Seanbaby.com

It's obvious that Seanbaby.com is funny, weird and distinctive, a showcase example of how idiosyncratic personalities, viewpoints and sub-cultures can flourish on a free, non-corporatized Internet. It's not as clear why Seanbaby is important, a vital but endangered Web species that needs to grow and prosper in a world whose desktop is being shaped by Microsoft and AOL/Time-Warner.

If there's a single trait most people who read Slashdot share -- maybe the only one besides an addiction to software -- it's a love of popular culture.

Culture has become a huge term, expanding by the week. It has come to include superhero comics, trashy daytime TV, sci-fi TV shows and websites, indie rock, rap and hip-hop, gaming, anime, cartoons, whatever. High culture -- the traditional, respectable, well-funded kind -- gets covered and criticized in the other media. But upstart culture, especially low cyberculture, can be wondrous stuff, an explosition of idiosyncratic voices that gives birth to this website and to Seanbaby.com. Interesting, valuable, fragile and endangered, Seanbaby.com is in its unique way, very significant.

In fact, for those working to maintain their sanity in the Disney/Sony/ AOL/Microsoft nation forming off and around the Web, The Seanbaby News Stupid Probe is a great place to start the day.

You won't get the world as presented by the Today Show there. Instead, you'll encounter what the site itself describes as news that will "kick your head's ass," focusing on frivolous lawsuits, exploding animals, chainsaws and chickenheads. You won't want to miss the Stupid Forum either. This is a look into the soul of the real America, at least a significant chunk of it.

Seanbaby is direct, if nothing else -- most media is not. It describes itself as intended for people over 18 -- only because, as we all know, kids will shoot one another if they hear or see dirty words. Seriously Seanbaby.com is what the late, lamented Suck really wanted to be but couldn't quite pull off. From the 20 worst NES games to Superhero Bios featuring stories, comics and videos about Aquaman, Lex Luthor and all their stupid friends, this site bristles with 'tude, shared cultural references, biting, anti-hypocritical humor. It rakes the moral pompousity that passes for discussion of digital and other culture in Washington, on campus and in much of the other press. It also manages to capture a lot of the lunacy.

The site's links and forms veer off in some strange directions, but Seanbaby.com is a great antidote to news, culture and the corporate entertainment machine as presented in the Corporate Republic.

Seanbaby is one of the reasons the Web's still-vibrant climate of individualistic expression needs to be preserved as Microsoft and AOL/Time-Warner gather their forces like two giant and rapacious dinosaurs to plot out the future of the desktop. (Believe me, if either or both win, Seanbaby.com won't be there.) Seanbaby.com is the voice of the other Web, the "real" web, if you prefer. It understands that comics, The Simpsons, and Nintendo aren't just "entertainment" -- they're the basis of whole sub-cultures affecting and shaping people's lives. It suggests the promise of the medium to create original and outspoken content and link people with distinctive sensibilities, two things the AOL culture relentlessly destroys, no matter what it owns, buys or acquires (AOL/Time-Warner is now trashing up the snoozy CNN news network by adding -- what else? -- lifestyle, celebrity gossip, and health stories -- and by hiring the usual platoons of blow-dried airheads. That won't get younger viewers either. The money they're wasting could launch tens of thousands of Seanbabies).

"You should know that some pussies have been known to find sarcasm and bad words confusing and offensive," writes Seanbaby, whose bio also appears on the site. "If so, I, your sexual fantasy from the future, advise you to find a new source of free comedy, caveman. For those who stayed at the risk of face rockage, you should know that soon, like all Earth entertainment, this site will be replaced by Doctor Excitement's Fun Blaster, a peace-bringing combination midget generator and launcher."

Old fart media execs wondering what they have to do to get young people to consume mainstream media have only to log onto Seanbaby.com to understand why they never will, and don't really even want to. This freedom and voice and community and definition of culture will never enter a straight newspaper, pop up on a network newscast or, for that matter, appear on Slate or Salon. Yet it reflects its new culture as well as the New Yorker Magazine mirrors the old. For as long as it lasts in this parlous time of Web sanitation, may it grow and prosper, and spawn a thousand more just like it.

Comments

High culture promoted?

[jotaeleemeese]

High culture -- the traditional, respectable, well-funded kind -- gets covered and criticized in the other media. But upstart culture, especially low cyberculture, can be wondrous stuff, an explosition of idiosyncratic voices that gives birth to this website and to Seanbaby.com. Interesting, valuable, fragile and endangered, Seanbaby.com is in its unique way, very significant

Can you kindly tell us what is that "high culture" you are talking about?

Classical Music, Opera or Ballet perhaps? No coverage of the media.

Serious books aiming to more than provide a nice reading for your summer holidays? No, those are not covered by the media either.

Painting, architecture? No, one hour per week in CNN does not count as coverage.

So what is that "high culture" that MS-AOL-The BIG MEDIA are promoting?

Bizarro think this article am making sense!

[DeadFish]

It understands that comics, The Simpsons, and Nintendo aren't just "entertainment" -- they're the basis of whole sub-cultures affecting and shaping people's lives

Not to troll or anything, but i'm fairly certain that the assertion that cartoons and an antequated game console system are the foundations of a powerful counterculture is something seanbaby would probably consider explosively retarded.

In other bits-from-a-katz-article-I-don't-get news:

if there's a single trait most people who read Slashdot share -- maybe the only one besides an addiction to software -- it's a love of popular culture.
And yet,

Old fart media execs wondering what they have to do to get young people to consume mainstream media have only to log onto Seanbaby.com to understand why they never will, and don't really even want to.

Which is it? We love popular culture, but will never consume it? What? Is Simpsons not "mainstream"? What do you think Nintendo is, if not an old fart corporation? Jesus, Katz. Figure out what the hell you're trying to say. Geeks love to consume popular culture, but are to savvy or whatever to consume it or want to. Um. Okay.

Re:OldmanMurray

[-=OmegaMan=-]

Greatest Old Man Murray article ever, the "Crate Review System"

http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/crates/crates 1.shtml

Marketing

[LaNMaN2000]

All JonKatz left out was: "This message paid for by SeanBaby.com -- stay tuned for 'When lawyers attck 6' and 'Webcam Survivor' next on the alternative media channel."

In all seriousness, the problem with mainstream media is not the lack of variety it offers but the poor quality of the programming itself. Everybody is trying to cater to the lowest common denominator of human existence (sex, violence, etc.) that any regular Joe can relate to. The sites that make the web a better resource for entertainment are those that focus on a very well-defined niche (slashdot.org) and build an active community among that audience.

If I'm not mistaken, Jon Katz, himself, actually wrote an entire book about developing web communitites that expresses this same thought. I cannot understand why he would point to a site as general and (in my opinion) uninteresting as SeanBaby.com. It is just another reactionary counter-culture site in an Internet filled with such places.