In honor of ROFLCon this weekend (sads I am not there), I would like to pontificate on Scumbag Steve and a new era of meme-age. I can’t think of a scenario to date where someone unknowingly became the subject of a meme, found out about it, and then incorporated the meme persona back into his/her real life. So many layers of meta here that I just don’t know where to begin.
From what I understand, Scumbag Steve was just your average wannabe white rapper with a MySpace page and an unfortunate photo. A reddit user finds the photo, adds some funny captions, and all of a sudden Scumbag Steve was on a tear across the internets.
He was the wannabe rapper who comes to your parties draped in fake bling, drinks all your beer, and steals your friend’s wallet on the way out. Everyone knows a Scumbag Steve. Everyone.
Normally this would end up just like any other meme story – the actual real person from the photo might be somewhat traumatized and then would fade away. But not Scumbag Steve. He embraced the meme personality even though Scumbag Steve is a complete asshole. He took to educating other meme victims and has developed a little bit of wisdom in a space where there’s really none. He writes to Annoying Facebook Girl:
“Now don’t have your folks look for a meme support group for you, cuz there isn’t one. We’re out here by ourselves. You may feel hurt and embarrassed that somehow one of your friends or foes took that godawful picture of you (we know you really don’t look like that all the time, right?) and put it where the internet meme makers dwell. 4chan. Don’t go there, especially if your parents are looking….Now, if you do see a pic of me, try not to go all wifey on me but (scumbag joke, these memes can get inside your head) that too was a pic of me a little younger, looking like a scumbag. Let’s face it. The pics look pretty true to form.”
And in an ironic twist of internet wonderful, yesterday he releases an actual rap video and after a day it has crossed a million views. The meme becomes reality. Is there such a thing as a reverse meme, or has Scumbag Steve has just pwned the entire internet?
I remember when Sideways came out and there was that joke about Merlot that old people found funny (21 at the time, I just didn’t really get it). Merlot, I guess, was a meme at some point and then it wasn’t.
I am wondering when some dessert-related alcohol is going to come in strong with some inescapable Sriracha-like branding and just blow our collective minds. We’ll see it everywhere and begin ordering it with increased frequency. Like Merlot or Chardonnay, it will be a meme for a while and then disappear.
The consumer product market trends are incredible in the way they spread: greek yogurt, coconut water, 5 Hour Energy, etc. Nowhere and then everywhere. Dessert wine is ready – it’s an ignored category ripe for disruption and a part of the meal that people mostly ignore.
Phin’s latest must-read, “Mobile is the 99%” rightly points out that mobile and touch-devices specifically cater to the experience of the 99% — the people who consume, curate and comment across the web.
The impromptu Mechanical Turk survey I put together last week made this even clearer — this idea that people mostly use their mobile devices for short bursts of consumption. The apps that have done the best on mobile so far – reddit, games, photo-related apps, Twitter, all are designed around passive consumption.
In this way perhaps the future of mobile is like the early days of television – just sit back and watch and you’ll be entertained. This idea of curation vs. creation is perplexing because I can’t decide if they are necessarily at odds, though I can’t help but wonder if, because it is hard to be an awesome creator on mobile, does it mean then that we about to enter into a period of hyper-consumption ushered in by our mobile devices? TBD.
The emergence of O2O startups (the lazy person’s acronym for online-to-offline) has created a much-needed bridge for the wealth of digital information into the real world.
But from a product perspective, the interaction between online and offline is not yet seamless. You find a new coffee shop you want to try, but then how do you get the address to your phone? Maybe you save it somewhere, but it’s usually like 5 clicks into an app. There’s a deal you want to buy, but your credit card isn’t saved with this particular daily deals app. You buy a bus ticket, but then have to search in your email to actually pull up the ticket to show the driver. You see an article about some new app you want to download, but then promptly forget about it.
It’s clunky.
My favorite solution currently is the “text-it-to-me” feature. For example, check out the OnSports website. While I don’t know the numbers on this, I bet a ton of people use this feature (especially since it’s really the only thing you can do on their website). The user gets an easy way to interact with the service on his/her phone, and the owner/developer/entrepreneur is able to collect mobile phone numbers for people interested in the product.
Most people use their mobile phones for just-in-time information – where is this place I am going to right now, what emails have I received in the last hour, etc. and the usage numbers around SMS are insane. Some of the most successful startups have figured out how to leverage existing communication mechanisms to build an active user base, and while SMS has been used in the past for this sort of thing, I can’t help thinking that it has been under-utilized and there’s so many creative ways to take advantage of SMS that have not yet been explored.
