A Moment of Commentary

It is easy to think of the internet as a massive sea of trivialities, memes and pop-culture references. There is a lot of creativity out there but, maybe because of the sheer volume of media one consumes in 10 minutes of internetting, it is easy to think that the actual work took as little time and effort to create as it did to enjoy. Of course it doesn't. A lot of time and effort can go into silly video or a good joke. Even lolcats, perhaps the most ubiquitous and trivial of internet trivialities, require a good photo.

A few months ago my friend Whitney directed me to this neat poster/flowchart describing the logic of crediting an image online. (As it was created on a design blog, it is also appropriately cool looking.) A cartoonist/author/general creative-type person I follow recently wrote about his corner of this emerging debate, extending the conversation to creativity in merchandising authorship and pop-culture commentary. It also gets at why we feel the need to wear images on t-shirts, the motivations behind that impulse that I've not heard articulated as efficiently anywhere else. It's a short but excellent blog post by an internet creator and merchant who is walking the line between "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery" and "give credit where credit is due." Or between "nobody 'owns' a funny sentence" and "simply repeating a funny sentence isn't funny."

"I’m glad that our knee-jerk reaction to seeing a ripoff is to call it out and shame it. I think we’re right to feel proud of someone coming up with a new idea, or creating a new combination of old ideas, but bored or sickened by the same old lazy references being regurgitated for profit. Don’t tolerate it! Having high standards pushes the culture forward faster."
(Read the excellent original piece here.)


By the way, apparently the original insult was removed, from at least one website.