Saturday, January 26, 2013

Gowanus Dolphin Jumps Shark


By the end of the yesterday, I figured out that it's OK to piss off a group of internet cognoscenti as long as you make your girlfriend laugh.

I am among the luckiest of all Twitter users for having a girlfriend who doesn't check Twitter (and also has nearly zero awareness of internet meme culture). So when we sat down to dinner last night, I assumed her reaction after I explained that day's adventures with my Twitter parody account the @GowanusDolphin would be a mix of a) not really understanding what I was talking about and then b) making fun of me for my geeky behavior.



Instead, she got a surprisingly hearty laugh out of the whole thing and thought the idea of a dolphin lamenting about being unable to find the South Street Seaport was funny.

Granted, we were a couple of glasses of wine into dinner, but anyone who has been in a relationship for several years might agree that it's not an insignificant accomplishment to elicit a genuine guttural laugh from your partner.

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I was appreciative for this person not just for his kind words but for helping me understand where it was I went wrong.
 
Based on the reactions and conversations I had on Twitter yesterday, I learned that my transgression was not being crass about the plight of the unfortunate dolphin but being lame and unfunny according to the standards of people who spend all day on the internet deciphering the value of internet memes. Turns out that parody accounts are offensive on principle to certain people, in and of themselves, regardless of the content. I ran into a pack of viral meme watchdogs, and they were happy to rip me to shreds.

I guess I have a very simple sense of humor, and to me the idea of a dolphin getting stranded in the Gowanus Canal, setting up a Twitter account and then asking to be put on the guest list at the Barclay Center is just fucking funny to me. In other words, my sense of humor has not evolved much since my father showed me a VHS tape of "Land Shark."

In any case, when some of these professional internet crawlers discovered that I wrote a blog about the parody account, I found out that that was yet an even greater offense to their sensibilities, and they were not shy to express it and pile on me a bit:








I follow some of these people, and actually consistently enjoy Katie Notopoulos' content, but I didn't really understand what I did to bother her so profoundly that she'd take time out of her day to basically harass me, so I asked:



Apology accepted I guess? I have no idea what she's referring to regarding "bang with friends," but I realize that when you spend all day on the internet, standard interactions can become difficult to navigate. The value in determining whether or not you're attacking someone for being an actual asshole or just because you are having a bad day is minimal, but the value in reacting quickly and decisively and broadcasting it is high.

Of course I find it especially bothersome that Notopoulos would attack @p_funk_bot which has done her no harm and has brought some level of joy to many of the thousands of people it has interacted with.

At times, I've been an asshole on the internet myself, but for the most part I apply "anti-Internet Tough Guy" rules to my dealings online: If I wouldn't say it to your face, I probably won't say it to you on the internet.

It's very easy to make your own point of view seem correct in 140 characters and a lot harder to take a step back and analyze a situation intelligently. And since it's also not much harder to take someone to task directly on Twitter, rather than harass them in the abstract like Max Read and Notopooulos did, I can't say I have much respect for their approach.

People on the internet pretend to care about bullying, but as one of my favorite comedians Neal Brennan has pointed out, no one actual gives a shit about bullying on principle, they just don't want to be part of the group that's bullied. The corollary to that is when it comes time to dish out some bullying, it's easy to get on board.

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This might be the only actually halfway interesting issue in the aftermath of the @GowanusDolphin Debacle. When I told my girlfriend that the account was suspended, she (as a totally distant, relatively objective observer of the events) thought it was outrageous that they would ban the parody account and said it's "almost an issue of free speech."

At the time the account was banned, I didn't care. It started out as an unfunny gag and wasn't likely to get much funnier, so it's probably good that they pulled the plug early.

But why exactly did they pull the plug? Of the people who came out to criticize me, no one actually admitted to being offended by the parody of a struggling dolphin, but many of them stood behind the principle that I was a in the wrong for creating something that was not cool on the internet. The only clearly outlined offense was creating something that was deemed not funny and not hip according to advanced standards of irony perpetuated by a certain clique of neo-journalists on Twitter..

There really was is not a valid reason to have banned that particular parody account on Twitter. Plenty of parody accounts thrive, and plenty of legitimately offensive real accounts as well, and parody in general is a well integrated aspect of pop culture. So, my hunch is that I actually did offend someone (or a large enough group of people) on the basis of making fun of a dolphin's suffering within the first 10 minutes of the story breaking.

I can only assume this is a peripheral effect of the viral media's obsession with the cuteness of animals, as evidenced by the abundance of feline- and canine-related pictures and memes that get circulated constantly by people who are influential on Twitter and in the new media. It seems Buzzfeed writers and their ilk have an easier time relating to animals on the internet than to people.
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