Something really missing in social music right now is a great, sublime, amazing playlist experience. I use playlists primarily as a way to discover new artists or to assign a soundtrack to a certain mood. While usually I make my own (was a huge maker of mix CDs back in the day), I do like to listen to playlists made by others. That said, so far it has been extremely tough to find the gems because the bulk of playlists are mostly bad or lame. Perhaps the best example of a sweet playlist is the Hype Machine Zeitgeist, which unfortunately only comes out once a year.
Want to point out, though, that applying blanket “social filtering” is not the answer (point echoed by Hunter Walk over the weekend). While social filtering is helpful, I am not sure it is the “killer app” in this harder-than-we-though playlist challenge.
This challenge made me think of Muxtape, the NYC-based mixtape startup from 2008 (a small remnant is still available here). Currently playlists are a feature within the major music services, and it made me think about whether a stand-alone service built only around playlists is still a relevant request in 2012. Do we have room in our lives for yet another music service? Muxtape was amazing in a pre-Spotify/Rdio world, and I think its simplicity is more relevant than ever.
That said, there is still the question of filtering, search and curation. Now that the content has mostly become free (not free as in $0, free like a bird…a big change since 2001 and even 2008), I am hoping to see a lot of cool advances in the world of music filtering over the next few years.
This thought starts with a cheeky, shortened version of online-to-offline, which will now be referred to on this blog as O2O (like H20, but not).
Online innovation is a space with massive growth potential and a large future in front of it. But perhaps even more exciting is the future of O2O-type businesses and initiatives that bring the digital thought process into offline endeavors.
This means innovative spaces. I have been wondering about this – the major scholars, some examples, the design process, and general thoughts around how to make a space innovation-friendly. It’s not simply just getting a bunch of sweet electronics and pimping it out that way, though that would be fun on its own, but rather the process itself. Or even simply the idea that a space on its own CAN be considered innovative. It’s easy to see why Steve Jobs had such trouble committing himself to furniture.
Spacial decisions aren’t like pixels – you can’t change and shift and fix and iterate until you’re happy. Nonetheless, it’s a new area of interest for me and if you have any resources – whether just some strong opinions, essays, or cool architecture porn, please feel free to send them my way (ap at amandapeyton.com).
I am very curious to see what, if anything, happens with the Gawker “Burner” button that was announced today. While part of me is incredibly curious and excited – I am a huge supporter of anonymity and identity control within online communities – I also wonder what sort of dark stories and rumors and libel will be set free as a result.
And that’s just the thing – I think there’s this hesitation to really embrace anonymity as a crucial part of our growing digital community. There’s a time and a place for “the real you”, and it’s not everywhere, all the time.
But there’s a dark side to free speech that is really hard to defend. People can be assholes sometimes and even more so when hiding behind a computer screen and armed with a keyboard and a “Burner Button”. The Gawker crew has far more experience with the nuances of asshole-on-the-internet and this particularly bold move could result in a new type of insightful and useful commentary. Or there will be a surge in profanity, or probably both.
What we forget when we experience these trollish, disgusting, hurtful, dark-side-of-humanity moments is that they too represent a core societal value that we at least in theory all believe in. But it’s important to remember that while it sucks that people are mean, that is a problem with people, not the internet.
I wish there was a better way to organize and view your favorite tweets. The feature is mostly hidden, and only a few people I know use it with any sort of frequency. And yet, there are so many gems. So many discussion starters, controversy, passion, h8, and humor.
This one comes from @bradfordcross from back in January, and to me it was an insightful and pithy way to summarize this “creation revolution” that is going to characterize the next few years in technology. More people making, saying, writing, commenting, photographing and creating.
I wonder how this truly fundamental shift will affect that standard sharing numbers across the web. The hard-and-fast rule was always that, in any system, 1% are the true creators, 19% passively create (press the like button, add a comment, post a few things), and the other 80% only consume. For more reading about this, check out Brad Feld’s post from back in 2006. Creepy to think that these numbers are nearly six years old.
Helping to find and shape a digital voice for creators is extremely non-trivial, and even if the creator ratio goes up to 5% or even 10%, that represents a MASSIVE MASSIVE shift in terms of pure numbers.
