This has to be the best Know Your Meme episode yet! great rhythm with the editing. informative historical contexualization.  masterful weaving in of popular culture. and freaking WEIRD AL is in it! COME ON! this is tooooo cool. I grew up on Weird Al!

This is American culture at its best - only Weird Al could exist in America - everything about this episode speaks to the unique experience of growing up with pop culture in the US.

Appreciating this episode requires one to understand the technological feats of audio engineering, iphone apps mania, misogynistic off-tune popularity of *some* rap artists, hip-hop’s intimate yet under-appreciate relationship with technological innovations, Weird Al as as cultural commentator long before South Park and John Stewart, internet memes as a cultural phenomenon, kanye’s popular tantrums, and satiric political commentary with popular media.

Essentially, this episode won’t make sense unless you know where to culturally place/appreciate all these aspects - yes there’s even a place for a rapper like T-Pain who can rap/sing (badly) about his love for the strippas and strippas and more strippas.  Oh and T-Pain twittered this Know Your Meme homage to his cultural legacy.

If I EVER forget why I love America - which often happens sometimes when I’ve traveling/living in other countries and fetishizing their health care system or affordable non-organic hormone pumped food or political participation levels or slower non-materialistic lifestyles - REMIND me to watch this episode of Know Your Meme.

it also looks like Sony is releasing a Weird Al compilation album. awesomeness.

elspethjane:

As Jamie Dubs just said, WE BEAT THE INTERNETZ, GUYS!  So, T-Pain just tweeted our KYM episode.  :)

I found this out while in Shanghai! Look Time.com names the Know Your Meme site as one of the top 50 Websites of 2009. When the show first launched early last year I listed my fave episodes. I knew that it was going to become a popular site even back then!

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So kenyatta produces a show called Know Your Meme. The entire show documents popular internet memes.  Memes are like genes, but instead of holding and replicating genetic information, memes are units of cultural information. The show’s style is like Jon Stewart’s Daily Show but instead of reporting on the whole world, they report on the internet.Yes the internet is a CONFUSING WORLD! How do we make sense of all the popular youtube videos and lolcats and emails about YoDawg? That’s why we need a show called Know Your Meme!

The on-screen team consists of Kenyatta, Jamie, and Ellie. And the behind screen magic consists of great internet researchers, editors, and camera people.

Now if you are wondering what what is the significance and wonder of documenting online ideas - then you must do two things right now:

1.) watch some video on Know Your Meme

2.) read Kenyatta’s interview, Life After Memes,  on Pop Tech. He discusses memetic activity as cultural practices. He also challenges Susan Blackmore’s notion that memes are bigger than people and actually control people. Kenyatta’s article essentially makes the point that memes do not control society, memes at the end of the day require people to have a life on the internet.

culturalbytes:

I am so excited to find out that I have received a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant! I will be going this summer to work with in China with the China Internet Network Information Center 中国互联网络信息中心 (CNNIC), the government agency that manages all of China’s internet affairs (equivalent to the FCC in the US). I met with CNNIC last summer in Beijing. We agreed upon a summer project in which I would analyze how youths and migrants are using ICTs to manage their inter-personal communication networks, with a special interest in online gaming networks.

It’s pretty exciting that these next 3 months at CNNIC will be the start of my dissertation fieldwork. I will be in Beijing for two months this summer! Here’s the title and description of my project below. If you or anyone you know is working on anything related to China and the internet - I would love to talk to you or them! And let’s talk if you are you going to be in Beijing this summer!

Title: China’s Internet Policy and Digital Network Architecture: Information Communication Technology (ICT) Practices among Youths and Migrant

Project Summary: This project asks how China’s internet policies and digital architectures influence the communication practices of two important and growing populations of new users—youths and migrants. I investigate how the inter-personal communication patterns of youths and migrants are affected by two factors: (1) recent internet usage policies set by the Chinese administration and (2) cellphone and internet digital architecture—an infrastructural comparison that is a central feature of this study.

The availability of popular ICTs to all citizens in countries such as China, renders problematic any theoretically dichotomous notions of the “Digital Divide” that are based on ICT “haves and have-nots”—where the “haves” have more technology and are consequently more empowered than the “have-nots.” A central contribution of this study is that it has the potential to transform current concepts of technology access and of ICT usage by accounting for important and specific technological differences in digital architectures and communication policies in the practices of new ICT users in China.

Thank you to Christena Turner, Richard Madsen, Eric Cech, Shannon Spanhake, Kenyatta Cheese, leah muse-orlinoff, stephanie little, Bill Blanpied and Bill Chang for all your help!

culturalbytes:

In preparation for my summer research project, “China’s Internet Policy and Digital Network Architecture: Information Communication Technology (ICT) Practices among Youths and Migrant” at China Internet Network Information Center 中国互联网络信息中心 (CNNIC), I went to DC for an NSF-sponsored meeting for the EAPSI program through the Office of International Science and Engineering (OISE).

I was finally able to meet up with two Bill’s who made this oppotunity possible, Bill Blanpied on the left and Bill Chang on the right. I am grateful for their introductions to Dr. Mao Wei, who I will be working with this summer at CNNIC along with his amazing office of reseachers, including Wan En Hai! This is so exciting to work with Dr .Mao Wei - the person who started CNNIC and established many of the early efforts in China that has allowed it to grow so quickly and efficiently.

I met Bill Blanpied in India during the summer of 2008 for the China-India-US Workshop on Science, Technology and Innovation Policy in Bangalore, India. After the informative conference I was heading off to China for fieldwork from India, so Bill suggested that I meet up with Bill Chang, the Director of NSF’s Beijing office at that time.

I am so grateful for the guidance from Bill-Squared - thank you for all your encouragement on my project!