Bad grammar, hoaxes and freewheeling broadband - Dotconomy - Internet behavior - Brief Article

Telecom Asia, Jan, 2002 by Tony Chan

"All your base are belong to us" is not exactly a catchy phrase, but despite its nonsensical nature and bad grammar, it ended up a huge hit on the Internet for a couple of glorifying months last summer.

A group of individuals simply got obsessed with the phrase, which came from the badly translated dialogue of an old Japanese video game, Zero Wing. In the game, the commander of a starship encounters an evil nemesis that sets off explosions onboard and says, you guessed it, "All your base are belong to us".

No one can explain the phenomenon, but people, equipped and well learned in the art of digital image manipulation, were putting those seven little words on any and every image they could find. "All your base" on a billboard with President George Bush, in a picture of Al Gore, again on a mug shot of Microsoft chief, Bill Gates. Oh, there it is again on the side of the space shuttle.

Someone even took those pictures and put them together in a Flash movie, complete with a techno music score. For the result and more grammar blunders, go to: http://www.nulldevice.net/images/AYB1.swf.

Fast forward to post 11 September. A picture of a tourist on the lookout gallery of the World Trade Center taken, apparently seconds before an incoming American Airlines jet in the background was about to smash into the building, was sent around the World Wide Web. The originators of the image claimed that it was from the FBI, who had developed a roll out film from a camera recovered from the wreckage of the WTC after the terrorist attacks.

Accidental tourist guy

The now infamous "Tourist Guy" picture was immediately proved to be a hoax, but that didn't stop Internet enthusiasts from taking the image and running with it. At least three Web sites were devoted to images of TG (for a sample:. www.touristguy.com). A whole troupe of Adobe Photoshop fans took the image of TG and inserted it into famous and sometimes, not-so-famous, situations, including the crash of the Hindenberg, at the scene of the Concord crash in Paris, with president John F. Kennedy, just before the assassination of President Lincoln, driving the bus in the movie Speed and so on and so on.

TG has become an online festival for amateur graphic artists, who make no attempt to pass their images as real, but rather as humor and light relief. Oh look; there is TG again, in front of a nuclear test blast.

The TG fan base even gave him a name, Waldo, and put his face in place of stars of hit movies like Gladiator and Forrest Gump. A Brazilian businessman, Jose Roberto Penteado, even stepped out to claim that he was actually the TG and became an overnight Internet sensation, receiving coverage from prestigious publications such as Wired magazine and an offer to star in a commercial for carmaker Volkswagon, which was later withdrawn because the automobile manufacturer decided that maybe being associated with one of the worst human tragedies in the last decade wasn't such good PR after all.

The real Tourist Guy turned out to be a 25-year-old Hungarian named Peter, who claimed to have started the whole thing as a joke for his friends. It was only after Penteado emerged with his claim that Peter's friend revealed the true author of the TG image. Peter's proof came when he produced the original image, plus additional pictures from his visit to the WTC in November 1997.

Weird and wonderful

So why have I rambled on about obscure video game grammar and what can probably be construed as bad taste in the face of an American national tragedy? Because there is absolutely no logical reason for the popularity of both "all your base" and "Tourist Guy".

On the other hand, these two events capture the weird and wonderful nature of the Internet and its potential as an interactive platform for both entertainment and community.

Would anyone pay to download a picture of the TG so they can re-work it with Adobe Photoshop? Would anyone pay to see a picture of TG as the Terminator? I don't think so.

"All your base" and TG were possible because Internet content has remained free.

In fact, there are an increasing number of free sites that have come to embrace this aspect of the Internet, not as a medium for commerce or business, but for fun.

Take www.b3ta.com for example. It is a site devoted to Photoshoppers (not those buying photographs). The host of the site regularly posts pictures of things, people and animals and challenges visitors to modify them and then upload the results back onto the site. It is completely free.

From the looks of it, there is no shortage of bored graphic artists out there with little to do except transform a frog into an armored monster, or put traffic cones in place of a kitten's ears. The site is truly bazaar at times, but it is usually refreshed daily and obviously has a following that comes back over and over again. While it is not exactly addictive, it is certainly sticky.

So without pay content, where does that leave the new economy? Access, of course. All this would not be possible without broadband connections.