*Alice Marwick delivers a ROFLCon keynote Saturday on the **internet's **power to upgrade culture.
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CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts -- Can the internet and its celebrities change the status quo? Of course they can, but do they?
Those were the questions posed by Alice Marwick, Saturday's keynote speaker at ROFLCon, a two-day internet culture conference. Marwick, a Ph.D. candidate at New York University who studies social status and hierarchy in Web 2.0 cultures, thinks it's time for the internet community to use its power for good.
The internet, it turns out, actually is serious business.
"Rather than fuel a cycle of novelty, let's use this media as a valid alternative," said Marwick. "Let's challenge or change the views that we're subverting from."
Marwick pointed out that while microcelebrity is a positive alternative to mainstream media culture, it's important to turn a critical eye on online communities. "Internet culture can be very sexist, homophobic and racist," said
Marwick. "Popular blogs are all written by white guys ... and the most popular
YouTube videos are of hot girls."
Marwick went on to discuss whether internet celebrity may even be becoming more important than Hollywood and other traditional models of celebrity. If so, then it's even more crucial to not allow fame, "a drug of validation," to muddy it up, she said.
Marwick used the example of Magibon, a YouTube phenomenon whose videos of herself staring intently into a webcam elicit millions of views, to talk about the way contemporary celebrity culture permeates internet culture. Magibon occasionally spoke in Japanese, leading many of her viewers to think she was from Japan. But a disastrous television appearance led to outing Magibon as a rural teen from Pennsylvania.
"This faux Japanese doll came off as awkward teenaged, American girl,"
said Marwick.
"If this is the culture we're building as internet nerds, lets have it be something we're proud of," concluded Marwick, as a call to arms to the audience.
Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
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