Mike Arauz's Blog – The Archives

My favorite links, photos, and videos from the past week on my Tumblr blog.

Peggy Wang, at Buzzfeed, created the best thing ever: Wikipedia Names Your Band.

Go to “Wikipedia.” Hit “random” and the first article you get is the name of your band. Then go to “Random Quotations” and the last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album. Then, go to Flickr and click on “Explore the Last Seven Days” and the third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

Henry Jenkins and his team at MIT's Convergence Culture Consortium are laying out the official replacement for the term "viral," in their 8-part paper, "If It Doesn't Spread, It's Dead." It's lengthy, but incredibly important for anyone interested in digital communications.

Talking about memes and viral media places an emphasis on the replication of the original idea, which fails to consider the everyday reality of communication -- that ideas get transformed, repurposed, or distorted as they pass from hand to hand, a process which has been accelerated as we move into network culture. Arguably, those ideas which survive are those which can be most easily appropriated and reworked by a range of different communities. In focusing on the involuntary transmission of ideas by unaware consumers, these models allow advertisers and media producers to hold onto an inflated sense of their own power to shape the communication process, even as unruly behavior by consumers becomes a source of great anxiety within the media industry.

Louis CK explains how we take technology for granted these days.




Mr. T and Nancy Reagan




Greg Rutter's Definitive List of The 99 Things You Should Have Already Experienced On The Internet Unless You're a Loser or Old or Something