Internets, How Do They Work?: Lessons from ROFLCon

What do you learn when you get the entire internet together in one room? In this panel, the cofounders of ROFLCon (Tim Hwang and Christina Xu) will share what they’ve learned from cramming the internet’s celebrities, content creators, and community organizers into the same space as their fans and the academics that study it all. We will give you the condensed, Cliff Notes version of what guests like moot, Mahir Cagri, Ben Huh, Tron Guy, and Autotune the News have revealed about the currents at work underneath the internet universe.

Beyond merely sharing some moments and the usual pictures of funny cats, we’re also going to focus in a bit on the even more amusing backstage of putting something like this on. What have we learned? How are we thinking about events around internet culture now? And how/why did we get Leeroy Jenkins to do our conference security?

This panel will also be taking a step back to grapple with some of the questions that have emerged as the most important in our dealings with the internet at ROFLCon: what happens when internet culture becomes big business? What counts as an “internet culture”? What are the ethics of operating in this evolving ecosystem?

LEVEL: Intermediate