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I am the author of the piece and I agree the title is poor but the title came before the piece did so apologies that it did not go where I promised. The title

I am the author of the piece and I agree the title is poor but the title came before the piece did so apologies that it did not go where I promised. The title is a riff on Johnathan Zittrain's "The future of the internet & how to stop it" http://futureoftheinternet.org/ http://futureoftheinternet.org/ and the post was a pretty free-form exploration of the topic written with a tight deadline. I'm glad people are enjoying it, I honestly didn't know what the reaction would be when I posted it.

jacobolus 16y ago
A response: http://xkcd.com/794/ http://xkcd.com/794/ Take a look at any play, novel, poem, song, painting, etc. etc., and you’ll find that they’re all filled with in-jokes and references to some shared canon or to recent events. The idea that once you hit the internet this becomes some uniquely exclusionary practice seems pretty historically revisionist.
- shalmanese 16y ago
  This is one thing I neglected to address in my piece due to lack of space. It's not a difference of kind but of magnitude. Offline humor also serves many of the same operational purposes that online does but they are not solely comprised of them.
  - jacobolus 16y ago
    I think you need much more evidence. The reason that most of the offline written material we look at (e.g. famous novels) is “substantive” by comparison with online material (e.g. YouTube comments), is that the vast vast majority of the complete crap has been filtered out by editorial and publishing processes, or lost to time. The reason that internet jokes seem obscure to people not in the internet community is not that they’re “operationally different” than other jokes, but just that jokes quite often lose meaning out of context. I would guess that if you looked for instance at the letters received by congressmen or newspapers, you’d find just about the same amount of incomprehensible garbage. I dispute your claim that there is a substantively different purpose to the use of “humor” in online writing vs. online writing: it doesn’t match my experience. But even if it happens to be true in some sense, your essay doesn’t provide convincing evidence. * * * On the other hand, I think your commentary about the internet having a “citizenry” is pretty interesting.
    - shalmanese 16y ago
      I agree, the purpose of the piece was not a proof, but a narrative. The long tail of quality vs edited, curatorial content is an orthogonal argument to the one I'm making. I guess I'm arguing that, given the same person, placed in two contexts, they will produce two different types of humor and the offline version will be objectively funnier than the online version. And the core of the difference between the two is due to the affordances of the space. Is that a bit clearer?
      - jacobolus 16y ago
        Okay. But I would guess that the main reason that the offline one is “funnier” (insofar as that’s true at all) is that you’re more likely to know the guy making the joke. If you just walked up to a random guy on the subway and he started telling a joke, it wouldn’t be any funnier than if you found the same stranger’s e-joke. People clearly tell different jokes to different audiences, but I don’t think the distinctions in audience here are inherent in the medium. For example, someone telling a joke in an IRC channel with a bunch of regulars who know each other will tell a different kind of joke than someone writing a Youtube comment. Likewise a guy might tell his poker buddies a different joke than he’d scrawl on the inside of a bathroom stall.
        shalmanese 16y ago
        It's funnier because the people who are joking know each other and are able to affect each other's lives in much more significant ways.
stuhacking 16y ago
That's funny. You complain about internet humour being nothing more than remixes of old jokes, pop culture references and done-to-death memes. Yet, you employed a similar technique by basing your title on that of an existing text... for humorous effect? I saw irony there. (You even predicted my tongue-in-cheek response. Bravo, sir!)

jacobolus 16y ago

A response: http://xkcd.com/794/ http://xkcd.com/794/ Take a look at any play, novel, poem, song, painting, etc. etc., and you’ll find that they’re all filled with in-jokes and references to some shared canon or to recent events. The idea that once you hit the internet this becomes some uniquely exclusionary practice seems pretty historically revisionist.

shalmanese 16y ago
This is one thing I neglected to address in my piece due to lack of space. It's not a difference of kind but of magnitude. Offline humor also serves many of the same operational purposes that online does but they are not solely comprised of them.
- jacobolus 16y ago
  I think you need much more evidence. The reason that most of the offline written material we look at (e.g. famous novels) is “substantive” by comparison with online material (e.g. YouTube comments), is that the vast vast majority of the complete crap has been filtered out by editorial and publishing processes, or lost to time. The reason that internet jokes seem obscure to people not in the internet community is not that they’re “operationally different” than other jokes, but just that jokes quite often lose meaning out of context. I would guess that if you looked for instance at the letters received by congressmen or newspapers, you’d find just about the same amount of incomprehensible garbage. I dispute your claim that there is a substantively different purpose to the use of “humor” in online writing vs. online writing: it doesn’t match my experience. But even if it happens to be true in some sense, your essay doesn’t provide convincing evidence. * * * On the other hand, I think your commentary about the internet having a “citizenry” is pretty interesting.
  - shalmanese 16y ago
    I agree, the purpose of the piece was not a proof, but a narrative. The long tail of quality vs edited, curatorial content is an orthogonal argument to the one I'm making. I guess I'm arguing that, given the same person, placed in two contexts, they will produce two different types of humor and the offline version will be objectively funnier than the online version. And the core of the difference between the two is due to the affordances of the space. Is that a bit clearer?
    - jacobolus 16y ago
      Okay. But I would guess that the main reason that the offline one is “funnier” (insofar as that’s true at all) is that you’re more likely to know the guy making the joke. If you just walked up to a random guy on the subway and he started telling a joke, it wouldn’t be any funnier than if you found the same stranger’s e-joke. People clearly tell different jokes to different audiences, but I don’t think the distinctions in audience here are inherent in the medium. For example, someone telling a joke in an IRC channel with a bunch of regulars who know each other will tell a different kind of joke than someone writing a Youtube comment. Likewise a guy might tell his poker buddies a different joke than he’d scrawl on the inside of a bathroom stall.
      - shalmanese 16y ago
        It's funnier because the people who are joking know each other and are able to affect each other's lives in much more significant ways.

stuhacking 16y ago

That's funny. You complain about internet humour being nothing more than remixes of old jokes, pop culture references and done-to-death memes. Yet, you employed a similar technique by basing your title on that of an existing text... for humorous effect? I saw irony there. (You even predicted my tongue-in-cheek response. Bravo, sir!)