Good morning, internet. Here is your top headline of the week: Designer nano luggage to carry drugs to diseased cells.
And now, your infographic of the week:
(by Chon Hon Lam)
It all started so innocently.
In 2007 somebody had a funny photo. In that photo, a person was clearly doing something in a manner which would not lead to success in their endeavour.
The enterprising person in possession of this photo wrote “FAIL” on it, and posted the photo to the Internet. It was simple. It was clever. The photo (which I don’t remember, exactly, does anybody know what started it all?) was funny. The “FAIL” added something to it, and a meme was born.
In January 2008, failblog was born — it would eventually be sold for a profit several months later.
Three years later, and the meme is still going strong — surfing the Internet, FAIL photos are easily found in many locations. The FAIL blog now has a YouTube channel, and other sites devoted to the meme, such as English FAIL and Daily FAIL have risen. The meme now needs multiple supporting sites.
But why does the popularity endure? Has it not run its course?
Let us take the following example:
When I started to think about writing this blog post, this was the most recent entry at FAILblog. It was titled Wrestling Maneuver Fail. But who is failing? What are they failing at? It is far from clear to me — and probably far from clear to people who know wrestling — who is successful in this photo.
The funny part is that the wrestler on the bottom is holding the penis of the wrestler on the top. The photo is humorous on its own, but good captions are available:
Mom always said, “if life gives you lemons, make lemonade.” Step one: squeeze.
or
Nearly pinned, Johnny used his infamous hand job move.
“FAIL”, however, fails to be witty, funny, or even descriptive. It is, however, the caption. But even when it is descriptive, there are several reasons why it should die out, and soon.
It seems most likely that FAIL is just a crutch for people who lack the intelligence, patience, or wherewithal to come up with something original. After all, how many times can you hear the same joke before it stops being funny?
There is no one-size-fits-all answer to that question, but after three years of photos with FAIL written on them filling the tubes of the internet, most people should be well past their saturation point by now. This small corner of the internet would make the bet that when people DO laugh at a FAIL-photograph, it is in spite of the provided caption, and not because of it.
The FAIL has managed to escape the photograph, into the wider Internet. Right now it seems largely confined to Twitter and video, but as a problem at Amazon last year shows, even the BBC can get on board with the juxtaposition of a subject and the word fail.
Video is closely related to photography, of course, and Twitter’s hash tags and character limit make it an ideal breeding ground in which FAIL could escape the “unimaginative, unfunny caption” status it currently holds, and make a break to the wider world.
It is already happening. And only you can help to stem that tide.
That is, if it’s not too late.
A pet peeve of mine — and many others — is when people start to speak in text message or internet speak. Not in an “I less than three you” sort of way, but sounding out the letters LOL instead of either laughing or saying “that’s funny”. I worry that these people have had their brains melted by aliens, and are now trying to pass a word-of-mouth virus through the general population that will also destroy my own.
It certainly feels that way.
The final straw in this is when FAIL enters into the conversation. At least LOL and their like is simply a matter of people being unable to differentiate a chatroom from a conversation — they have communication difficulties, but not necessarily true mental deficiencies. Somebody who is incapable of expressing themselves, and instead bleats out a four letter, one syllable word, “FAIL!”. That person has a real problem.
I have heard it in conversation, sadly.
So, dear Internet, are you with me? We must stop the FAIL before it goes any further. Stopping it’s spread across additional mediums is simply not enough. We need to stop captioning funny photographs with the same four letters.
Humour should be simple, yes, but it also needs to be creative, original and insightful.
Let us stop the spread of FAIL before it becomes more than a meme. It begins with you.
With a great deal of interest, I read about Akamai’s State of the Internet report, on Gizmodo, CNet and Mashable.
Unfortunately, Akamai appears to insist that potential readers sign up to be hassled by their sales people before allowing people to read their report. Sufficiently curious about the results, however, we signed ourself up for free spam in an effort to learn more about what everybody is talking about.
The main result the Internet seems concerned about is the speed of the Internet in the third quarter of 2009. In particular, the report’s claim that the Internet has slowed down (year-over-year) in the United States, but sped up in most other nations.
CNet and Mashable simply report that it has decreased. Gizmodo suggests that the infrastructure is falling apart. What’s the truth of it?
Going in, we have a few suspicions here at the Big Bad Blog:
Does the data use a per capita average? Or a per unit of data average?
The former can be influenced by a proportion of people becoming Internet users, or losing the Internet at home (or perhaps their home), resulting in not having the Internet.
