Rocketboom: Get boomed

by Rich Awn

Why am I suddenly so obsessed with Rocketboom?

Maybe because it’s a little too glib… just a hair too clever for its own good.  Or perhaps those stunning femme digitales on camera are so sincere and seductive that Rocketboom.com’s daily dose of internet noggin fluff succeeds in whacking you upside the dome with a light saber and leaves your dismembered memes sputtering about on the floor gasping for air.

“Meme, you say?”

Yes, meme (MEEM).  First coined as a philosophical neologism of ontology in 1974, the term now describes a bite of culture, like an amino acid in the double helictical spiraling chains of DNA that encode our digital life.  Memes are identified by the good folks at Rocketboom, posted, linked, and later examined in the labs of the Rocketboom Institute for Internet Studies.  Findings reveal the social significance of such memes as Star Wars Kid, Technoviking, fail, pwned, owned, Magibon, and the Rickroll phenomenon.

Rocketboom spares no expense with fancy taped maps as backgrounds and generously provides supplimental hand-drawn diagrams on marker board to help make difficult concepts like “WTF factor” and “KUWAII ^___^” easier to understand.  Here, the hyper-future is propagated through a phonograph with video segments that are fun to watch and written just snarkily enough to have some spice without an over-saccarine saturation.  As far as talking techhead digital video digests go, Rocketboom totally boomed me.

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