Internet Culture

posted 03/17/08 by Rick Webb

Lolz OMG. Suxxors. Reading the internet can be like reading esperanto.
When we started this company, we viewed the internet as a population, a culture unto itself. We added value for our clients not just through our awesome production, creative and development skillz, but because we understood this internet culture. Because we were part of it. Because we lived it. As the internet usage has expanded in the last 6 years, the mainstream population has moved onto the internet. We’ve got a wider audience. There are “normal” people on this thing now. But that doesn’t mean the internet culture has disappeared. Think on this: the creators of the Lolcat, I Can Has Cheezburger employs nine people and still, to this day, gets millions of page views a month1. Seriously. Think about that. People have made a serious web business consisting of little more than pictures of cats with captions. IT MAKES NO SENSE. Except on the internet, it does.
Our psyche is comprised of several overlapping subcultures, really. We know this. We have our class identification, our race, our religion, and several others. Our hobbies. Our passions. Our obscure interests. Those forums we frequent. We market based on class, we market based on race. We often think of the Barbarian Group through this prism as a multicultural marketing agency for Internet Culture. The Subservient Chicken was a perfect example of this. It was marketing to a segment of BK’s consumers – the ones who get the munchies, let’s say.
This has interesting ramifications against brands and branding. Branding has always been about speaking to everyone in the same voice. We often reject this at The Barbarian Group. Benjamin often points out that he speaks to his mother differently than he speaks to a client, and he may speak to two friends differently and that this is all totally right and good. it is counterintuitive – though obviously less effort – to speak to everyone in one voice. We recognize this in multicultural marketing, and it should be recognized with the internet culture. As an aside, the internet culture is generally a high-value audience: young, educated and upwardly mobile. In searching to be respectful and understanding of our customers, we almost have a duty to speak their language. And if that means we need to shoot beer out of a cannon for no good or apparent reason, well, that’s not such a terrible thing, is it?

1 http://www.metacafe.com/watch/1157418/i_can_has_cheezburger_founder_and_ceo/

Here are some recent posts from our employees about Internet Culture:

Farmville - A Community of Farmers or a Cult?

My sister is a highly educated professor living in Amman, Jordan. She is currently preparing to defend her doctoral thesis this coming summer. So it was only natural that I became very worried when her conversations switched from focusing on politics to farming. That’s right, farming.
Today I am announcing that I will be taking a four week leave of absence in order to go to Farmville in search of my sister. I fear that this farming phenomenon is actually a cult and hope to rescue my sister before she gets in too deep. During my four weeks I will be posting investigative reports in order to educate others about the dangers of Farmville.
This mission does not come without risks and that is why I have enlisted friends on the outside to monitor my whereabouts. Should it appear that I have also become brainwashed by the people of Farmville, they have strict instructions to come in rescue me. Friends and fellow Barbarians, I love you all and please try not to worry.
-Shelby

Today: TBG Park(ing) Day!

TBG New York is out working from the streets RIGHT NOW. We’re partaking in Park(ing) Day. Stop on by, say hi, and get yourself a free website.
We’ll be on Grand between Broadway and Mercer all day today.

All The Cool Kids Are Doing It

Public Service Announcement: I have joined the ranks of the lazybloggers. That is, I am now importing my Tumblr feed into my TBG blog, which contains the following:
As a result, my posts may be numerous, terse, nonsensical and/or random. Also, since I’m usually not using Tumblr itself to “reblog” content, items may not always properly attribute a source, but I’ll do my best to resolve that where it seems warranted. Otherwise it’s probably safe to assume that anything awesome or funny comes from Benjamin, Rick, Noah or some other Barbarian, and anything transit-related comes from Streetsblog.
Sorry in advance for the additional clutter. But hey, if you can’t beat ‘em join ‘em, right?

SVEDKA.com Bot Builder asks you to Bot Yourself

Many years from now (let’s say, 2033), the world will be a much sexier place. All of this strife and conflict and spam and Twitter outages will have been resolved, replaced by a wonderful, vodka-filled nonstop party. And SVEDKA is the uncontested president of that party. And everyone who’s anyone has given up their bodies and gone Bot.
Well, you don’t have to wait. The SVEDKA Bot Builder lets you create a perfect, silicone simulacrum of your sexy self, one that is more perfect than you could ever hope to be. Your Bot won’t age, won’t rust, and certainly won’t be hailing a cab at midnight because it has a 9 am meeting.
Building on the svelte SVEDKA.com, The Barbarian Group combined like Voltron with OddCast to create the SVEDKA Bot Builder, utilizing their way-futuristic character generation to make sure the Bots were as sexy as possible.
You can upgrade your new Bot bod with all sorts of useful tools, like rollerskate feet, wings, and an arm that’s an always-full martini. You can paint it, pose it, and even add some sick lowrider flames if you’re feeling fancy.
Once you’ve got your Bot perfected, you can make it do your bidding: say marginally titillating things with a voice-synthesized e-card, show off your shiny new physique on your Facebook profile, or save out some snapshots to use as profile pics on Twitter, AIM, or Friendster.com.
So go on! Get your Bot on – the future isn’t going to wait.

