Stuck in the web: the year online

From ‘Gangnam Style’ to a supersonic leap, and from the arrival of Spotify to outrage at Instagram, it was a busy year online

This is a world in which our experiences, connections, consumption and commentary are increasingly blurred between online and off.

The games we play are no longer inserted into consoles. Our communication is faster, more multifaceted and less private, and it reaches more people. We discover and share culture not just through mainstream outlets but also through online word of mouth, which has alerted us to things we previously would have missed. It’s now one of the reasons we might go to a play, film or exhibition.

The forms our humour takes are changing from standard jokes to ever-morphing memes or distracting hashtags. The growth of digital art means the internet is no longer just the channel; now it is the medium itself.

How a film, exhibition, play or event exists beyond its “real life” setting has been transformed by trailers for theatre and interactive marketing. We are consuming media through more and more websites, Tumblrs, aggregating apps and filters. And the funding models for arts and culture are in many cases shifting to the online crowd.

What did 2012 mean for web culture?

Wanna play?

Zynga’s disastrous year fired a warning flare for the social-gaming-app bubble. With a falling share price, an unstable reliance on Facebook (and vice versa), the drop in popularity of the Farmville franchise and a badly judged purchase of OMGPOP – the developer of Draw Something – for a remarkable $180 million in March, the company’s chief executive, Mark Pincus, was named the fourth-worst CEO of the year in the annual list compiled by the management professor Sydney Finkelstein, author of Why Smart Executives Fail.

Online and social gaming, while yielding huge revenue for some, is still a rapidly changing market, with trends coming out of nowhere, successes rocketing at an astronomical pace and dominant forces weakening all the time. Will we still be obsessed with Jetpack Joyride this time next year? Will CSR Racing still rake in the cash? Will companies still need big bucks to attract huge numbers of users? Will pay-for-play streak ahead of free gaming? Perhaps the main realisation this year is that someone with a smartphone or a Facebook account can’t play everything at once. The mass popularity of one game means others will be squeezed out unless, as with Angry Birds, they continue to flip over new editions faster than ever.

That’s my jam

The slow-burning success of the year in music online was This Is My Jam, a website that lets you pick your favourite song of the moment and connect with your friends to share it. It’s simple, noninvasive and fulfils the key requirement of a social network: it allows people to shout about what they like.

Spotify also landed here, finally, after years of Irish users trying to circumnavigate geographical restrictions to get accounts. And even with MySpace’s renaissance, Soundcloud remains the go-to point for checking out new songs and remixes.

As for music videos, the absence of a large TV outlet for Irish ones means the audience for them has gone almost exclusively online. Stevie Russell’s video for Kodaline’s All I Want – like Beauty and the Beast meets The Office – is probably the best of the year – although Mmoths’ Heart, We Cut Corners’ Yet and This Club’s Up compete in the innovation and watchability stakes.

Contemporary music videos from the cool kids are still obsessed with trashy 1990s imagery, videos for the Tumblr generation, placing value in cheap montages that feel more Trapper Keeper than real keepers.

I have a meme

Recuts, swedes, trailers remade with Lego and the endless library of video snowclones show no signs of abating, from Homeland skits to reimagining music videos. With luck, next year we can finally put the seemingly never-ending Gangnam Style and Call Me Maybe parodies to rest, but new ones will take their places. And, somewhere out there, people are still insistent on making more Downfall parody videos.

LOL

If the meme is a replacement for the punchline (what did we laugh at before?), then parody accounts on Twitter are the long-form joke.

At home the most successful of these was Colm O’Regan’s Irish Mammies, which went from a Twitter account to a website and, finally, a book.

The humour around such ventures is hit and miss, but there’s a jaded predictability to the insistence of laughing at and then spreading increasingly tired gags. Putting the “ah here, leave it out” Dublin holler over footage of an aircraft flying into the Twin Towers just isn’t funny. Neither is a guy looking into the camera on The Late Late Show. Or the laziness of Lolcat text over endless photographs of strange celebrity expressions.

Some gif-based Tumblrs – the scrapbook for a generation – actually yielded some laughs, in particular Dublin Gays and Hungover Owls. But there’s still the nagging sense that trawling through photographs of people who look like things is a colossal waste of time.

#NoFilter

If there’s one art form that has been completely rewritten online, it’s photography. This year Instagram continued to catalogue what we were eating, sunsets, pouting self-portraits, pets, holidays, nights out, architecture and everything else in between, not to mention the popularity of celebrities on the social network.

Photography websites have become democratised, with individual amateurs all capable of now snapping something and overlaying a fancy – and reality-distorting – filter, creating something that would have previously taken hours to create in a darkroom or in Photoshop. But will Instagram’s dominance continue? More about that later.

The slow growth of web-only programmes

Although web-only TV content has been promising to move into the mainstream for years, the quality of web-based shows suggests self-obsessed and self-indulgent diary-based reality television, annoying reaction videos and low production values. But all that’s changing. Lisa Kudrow’s Web Therapy broke the mould in previous years, and this year it got an Emmy nomination.

But probably the most interesting success of 2012 was The Outs, a web series about gay life in New York that developed both an audience and critical acclaim. This transmedia approach to how film and television is made will continue to develop.

Meanwhile, Vice’s online channel, VBS, continues to punch above everyone’s weight, especially when it comes to captivating documentaries.

Yeah, I watched that on my laptop

Film services such as Netflix and iTunes have taken a small bite out of illegal downloading and streaming, but the most significant Irish input this year was the launch of Volta, a streaming service that allows its customers to watch a bunch of Irish-made flicks.

Short of the Week continues to act as a fantastic aggregator of short films that otherwise can’t be accessed outside niche festivals. And a bunch of topical Irish shorts found an audience online, including Coming Out, Being Seen, Making History, by Anna Rogers for the 20th Gaze Dublin International LGBT Film Festival, which amassed nearly 12,000 views on YouTube.

Going live

The Red Bull-funded edge-of-space jump by Felix Baumgartner became the online-only live event of the year – and transformed how, with a lot of money and a fantastic idea, event gatherings can capture the imagination of people willing to watch online. Eight million people saw Baumgartner freefall and then parachute on their phones, tablets, laptops and other devices.

Sharing culture

We’re less reliant on old media for information about what to see, hear or visit thanks to the instant feedback we can get from Facebook, Twitter and blogs.

Now a niche gig, exhibition or play can become an instant hit through online word of mouth. Just look at the way the Irish play Singlehood excelled with an online campaign that stretched from crowdfunding to social networks.

Also, with luck, Google’s Art Project will be developed further, as online visitors explore museums and exhibitions from their computers.

Funding culture

The Irish crowdfunding site FundIt, which was a year old last spring, has the potential to transform how we create and fund culture online, as it lets users become increasingly involved in the culture they want to make happen. It’s not guaranteed to be a sustainable model, but there’s no doubting the enthusiasm that Irish art, music and theatre lovers have for donating to culture. After just a year, more than €500,000 had been pledged through FundIt to creative projects, including 21 festivals, 30 plays, 11 books, 10 short films and two fashion shows.

Who owns content?

Sharing culture online can bring huge benefits in terms of exposing us to new experiences, but the flip side of the coin is the continuing struggle to establish – net neutrality and copyright freedoms aside – who owns what on the web.

One of the biggest controversies has come at the end of the year: Instagram, in tandem with its new owner, Facebook, announced that it would be changing its conditions next month, to give it control of users’ photographs.But those users were furious, and on Thursday the company backed down. Its founder and CEO, Kevin Systrom, apologised and said: “I want to be really clear: Instagram has no intention of selling your photos, and we never did. We don’t own your photos – you do.”