This book examines the usefulness and limits of DIY citizenship, exploring the diverse forms of political participation and “critical making” that have emerged in recent years. Matt Ratto, Megan Boler (ed.), DIY Citizenship, Critical Making and Social Media, Cambridge MA, The MIT Press, 2014. See more
“How cats became the undisputed mascot of the internet. The advertising slogan of the social news site Reddit is “Come for the cats. Stay for the empathy.” Journalists and their readers seem to need no explanation for the line, “The internet is made of cats.” Everyone understands the joke, but few know how it started. A … Continued
Sharad Goel, Ashton Anderson, Jake Hofman, Duncan J. Watts, “The Structural Virality of Online Diffusion”, Management Science, 2016, 62(1), pp. 180-196. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2015.2158. Extract of the abstract : (…) We use this notion of structural virality to analyze a unique data set of a billion diffusion events on Twitter, including the propagation of news stories, videos, images, … Continued
Michael S. Bernstein et al., “4chan and /b/:An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community”, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, 2011. Abstract: We present two studies of online ephemerality and anonymity based on the popular discussion board /b/ at 4chan.org: a website with over 7 million users that plays an … Continued
Carl Chen, “The creation and meaning of Internet memes in 4chan: Popular Internet culture in the age of online digital reproduction”, Habitus 3, 2012, pp. 6-19. Abstract: From lolcats to memes, Internet gimmicks have become more and more prominent in popular cul- ture, giving rise to interactive communities such as “Yale Memes.” As a result, these viral images have … Continued
Discover more about meow speak and proto-LOLcat thanks to Margaret Rhodes, “How Cats Became Rulers of the Interwebs”, Wired, 08 October 2015. “EVERYONE KNOWS CATS rule the Internet. But you may not know that their takeover started 20 years ago, in online chatrooms. This particular community (of people, not cats) was characterized by its habit of … Continued