Urlesque and Memes

This Week in Web #23

Urlesque and Memes
Illustration by J. Longo

The rise and fall of Urlesque, the site that wanted to take memes mainstream

Rae Votta, Daily Dot

I admit, I was never even aware of the existence of Urlesque (which is no longer active but with remnants existing in HuffPost Comedy), but hearing this retelling of the site’s short existence at AOL by one of its contributors makes me wish that I had been in the know sooner. Part of the reason that I started this newsletter was to examine internet culture, which at turns is getting more homogenized and sanitized in the mainstream, while an arms race of non-sequitirism exists on the fringes, daring the uninitiated to enter at their own risk.

I think that a part of the meme-ification of culture is, in addition to the sheer virality of a single idea over a longform topic, an easy way to become part of a club. While the origins and meanings of individual memes may baffle onlookers as much as the actual content, a handshake has been performed by those involved saying “yes, I am in on the joke and we are alike”. Urlesque might be gone, but Know Your Meme, Buzzfeed, and many others have taken up the mantle of documenting what disparate corners of the web are finding funny and meaningful.

Memes are shorthand for a state of being or to quote a meme concept that has passed it’s prime, they can describe “that feeling when“. The joy of sharing memes online isn’t necessarily in figuring them out or describing them, but in reveling in a group at a shared experience. Even though I was never onboard Urlesque, I’ll miss it, as we can never have enough forums to share the wonderful oddities produced and amplified by the web.


Online Reviews? Researchers Give Them a Low Rating

david Streitfeld, The New York Times

There’s a restaurant named Botto Bistro near San Francisco, which prides itself on “Authentic Tuscan cooking with attitude, also specializing in getting the worst reviews on Yelp!” The Yelp reviews for the restaurant match this, at least for the people who are in on the joke. The owners are protesting the fact that you can’t opt out of being reviewed by the service by requesting that customers leave them a one-star review on the service.

Should you rely too heavily on online reviews? Botto’s owners don’t think so. Nor do studies that suggest that beyond reviews being outright fabricated or paid for, the algorithms and shortcuts that many sites rely on to get a five-star scale out of a complex system of pros and cons. Keep in mind next time you decide which restaurant to go to or which movie to go see that the numbers online cannot be an accurate reflection of what your future experience will be, and are often gamed to raise expectations.



Why you should think twice before spilling your guts to a chatbot

Nathaniel Mott, The Christian Science Monitor

When chatting to a computer you may assume that your conversations are being parsed by a computer, never to be seen by humans. But even if that’s the case, why should the computer be trusted any more with your personal data?

Nathaniel interviews several researchers who point out that users may be willing to hand over even more personal info to a chatbot than they would in an online form or to a pollster, as the conversational nature makes people more inclined to be forthcoming. Combine that with all of the other info that the bot could potentially know about you based on connections to other services, and suddenly a more personalized picture of every user emerges.


https://twitter.com/sophieGG/status/738757010037080065

Will One of These New Emojis Replace the Eggplant as the Dick Symbol?

Kaleigh Rogers, Motherboard

Popular phone keyboard alternative, Swiftkey, tracks which emoji are being used and in what combinations. The eggplant emoji is used over four times as often as the ear of corn, which was released at the same time. With the many new food emoji added, until the Unicode consortium straight up ads penis emoji, will any of these overtake the vegetable as the de-facto standard for suggestive texting?

Just make sure that whoever you send dicks to, real or food-emoji-based, that they requested them first. A Facebook user is petitioning the company to ban users from sending unsolicited sexual photos via private message, which aren’t monitored and flagged in the same way that public posts are.


β€œProtecting Internet Freedom Act” Introduced By Cruz

Michael Berkens, The Domains

Senator Ted Cruz has introduced an act with the intent of extending a contract indefinitely between the National Telecommunications and Information Administration and Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, allowing the latter to continue control of TLD ownership and management, as well as assigning them. This would in effect be similar to ICANN management of TLDs as exists currently, but without the concern that the act’s authors have of this going away, as is currently being discussed in the wake of the Snowden leak that demonstrated the amount of spying done by the US government on every connected person and device on the planet.

I don’t know if I agree with the phrase that they need to “ensure that the United States maintains sole ownership of the .gov and .mil top-level domains, which are vital to national security”, but I’m also not well versed on what exactly would happen were other countries (that also have militaries and governments) able to utilize those extensions. While the support for this bill is worded as much as anything in politics is, basically as “the person who I am opposed to politically thinks this way, therefore he’s wrong and this is what we should do”, it’s not just as easy as choosing to be for or against the concept simply by who proposes it. The general issue of internet ownership and management is as important as any other trade agreement, and it should be handled with care and deliberation.



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