Tim Hwang is the founder of ROFLCon, a series of conferences on internet celebrity and web culture. For his work he has appeared in Wired Magazine, The Washington Post, The New York Times Bits blog, and the Guardian UK. He is the founder of the Web Ecology Project, a multidisciplinary effort to better understand the systemwide flows of content and community online. Currently, he works as a researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. He blogs at brosephstalin.com and is on Twitter @timhwang.

Talk Title: “Web Culture as Web Ecology”

Talk Description: The last two decades have seen a dynamic universe of cultural content and community emerge online. Through experiences with planning and organizing ROFLCon, this talk will explore the increasing influence of this online universe on the traditional mainstream media landscape. It will review how traditional content producers  and “social media experts” have been attempting to understand and shape web culture. It will suggest that the current thinking suffers from serious drawbacks, and that a new approach is needed.

To that end, the talk argues for a new field of web ecology. It will advocate for thinking about culture on the web as an interconnected ecosystem, and for rigorous, quantitative research. It will debut some of the newest work being done in this vein on the mechanisms of viral growth and community formation. The talk also discusses the conservation of web ecology, and how developers can work to promote and preserve a vibrant cultural space online.

Organized by: Drugo more
Partner: Multimedijalni institut
Donators: Ministry of Culture RH & City of Rijeka