Doing good in the world as a meme
Saturday, April 26th, 2008Sadly, I missed the LOL-related panel (lolcats, lolsecrets, lolcode, lolbible), but I did get to the panel about pwning for the betterment of mankind. It was… a bit too serious. And in fairness, they were trying to deal with some serious stuff… net neutrality, the CIA, etc etc etc. But I didn’t think some of the panelists (iJustine…) really contributed much. ACLU guy made some really passionate points, particularly about how memes/microcelebrities need to work together to push causes, and how involvement from an org like the ACLU can only serve to make any efforts seem cornier/less authentic (echoing David Weinberger’s excellent point from yesterday that perfection is the enemy of credibility in the era of user-generated content).
I was really interested in the Bubble Project, which I hadn’t heard of before yesterday. Basically the ad exec spent a few grand of his on money and put big empty speech bubbles on ads around New York so that people could fill in their own captions… Kate took a bunch, I can only assume she’ll be putting them up around Toronto.
Leslie Hall was pretty quiet throughout (though check my flickr/youtube for some excellent bored/shocked poses), until someone started asking about the impact she thinks she having on the lives of girls with self-esteem/confidence issues.
As much as I love her just because she’s hilarious, she’s also probably really empowering for a whole lot of people. Oh, and watch for some pics/video of Leslie in concert, too!!
Cool backchannel thing: http://roflcon.backchan.nl — Ask a question, people vote it up or down, and it ends up on the big screen… then they actually answer them!
Oh, and check out Kate’s first guest blog on Spark!