The latter is likely to be influenced by overall penetration — what percentage of users are low-end users who do not need (and hence do not want to pay for) high bandwidth access? Additionally, an increasing use of smart phones (which access at slower speeds) would decrease the average speed for users.
The Akamai survey uses the language “average measured connection speed”. As the data used is taken from their servers, we take this to mean that Akamai identifies the home nation/city of the connecting server, measures it’s speed, and then adds that information to the data pool.
While Akamai does not speculate on causes, this fits into the latter category above. Possible causes, then, are individuals downgrading their internet, people who do not need (or use) high bandwidth applications getting online in higher numbers at low price points, increased browsing from mobile phones, and — as Mashable fears — a degrading infrastructure.
Here at the Big Bad Blog, we suspect a mix of three things:
1. The recession. While people in the United States may consider Internet to be a necessity, and have not cut themselves off during the economic downturn, many people might have opted for less expensive packages, meaning lower connection speeds.
This is supported by the Akamai data, that sees the rate of high-speed broadband adoption in the United States to be dropping (by 0.7%), with an 8% high speed abandonment rate. It is important to keep in mind that these 8% are still connecting — Akamai’s data measures what portion are high-speed.
2. Mobile phones. At the same time, smart phone use continues to increase across the United States. As more people do an increased amount of browsing and social networking over their phones, the average speed decreases accordingly.
While Akamai acknowledges that this is occurring, they do not provide any data on adoption rates or proportion of browsing done via phone. This means that we have difficulty judging whether or not supposition #2 is correct.
3. Infrastructure. Particularly, the infrastructure associated with the most popular smart phone — the iPhone — is notoriously bad in the United States. AT&T’s 3G network covers little of the country. This means that the United States’ numbers take a greater downturn than those of other countries due to the smart phone effect.
Add this to the United States enduring a slow bounce back from the recession, and we might have a winner in the Case of the Cause of the Slow Internet.
About a year ago I attended a lecture at LSE — part of their free public lecture series that I attend too infrequently. The topic of that lecture was isolation and the Internet. The thrust of the lecture is that all the evidence — all of it — points not towards the Internet making more people more isolated, but towards the improved maintenance of one’s desired level of socialization. In other words, sure — if you want to isolate yourself, the Internet will allow it. But if you are a naturally socially person, the Internet will facilitate it.
In other words, worries that the Internet causes isolation and the degradation of social skills are not just exaggerated, they are unfounded.
This did not come as a surprise, because ten years ago I was studying similar topics as part of my undergraduate degree. At the time the Internet was young and there were no firm numbers to look at. But the worry that this new technology would cause a degradation of social skills already existed and was quite palpable. And all the (admittedly anecdotal) evidence — at least, the portion that had basis in fact — pointed towards a conclusion that the Internet was just another technology that could be used for communicating. Like any such tool, people who use it to communicate enhance their social connections by doing so, rather than degrading them.
At that lecture, a year ago, it was nice to see that the studies (and meta-studies, which combine data from multiple studies to look for patterns that might not be visible in the smaller populations) confirming the conclusions I had drawn ten years earlier. In fact, I am not certain how anybody approaching the subject with an academic mindset could have seen it any other way — but by no means does that mean that the numbers would bear that out.
With all this in the background, I was somewhat surprised to read this news story a few weeks ago (found via Mashable) declaring that this had been discovered by a survey by the Pew group — a “think tank” that conducts random phone surveys. First the Mashable headline does it for me: “MYTH BUSTED”, it declares in all caps.
Further, the introduction to the Pew Survey itself just gets my goat:
This Pew Internet Personal Networks and Community survey is the first ever that examines the role of the internet and cell phones in the way that people interact with those in their core social network. Our key findings challenge previous research and commonplace fears about the harmful social impact of new technology
This is blatantly false. The research has been saying the same thing since I first started reading it a decade ago. Academics have been performing surveys and studies on the subject for years, and have already drawn the same conclusions.
The Pew survey breaks no new ground. As a “think tank” and common go-to source for reporters, they clearly generate more buzz than the people who have been slogging this out for the last fifteen years to determine the real impact that these relatively new technologies have on our social interactions.
And it pisses me off to no end to see them open with such blatant intellectual dishonesty (or ignorance) by claiming that their findings fly in the face of previous research. Nobody needs an intellectually dishonest think tank, Pew. Nobody.
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As an aside, I have tried and failed to find a podcast, video or transcript of the lecture in question. However, LSE does provide videos, podcasts and transcripts from lectures in their public lecture series. I think they’re fantastic — particularly the podcasts, if there have not been too many visual aids.