> I think the internet is just different. Content creation has become something people do in pursuit of profit rather than something they do out of interest or just the lulz.
This is something I've been kind of depressed about lately. I grew up with the internet of the early 2000s, through the blog boom and the early days of YouTube. I used RSS, and was into things like Creative Commons and GPL. Free culture stuff. We had a wealth of cool things that people were making just because they wanted to, and crass commercial motive was hardly something that crossed peoples' mind. Just as app stores killed free web games (far more than the demise of Flash), the growing commercialization of the Web has eroded the wonderful mashup culture that permeated it.
I've been thinking about it a bit lately because I got turned onto actually listening to Hatsune Miku music, and it's a terrific example of what once was: remixing, memetic evolution and building something bigger collaboratively. (Miku has been vaguely on my radar all along, but I never bothered to give the stuff a fair chance until I realized a Wagakki Band song I liked was a cover of one of the most popular vocaloid songs, Senbonzakura.)
* The Leakspin meme was a thing in the early 2000s, combining the Finnish folk song Ievan Polkka with a random anime clip. That was all over the place back then, and I wasn't even a 4chan user.
* Some guy in Japan used the relatively new synth voice bank VC01 Hatsune Miku to release a sort of cover of Ievan Polkka, including a silly redrawing of the box art, which blew up on the Japanese streaming site Niconico and later made it onto YouTube. Which has lead to the character being associated with leaks/spring onions. [1]
* Someone else made the song "Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya" with the same voice, which was later covered with another synth voice and then paired with a now famous animation of a pop tart cat. [2]
* The growing "memetic velocity" surrounding a character derived from a synth voice and the anime art on the box it came in resulted in an absolutely fascinating music scene where synth artists bill themselves as producers and give a performance credit to the synth, releasing their amateur music for free on video sites (and sometimes getting album deals as they grew in popularity). And eventually you get a worldwide phenomenon with global tours of a hologram performing with a live band, drawing from thousands of songs and visual artwork created by whoever wants to contribute. A "wiki celebrity," so to speak.
Kind of random, I guess, but reading up on how that all connects (and was going on in the background of related memes that I was aware of) has kind of restored my faith in the Internet. I think that if you get enough creative people together, you're going to end up with some cool stuff. The question remains, though...would it happen today? (And if not, what do we need to torch to fix it?)
This is something I've been kind of depressed about lately. I grew up with the internet of the early 2000s, through the blog boom and the early days of YouTube. I used RSS, and was into things like Creative Commons and GPL. Free culture stuff. We had a wealth of cool things that people were making just because they wanted to, and crass commercial motive was hardly something that crossed peoples' mind. Just as app stores killed free web games (far more than the demise of Flash), the growing commercialization of the Web has eroded the wonderful mashup culture that permeated it.
I've been thinking about it a bit lately because I got turned onto actually listening to Hatsune Miku music, and it's a terrific example of what once was: remixing, memetic evolution and building something bigger collaboratively. (Miku has been vaguely on my radar all along, but I never bothered to give the stuff a fair chance until I realized a Wagakki Band song I liked was a cover of one of the most popular vocaloid songs, Senbonzakura.)
* The Leakspin meme was a thing in the early 2000s, combining the Finnish folk song Ievan Polkka with a random anime clip. That was all over the place back then, and I wasn't even a 4chan user.
* Some guy in Japan used the relatively new synth voice bank VC01 Hatsune Miku to release a sort of cover of Ievan Polkka, including a silly redrawing of the box art, which blew up on the Japanese streaming site Niconico and later made it onto YouTube. Which has lead to the character being associated with leaks/spring onions. [1]
* Someone else made the song "Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya" with the same voice, which was later covered with another synth voice and then paired with a now famous animation of a pop tart cat. [2]
* The growing "memetic velocity" surrounding a character derived from a synth voice and the anime art on the box it came in resulted in an absolutely fascinating music scene where synth artists bill themselves as producers and give a performance credit to the synth, releasing their amateur music for free on video sites (and sometimes getting album deals as they grew in popularity). And eventually you get a worldwide phenomenon with global tours of a hologram performing with a live band, drawing from thousands of songs and visual artwork created by whoever wants to contribute. A "wiki celebrity," so to speak.
Kind of random, I guess, but reading up on how that all connects (and was going on in the background of related memes that I was aware of) has kind of restored my faith in the Internet. I think that if you get enough creative people together, you're going to end up with some cool stuff. The question remains, though...would it happen today? (And if not, what do we need to torch to fix it?)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatsune_Miku#Cultural_impact
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyan_Cat