Memes, Trolls, Etc.

The article that I found most interesting this week was Kimberly Gregson’s about griefing, more specifically griefing in different online games. While reading the last part that listed ways to combat griefers, I just kept thinking that while these may work some times, nothing is ever going to stop griefing or trolling completely. The griefers will always find a way to annoy people or have their own kind of fun in games, and they will never go away, just like computer hackers or things like that. I think that griefers are just something that people are going to have to accept and learn to deal with rather than constantly try to think of ways to stop them completely.
The Jonah Peretti article about Nike was interesting mostly because it was ridiculous how the George Walden guy freaked out over what had happened to Peretti. The guy seems like he just assumes that Peretti had some big agenda to attack the Nike Corporation and bring them all this negative media attention, but it was just something interesting that Peretti passed along to a couple friends, who then passed it on to their friends, and so on. I suppose, though, that anything that gets as big as that did is bound to have people criticize it, no matter what it is, though.
The second Peretti article about contagious or viral media made me think about all the different ways that companies use contagious media to promote their products, like how they create websites to promote their latest video game. It starts with a few people discovering it, then it spreads, and eventually you have people dedicated days and weeks to figuring out what exactly is being promoted or anything else like that, going through the site or whatever information they are given over and over for the smallest details. It seems like that is always an almost sure-fire way to gain interest for your product, and I’m surprised that it isn’t employed more than it actually is.