Rob Wittig: Netprov Playsession: “Lifecycle of a Web Fad”
I will facilitate a fun, interactive Netprov session in which we’ll explore ways in which social media culture gradually transforms initial communications inventions on a platforms into fads, then into traditions and then into defacto rule-sets and codified subcultures that escape their initial creators, boom, and ultimately burn out. This session looks at “memes” in the broad definition, as novel thinking-furniture or running gags that operate in language, images or both. By reproducing this life cycle in a short session, we’ll learn about the cultural turning points by which microcultural events evolve to become weirder and weirder. Netprov is networked improvised literature, a scholarly label for the many collaborative, creative fictions that blossom in new media.
