The first ever ROFLcon happened this past weekend as a two-day symposium on the MIT campus in Cambridge Massachusetts for Internet celebs, academics, and everyday nerds (April 25 and 26, 2008).

The purpose? To find out what Internet Celebrity is, how Memes form, what comprises Internet Culture, how this affects living, breathing human-beings and where this bus is headed?

So imagine if you will, walking into a real-life room filled with the likes of Leeroy Jenkins, Leslie Hall (gem sweaters), Tron Guy, Chuck Norris Facts kid, Red Paper Clip Guy, team Jib-Jab (who are super cute BTW), LOLcats, Marmaduke Guy, xkcd creator Randall Munroe, Reddit.com Guy (another real life cutie), and the list goes on—the Internet in one room!

Let’s back track a moment, for non-geeks, nouveau geeks and casual web surfers, What is a ROFL and what is Meme and who is Tron Guy?

ROFL is Internet slang for (Rolling on the Floor Laughing). A language that has evolved from saving keystrokes in text messaging and instant messaging.

A Meme is an idea that, like a gene, can replicate and evolve. A unit of cultural information that represents a basic idea that can be transferred from one individual to another and subjected to mutation, crossover and adaptation. The concept of meme is from the 1976 book by Richard Dawkins, ‘The Selfish Gene’ and has been adopted by the Internets to refer to the aforementioned.

Tron Guy is Jay Maynard who came into Internet Fame by creating a costume from scratch based on the 1982 film TRON. He created a website detailing the process of creating this most incredible wearable art and thus the viral capacity of the web took over. As friends FORWARD to other friends he became an Internet success. Jay Maynard gets major accolades for staying in costume for the entire duration of the ROFLcon. And, I think he was the most popular micro-celeb.

So why invite the Internet to meet up in person? Many reasons it turns out…
1. Does the Internet function the same in real life as it does online?
2. What is Internet Celebrity in comparison with Hollywood Celebrity?
3. What is rickrolling and lolspeak?
4. Is the Internet really as democratic as it seems?
5. And…what do these Internets look like in person?

Does the Internet function the same in real life as it does online? Well, according to Ian Chillag of NPR’s New Show ‘The Bryant Park Project’ it does. “ROFL con: it’s the entire Internet in one place, in its human forms. Those human forms do what other humans do: they drink beer. Scott Beale of Laughing Squid made it easy last night. He opened up a tab at a pub in Cambridge, and the Internet was thirsty.” I was at this pre-ROFL party, a great place to guess ‘who is that?’. The highlight was meeting the guy who lives in the basement of the popular music venue ‘The Middle East’. Why is his apartment so significant? It just happens to be the background for level 4 in the game Guitar Hero. Apparently this guy became aware that his apartment was the setting for level 4 when friends were over playing the game in said apartment. LOL

So how does Internet Celebrity (or micro-celebrity) compare to Hollywood Celebrity…Alice Marwick (PhD student in the Department of Culture and Communication, NYU) asks ‘Is this the democratization of a formerly elite space, or sensational lowest-common-denominator trash?’ CNN says “The Internet is setting a new standard for celebrity. Fame is no longer about getting “15 minutes,” it’s about becoming famous to 15 people.” David Weinberger from the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society says, “The Internet allows the masses to wrest control of fame away from the traditional media, creating micro-celebrities with the click of a mouse.” For me the discussion turned to applied science with the live performance of Internet mega-celebrity (at least I think she is) Leslie Hall.

Experiencing ROFLcon meant experiencing live RickRolling and speaking lolspeak conversationally. If you know what RickRolling is then your eyes are probably rolling as you read this, if you don’t know what it is then I shall explain it now. Rickrolling is a prank and Internet Meme involving the music video for the 1987 Rick Astley song “Never Gonna Give You Up”. The meme is a classic bait and switch: a person provides a link they claim is relevant to the topic at hand, but the link actually takes the user to the Astley video. The URL can be masked or obfuscated in some manner so that the user cannot determine the true source of the link without clicking (and thus satisfying their curiosity). By extension, it can also mean playing the song loudly in public in order to be disruptive. A person who falls for the prank is said to have been “Rick Roll’d”. (this description is from wikipedia, sorry but it was the best overall definition).

I can has cheezburger…and what is LOLspeak? “LOLinguist Anil Dash defines the LOLcat phenomenon as “the convention of taking pictures of cute animals, most frequently cats, and overlaying absurdest captions on the images.” For the sake of brevity we refer to the dialect of these captions as LOLspeak, But we will not be among the throngs of poseurs to address its morphological intricacy. Instead, today we focus on its primary function as a mode of expression: LOL and its literature are, far from an efficacious little bleat of joy, an agonized cri de coeur.” (from Eve Adams at flakmag.com) I can has (anything goes here).

Is the Internet really as democratic as it seems? Even though many at the Con said that RickRolling was annoying and the pastime of the inept and crude, it reared it’s ugly head during the panel ‘Meme Infrastructures’. During this panel a large screen projected the ‘backchannel’ of questions for the guests posted live by the audience. Audience members could then vote on each other’s posts via laptops and phones in order to ‘favorite’ certain questions. With in twenty minutes the lyrics to Rick Ghastly’s song appeared and, through timely voting, arranged in order. The panel was RickRolled in real time. It was amazing and telling…power to the people.

What do these Internets look like in person? Here is Day 2 at Roflcon, video by Dean Browell—just look at ‘em, you can actually see a real ROFL.

In summary, ROFLcon was a new and enlightening experience. It was like a dream filled with Internet celebrities, lol-jargon, weird little cats saying things wrong and FREE pizza. I loved every minute. Did I learn anything? Well…I’m sure I did.