Class in Session

My roommate back in college passed on some advice that helped get through our studies: Use your resources. That meant using your available TA sessions, your provided solutions manuals, your network of peers, your professors' phone directories, and so on.

"I'm not telling you what's on the test tomorrow. How did you get this number?"

Resources these days are a lot farther-reaching. The Internet is populated with lots of people aged 24 and younger, so the subject of school has popped up here and there. It has manifested itself in ways that have radically changed the learning process for students. These new resources are poised to change the way we think about education.

The '90s Really Weren't That Great

Microsoft released a commercial earlier this year, continuing its desperate campaign to convince us to return to Internet Explorer. Clearly, someone down at Microsoft thought '90s nostalgia was the way to go.

What would inspire this theme choice? As it turns out, the Internet is crazy about the '90s. To an embarrassing extent. There is no shortage of '90s callbacks, '90s nostalgia, and '90s references online.

And, when you think about it, it's pretty depressing.

The Great Ad Problem

A couple years back, McDonalds ran a banner ad, presumably to promote their dollar menu. It didn't quite have the intended effect.

Pictured: what 20-somethings say when they want a burger.

For a blip of time in the mid-2000s, an animated banner ad with those three frames proliferated around the Internet. It even came out that the advertisers had no clue that "I'd hit it" had any sexual innuendo associated with it at all - they sincerely thought that it was like any other throwaway slang from the younger generation. By the time McDonalds could redact the banner ads, it had already been mocked to hell and back.

This gaffe is best explained by assuming the advertisers were out of touch with their audience. In a lot of ways, this is a problem with online advertisement in general - they're out of touch with their audience, and everyone suffers for it.

Digital Language

The Internet has given us a new symbol in our lexicon: The "like".

Not to be confused with "thumb war".

It is a staple of the Facebook experience. If you see content on Facebook that instills positive emotion in you, then the provided way to express that emotion is to hit the 'like' button. It streamlines the entire response process - you get to state your approval of something and everyone else gets to know it.

The symbol has since evolved to take on independent functions in online context. 'Liking' things on Facebook moves them up higher in the home feed, exposing it to more viewers. 'Like's on YouTube function as ratings, with high-liked content being recommended more often to other YouTube users.

Reddit's upvote/downvote system functions similarly to this, where users can vote content up and down if they personally approve of it. What's more, sometimes people on Reddit will physically post 'upvoted' or 'downvoted', so as to communicate their approval (or lack thereof). On bodybuilding.com, approval of individual users can be expressed by voting to increase their reputation, or 'repping' them. Just as in Reddit, people will often respond to things with 'repped' in order to make their approval known. On 4chan, posting 'sage' functions in a way so that the thread doesn't get brought up to the top of the page, and is used to express disapproval of a thread's content in the same way that saying you 'downvoted' something does.

This is the new language of the online. Abstract concepts and functions are becoming recognizable and commonplace terms.

The Lost Worlds

The other day, I was going through my list of bookmarked websites and came across an old forum I used to frequent. It wasn't anything special as far as forums go - it was a small Proboards forum made for video game fans to talk about stuff. Back when I was 15, the forum had some good traffic, catering to about 20 different people on a regular basis.

As of yesterday, nobody's posted in the forum since 2010, and the last time anyone had an honest-to-goodness conversation on this forum was 2008.

Remember when 2007 was a year? I think that's when I got a Facebook.

It's a bit strange to go through an old forum like this for me. There was a point in time where people would go on this website on a regular basis and talk about what was going on with their lives. It was all between strangers on the internet, but there was some acquaintanceship in being able to unwind through written conversation. Plus, seeing the same people online - hanging out in the same place - does create a sense of community after a while.

And now, years later, it's completely abandoned. All that's left is an archive of a 2-year bloc of social activity from over half a decade ago. The message board is dead.

How many forums have ended up like this? Hundreds? Thousands?

Internet Vigilantism

Perhaps you heard about the bombings that happened at the Boston marathon last week. The FBI got involved. And so did the Internet.

Pictured: Some poor saps with backpacks. Unheard of in a college-dense city like Boston.

Reddit, 4chan, and some other Internet communities decided to comb through public footage of the Boston marathon. Their aim was to find the marathon bombers themselves, and to piece together the narrative behind the event. After all, they had all the same resources as the FBI, minus the criminal database, the forensic evidence, witness testimony, and all of those other "extra" things.

These internet detectives assembled an extensive gallery of "suspicious" people. Tabloids found these pictures, printed them, and circulated them. When the FBI released blurry photos of the two suspects, the Internet communities doubled down on their efforts. They reduced their list of suspicious people to a middle-eastern-looking guy named Sunil Tripathi, who had gone missing prior to the bombing. People ate up the possibility that the person responsible for the bombings had been identified.

And then it turned out that the Internet got it completely wrong. It wasn't Sunil Tripathi. It was two Chechen brothers (which must have been a relief for middle-eastern people dealing with unwarranted backlash about this already). Of course, that didn't stop people from going on a completely misinformed witch hunt for the first guy before the debunking. And it isn't stopping crackpots from trying to continue that witch hunt. Oops.

This is internet vigilantism - and in this case, it misfired. These events demonstrate the power of the online sphere in shaping public opinion. The Internet can also have a stake in the action themselves, with users often getting involved in pursuing criminals and other targets. This phenomenon has happened before, and it will probably happen again. What is the anatomy of online vigilante justice, and what can be learned from its failure here?

DeviantART and the Teenage Psyche

There's a fun little game you can play online. Go to DeviantART and search the site using any two words in the English language. You win this game if your two-word combination has more than ten search results, AND does not contain anthropomorphic animal-people, variants on cat-people or dog-people, sonic the hedgehog, sonic the hedgehog's friends, furry pornography, anime pornography, or anime in general. If your search contains any of these things, you lose.

Let's start with something fairly mundane and innocent, like "tea pot".

Dammit! This was on the second page of search results.

What about something completely out there, like "oceanography moon"?

Hey, seems like - wait, YuGiOh fanfiction?!

It's a harder game than it seems.

But why can we even play this game in the first place? What is DeviantART, what kind of people does it attract, and what does it say about our culture as a whole?