Mandatory ROFLCon Postmortem
Diana asked for a roflcon postmortem update, and I obey. If you don’t know what ROFLCon is, check out the website before you read further.
I am the rare internet illiterate on the ROFLCon team. I don’t mean to say that I am a technophobe, but somehow I never made the leap from embracing my programming skillz (and nerdy awkwardness) to embracing geek-chic online culture. I am ashamed to admit that it took me a full 30 seconds to understand the prophylactic visual cue on the ROFLCondoms. Unlike much of the ROFLcon team, I wasn’t a member of Harvard Free Culture (and while I have deep sympathy for the idealism of the movement, I am still working through how its ideology connects to the reality of economic incentives). Tim Hwang, ROFLCreator Extraordinaire, is a summer camp friend. He knows I have a taste for wicked crazy ideas, and I have yet to see an idea as wicked crazy as ROFLCon.
For me, planning ROFLCon was a crash course on internet culture. As I employed academic language to invite professors and pundits to ROFLCon, I found myself justifying an emerging field of cyber studies. I was not only legitimating ROFLCon to potential guests; I was also legitimating it to myself. In a sense, the creation and success of ROFLCon is in itself a legitimating act (a statement saying, this should be studied, this should be celebrated). We walked a fine (perhaps impossible) line between convention and conference: professors and grad students presented; the trip adviser owl and the firefox did battle outside. Nonetheless, too often I felt speakers and panelists approached questions before pulling back, as if to say, “Yes, this is interesting, but we aren’t ready to talk about this. We don’t know the answers. We don’t have the language to explore this.” Rachel does a great job of summarizing areas a future ROFLCon could explore in her postmortem wrap up.
ROFLCon worked well as a celebration. The antendees I spoke with unanimously loved it. Meeting Brad Neely was exciting. Watching Lesley Hall perform a lap dance for Tim Hwang - priceless. The weekend was characterized by boundless exuberance. And I believe this is all that we could have hoped for (and more). ROFLCon began as a handful of Harvard undergraduates (and a smattering of others) working out of a dorm basement. It took me months to believe that ROFLCon was happening; until the weekend of, I couldn’t comprehend the magnitude of the event. But ROFLCon proved that it could happen - that the infrastructure, the support, and the enthusiasm were all there, just waiting to be taped.
Now, I want more. Alice Marwick’s excellent keynote (lecture notes are on her blog here) provided a needed critical note to an audience focused largely on celebrating the LOLZ. If we want internet studies to be a serious school of thought, if, indeed, we believe that it needs to be, we must also be critics. A future ROFLCon should be no less a celebration of the profoundly democratizing and inclusive aspects of online culture. However, we must also begin to approach the harder questions. If the internet is a democratic medium, why is it dominated by white men? What sectors of the internet are we truely speaking for? What happens next in a world of increasingly grassroots media?
I want to know.