Shower Idea #001: Age Verification Quizzes

I have my best ideas in the shower (well, not always IN the shower, but you get the idea.). So this is my attempt at an ongoing collection of these ideas. All rights reserved, hit me up if you want to get rich.
Shower Idea #001: Age Verification Quizzes
Kids are dumb today, huh? They don’t even know how to search for things on the Internet, much less read or memorize. And yet, we have all of these things online that are age-restricted: porn sites, booze sites, the good redband movie trailers. So we put up these ridiculous Age Verification pages, which ask you your birthday and hope you’re honest. (It’s amazing how many people were born in January of a random year…)They’re a legal shield – nothing more.
So can’t we combine the two? Instead of asking someone their age, ask them a question they should KNOW at 18 or 21, like historical facts or math problems or things like that. We have all these standardized tests that say what we should know at a given time – let’s capitalize on it!
This would be awesome for websites, but would rule harder on things like Video Games, Apps, Movies – anything that has a tiered access structure. That way, kids who want to watch a PG-13 movie would have to answer 13 year old aptitude questions, where as 16+ kids would have to know, you know, what the Holocaust is. (I say this because a 16 year old once asked me what the Holocaust was.)
And hell, if they’re not 18, well at least they’re smarter, right? If they don’t know the answer, at least they’ll get better at looking it up, or answering multiple choice tests or whatever. And instead of just selecting a random birthday, maybe they’ll learn something. Call it Intellicaptcha.
But what if I’m over 18 and STILL don’t know the answer?, I hear you asking. Well, then, LOOK IT UP! Honestly, you people.

My Day at MoMA

MoMA has launched this excellent service (that’s a little bit gimmick, but 90% utility) called My Day at MoMA.
Essentially, the site asks you when you plan to visit, and then scans your Facebook profile to determine what the best day to visit would be, and creates an editable itinerary.
Having worked on another major Art Museum site, this addresses a very real and major aspect of what a Museum’s site should do – prepare the person for their visit, and get them excited about it. That might seem obvious, but you would be amazed at just how many Museum sites fail at this.
It’s a nice execution using existing social networks to provide a jumping off point, if not a solution.
Now if they could work on improving modern art.

Eugene Mirman discusses Advertising in the year 2009.

Really, required viewing.

Quell and the Qualification of the term "Photographer".

Ages ago, I went to see the photographer Nikki S. Lee give a lecture about her newest project, The Hispanic Project. For those not familiar with Ms. Lee, she’s an artist who immerses herself into a subculture (whether it be Lesbians, Lindy Hoppers or Punks) and when she feels she’s become completely assimilated into that particular culture, she has photos taken of her with her newfound community. She then quits the scene for her next project.
Artistic criticisms aside, one of the most interesting points of discussion to come up in the follow-up Q&A did not revolve around Ms. Lee’s assumptions about the mutability of identity, but the fact that she chose to label herself a “photographer”. While the end result of her projects were indeed photographic evidence of her participation, she was not behind, but in front of, the lens.
This debate is far from contained or resolved: what, exactly, qualifies one as a photographer? Is it technical skill, like Ansel Adams, or is it simply using the photograph as a medium for the way you see the world (like Terry Richardson, for example)?
Such questions arise with Quell, a new photo series from Brian M. Cassidy and Melanie Shatzky, the creative duo behind Pigeon Projects (editorial disclaimer: Brian is my cousin). Quell is a series of low-resolution, noisy images of people (teenagers, mostly) undergoing a sort of voluntary asphyxiation. But the catch is this – Mr. Cassidy and Ms. Shatzky did not take these photos or witness these events. They are screen-captured stills from videos freely posted to YouTube.
“Within the countless hours of crudely captured and degraded self-documentation, we have selected moments in which violence, grace, eroticism and tenderness converge into solitary and painterly images.”
But the question Quell brings up, along with a beautiful, hollow window into the bored and risky lives of it’s subjects, is this: Is this Photography? Are Mr. Cassidy and Ms. Shatzky, in this role, photographers? Or is this something else, some new breed of artistic curation that simply uses the still image as its conduit?
Perhaps the thing I like most about this new series is that it defies that easy codification, not just in style, but where it fits into an entire history and continuum.