  However, as these things move onto other, more general population websites, the content tends to get diluted. Things that start on 4chan tend to transition to websites such as reddit, and then progress down the line until they end up on websites such as 9gag and Facebook. At this point however, the content is less intense than it was originally, and many of the people viewing it do not have any idea where it started.

       In a sense, what happens with memes are what happened with fairy tales; many fairy tales, specifically those written by the brothers grim, were not for children. Instead, they were filled with dark, violent content. As the story passed through the generations, however, they became much more family oriented. Eventually, some even got made into Disney movies. Although these movies are meant for everyone, if you analyze them closely enough, you can see the dark beginnings, like how the step sisters abuse Cindarella. Many people who view these movies have no idea where they began, much like how many people don’t know where memes begin. Take the lolcatz, for example. They began on 4chan , but icanhazcheeseburger made them popular and everyone accredits the meme to that website. 

Collaboration is an essential part of the creative process. Whether it is with media, school projects, or software engineering, having one person in charge of something without anybody to consult him or her never seems to go over well.  A huge example of this in pop culture is the prequel Star Wars Trilogy. George Lucas had complete creative control of the franchise, and therefore, nobody told him that Jar Jar Binks was a bad idea. Who was going to question George Lucas, the creator of one of the most successful movie franchises of all time?  This dawned on me as I read “Open Sourcing Horror The Slenderman, Marble Hornets, and Genre Negotiations.”

The article discussed open sourcing, a form of software collaboration in which many people are allowed to work on something, and how it applies to internet mythos, such as the Slenderman. This also reminds me of the Star Wars expanded Universe, which is a term for Star Wars Media made outside of the movies. Unlike the movies, anybody was allowed to make content for it, and therefore, the legends of Star Wars continued to expand, until Disney made the expanded universe non cannon. Many other franchises are expanded this way. Sometimes the big entertainment corporations hire people to collaborate with them in order to produce more content.  I believe that it is better this way, because fans write many of these stories, and fans are what keep the spirit of a franchise alive.

Collaboration is even effective on a much larger scale. There is a word for somebody that has complete control of a country. This word is “dictator,” and dictators tend to not be good for the well being of a country’s inhabitants.  Countries that are run by collaboration tend to flow more smoothly.

The reading “The Labor of Fun,” describes how to some people, video games have become like a second job.  To some people, video games are more of a burden than a tool for enjoyment.   They feel they have an obligation to do certain things in the game, like level up, and buy items. This has especially been prominent in “freemium games,” which are games that are initially free but have the potential to make the user pay hundreds of dollars over time.  These games are especially prone to make people devote a certain amount of time to them, because most of these games only allow a limited amount of actions each day. But sometimes, people devote too much time to these games, and horrible things happen. In 2010, a lady in Jackson, Florida shook her 3-month-old baby to death for interrupting her Farmville session by crying.