Media Re:public

The crowd around me is happily singing along with a German video about “the dangers of the Internet.” Who says young people have no common experiences? What they (or at least the ones directly behind me) lack is any sense of their own volume.

I’m gratefully escaping the infamous LOLcats panel while listening to Jason Scott’s presentation called “Before the LOL.” He’s an actual grownup human, with a site called textfiles.com though as he points out he also does documentaries, i.e., “I actually get out of the house.”

Jason seems to be representing mid-generation baby boomer geekdom here at ROFLCon, which means he’s my age or so. Hooray. He’s showing us some history: Martin Cooper, the inventor of the cell phone and then this mysterious slide:

OLL KORRECT (LOLcats of the 1840s) became O.K.
GONE TO TEXAS (peaced out)
OUR FINE MEN (politicians and so on)
NUFF SAID

The fashion of misspelling came before, so is this just historians being happy that we’re not so new? Now we’re on the telegraph and its codes from 1859. 73 = Best regards 30 = no more (end). There’s nothing new under the sun. Ham radio as the original social media. He also shows slow-scan TV, which no one in the room, including me, has heard of - hacking video or at least pictures onto ham radio. The man who did this is Copthorn Macdonald.

Jason Scott is a master of early 21st century ADHD presentation style - 80% entertainment, 20% content. Perhaps standup comedy the only thing that compete with our online lives?

Now we’re transitioning from photocopiers to faxes to the very earliest BBSes. I’m not sure where we’re going here.

“K-RAD is short for ‘OK, Rad.’ Originally making fun of somone’s ”K bye’ signoff, then added “radical.” The efficiency of LOLcat language.

Ah, the overall message! We’re all just part of the great flow of history, YouTube is in fact the descendant of the telegraph. Jason Scott and the Web not-so-difference. I think one could do a similar history focused on the news media.

Tags: ROFLcon2008