The Bachelor of Arts & Science Integrative Council hosted the second annual Ampersand Conference last week, which focussed on creativity in the digital age.
The four-day event featured addresses by Christian Lander, the founder of the popular blog Stuff White People Like, and Ben Huh, the internet entrepreneur who popularized Lolcats, as well as workshops on digitial innovation.
“We felt the theme of creativity in the digital age was relevant and interesting to students,” said Metz, who helped to organize the conference and also serves as the president of BASiC. “You just need to go a class in Leacock 132 and see people on their laptops to see how much digital media affects us.”
Lander, a McGill alumnus and former Tribune editor, opened the conference by speaking about the surprising success of Stuff White People Like. He started the humour blog using WordPress, an open-source publishing site, after he and a friend spent a night discussing how they didn’t trust any white people who didn’t watch HBO’s critically acclaimed crime drama The Wire.
“I was going after these upper-middle-class boomers, trying so desperately to believe they’re progressive,” Lander said. “I really wanted to make fun of that. I wanted to go after the pretentiousness of it.”
Some of his blog posts were inspired from his time at McGill, such as white people’s love of “Arts Degrees” and being able to “Study Abroad.” Other posts deal with issues of multiculturalism, including “Having Black Friends”.
“White people were trying to collect ethnic friends like they were Pokémon – unfortunately you couldn’t trade them,” Lander joked.
Since he started the blog in January 2008, Lander has published two books and has been a featured guest on The Early Show and Late Night with Conan O’Brien. Lander attributed the blog’s popularity to the accessibility of applications like WordPress.
“Most of the traffic hits were due to people sharing the blog through their own blog links, Facebook statuses, and IM away messages,” Lander said. “It was really interesting to see the blog grow without having to go through a journalism gatekeeper, such as needing a plug from a show or magazine. If you do something that really connects with people, all of this can happen really quickly because the barriers are gone.”
Huh closed the conference by discussing his experiences as the CEO of the Cheezburger Network, a group of 45 meme humour websites, some of which Huh purchased from their original owners. He stressed the importance of simplicity when running websites that centre on user interaction.
“Too often businesses try to make things more complicated,” Huh said. “You need to connect with your fan base. Apple released a phone that was five years behind in terms of features, but 10 years ahead in terms of usability.”
Two of the most famous Cheezburger Network sites are failblog.org, which features embarrassing “epic fail” moments, and icanhascheezburger.com, which combines captions with awkward photos and videos of cats – a concept known as Lolcats.
Huh acknowledged that purchasing a humour website that revolved around cats and fast food was an unprecedented move that carried financial risks.
“I had a well-paying job in Seattle I didn’t like, so I was looking to start up a company,” Huh said. “I realized this could be career suicide, but I wanted to do consumer related things. Our goal is to make people happy for five minutes a day.”
The Cheezburger Network depends on user interaction to make Huh’s goal a success. The sites depends on users who upload their own comedy pieces, re-caption others’ uploads, and provide immediate feedback. Huh believes that today’s internet celebrities benefit greatly from the rapid growth of the online humour industry.
“It’s almost like the business found us,” he said. “WordPress wasn’t available five years ago. But today, internet humour as a vehicle for cultural change is inevitable. One thing’s clear: there’s more untapped potential in the internet user base than in the professional writers, and we need to tap into this user base.”
