C95 Column

Slave to the Machine

The mouse that roared

Parodies and lampoons have a rich history in print. And in the digital age, images become even more flexible and, well, lampoonable. With an ordinary PC, Photoshop and a modest scanner, you can create spoof advertising campaigns or - a highly popular form - mock movie posters. Spoof websites, like graffiti poster art, often start with dominant images from everyday life and public spaces (and the Net is the ultimate in public spaces), then reappropriate them by adding alternative layers of meaning.

The main targets of Web parodies are the powerful: governments, corporations, political leaders, Bill Gates, major media and brands such as Microsoft and Yahoo. The first real wave of Irish parody sites came around 1997-98, as the Web became graphica,l and after some of the country's leading institutions had ventured online. These direct parodies included the Irish Tiger, re-presenting the Irish Times's website as the house organ of the 'Celtic Tiger' boom; the Marycam - a spoof of the official site of Ireland's President, Mary McAleese; and Fuse - a parody of Telecom/Eircom's Muse music site).

Many of these sites have in-jokes about the Web itself as a medium. The Irish Tiger site pokes fun at 'entry pages' and the 'Are you over/under 18' splash-screens of porn sites. Its successor, D'Ireland.com, satirises the portal craze and annoying pop-up alerts. The Marycam ridicules webcams, and the Dublin Meejalab - about MIT's MediaLabEurope - has digs at online shopping. But while parodies often foreground the politics of representation, some of the Web's greatest in-jokes are hidden away from casual and non-technical readers - in the meta-tags, for instance, or in HTML comment tags, or even in a site's robots.txt file.

Most of today's Web pages are constructed in HTML (hypertext mark-up language). Once you have a reasonable grasp of HTML, it's relatively easy to copy pages and tweak them, to twist their look and content into a half-decent parody. In fact, parodying other people's code in this wider sense is one of the key ways that ordinary readers or users begin to grasp how to write their own pages, from grabbing the HTML to tinkering with the Javascript. It's an essential early stage in the Internet's learning curve.

The Net also has 'pure text' parodies which obey very different laws. They are textually transmitted. Whether they are spoof news stories or reworkings of popular songs, they have to be infectious enough to spread by email. But as they spread, unlike Web parodies they have a much greater chance of mutating. Often they turn into a local translation of a more general joke or song, ranging from the 'What if Star Wars Had Been Set in Limerick' list to the 'Dublin Wassup' script or the 'Dublin Eminem' lyric. If anything, these text-only parodies highlight how immutable and one-off today's Web parodies tend to be.

Michael Cunningham

The 'Marycam' - a spoof webcam and parody of the official website of the President of Ireland, Mary McAleese.

The Irish Tiger parody of the Irish Times newspaper and of Ireland's "Celtic Tiger" boom, and the follow-up site D'Ireland.com.

Fuse - a parody of the early incarnation of Eircom's "Muse" music site.

The Dublin Meejalab, a parody of MIT's Irish offshoot, Media Lab Europe (MLE). Ironically the spoof site went live in June 2000, before the Media Lab Europe had put up its official one.

RTMark (pronounced 'Art Mark'), a group of anti-corporate agitator artists. The US-based group gives monetary rewards to those who subversively modify commmercial products such as Barbie dolls to make anti-corporate points. Some would argue that it's not so much an artistic endeavour per se, more a playful form of propaganda.