Electric Sheep

PicApp Blogger Test

2008-07-31T20:22:00.000-05:00

Final Case Study

2006-12-11T21:50:00.001-05:00

I have completed my final paper on this case study. Anyone interested in reading it can find it here.

Meet Mr. Gladwell

2006-12-03T16:06:00.001-05:00

Malcolm Gladwell is a writer for The New Yorker who has written quite a bit about sociology and viral ideas. In fact, his book The Tipping Point deals almost entirely with "social epidemics." While the term sounds like it has a negative connotation, Gladwell writes about how deep the desire to start such epidemics runs in the corporate world.

While internet memes are generally less oriented toward a physical object than, say, a Converse marketing scheme, the sociological phenomenon that propagate their spread are essentially the same. In a 1997 article entitled "The Cool Hunt," Gladwell sites a study that examined the beginnings of hybrid seed use among Iowan corn farmers during the 1930s. He then illustrates how the same principles applied to a mid-90s resurgence in the popularity of Hush Puppies. Essentially, any given social group can be divided into the following categories: innovators, the extremely small group of adventurous people who first try a new idea, early adopters, a slightly larger group of respected and opinionated community members, early and late majority, the deliberate and skeptical masses, and laggards, a small group of traditionalists who are the last to adopt the idea. In marketing, it is generally recognized that only innovators are paying a lot of attention to advertising. All of the other groups adopt the idea largely because their predecessors have. In the case of internet memes, the innovators can generally be classified as originators, as they often create the memetic concept themselves. Otherwise, the mechanism is the same.

In another article (this one from 1999) entitled "The Science of the Sleeper," Gladwell examines the changing dynamic of how books, movies, and other cultural media succeed. Basically, he observes that interests are trending away from blockbusters and more toward niches in which media succeed through a sort of memetic spread. This is related to another important concept of internet society, that of Chris Andersons's The Long Tail. For more about that subject, check out this post from Noreen Slavin's blog.

The Speed of Meme

2006-12-03T15:05:00.001-05:00

Scott Eric Kaufman, who will be speaking about blogging at the upcoming Modern Language Association conference, is attempting to measure the speed at which a meme moves. This blog post explains his process and plans.

Chew On It

2006-11-30T23:23:00.001-05:00

Boing Boing: Funny Internet meme gum

Just The Facts

2006-11-30T00:12:00.001-05:00

One of the most prominent internet memes of the last year or so has been centered around Chuck Norris. That's right, Walker, Texas Ranger himself. A basic summary of the phenomenon can be found at Wikipedia.

In the early stages, the meme developed in IRC chat rooms. When it started to show up in the general chat of the popular online game World of Warcraft it spread quickly to the blogosphere at large. The substance of the meme centers on quoting "facts" about the action star. An example:

"When Chuck Norris does a push-up, he isn’t lifting himself up, he’s pushing the Earth down."

The quotes that have been created are numerous and of varying degrees of humor (several are downright hilarious), but the all follow the same basic premise: Chuck Norris is so intensely manly that he can do the impossible.

The Chuck Norris Facts Generator and the companion site at which the best facts are stored started in the early summer of 2005 and spiked in popularity during the winter of 05/06. The meme seems near the later end of its life cycle, as it is now very rarely seen in the places that spawned it.

One

2006-11-21T01:47:00.001-05:00

A recent video to make its way around the web features a Bank of America employee singing a version of U2's One with new lyrics about BoA's merger with MBNA.

Aside from the disturbing subtext of making a song about existential angst into a tune about a corporate merger, the whole thing is pretty ridiculous. These guys clearly take the thing pretty seriously -- which makes it so much more funny. In fact, here's comedian/actor David Cross (of Mr. Show and Arrested Development) performing it:

Public Inside Jokes

2006-11-21T01:41:00.001-05:00

Some memes are propagated by a more centralized group of people, in a manner of an inside joke that by virtue of its presence on the net spreads to include the readers as well as the writers. A good example of this occurred on BoingBoing about a year ago, centered around pictures of kids in robot costumes.

What's the Buzz?

2006-11-20T11:23:00.001-05:00

BuzzFeed is the name of a new site dedicated to linking to "hot" stories and things that are mentioned on several sites, or sites that have a lot of links back to them. There is no thematic connection, other than the presence of such buzz. This is ideal meme breeding ground. Check out the "About" page for a better description of how it works.

The problem is, Jon Hodgeman is a lot cooler than Justin Long...

2006-11-12T20:23:00.000-05:00

Apple's "I'm a Mac/I'm a PC" ads are hard to miss. Because of the subject, it was inevitable that the internet community would play with the idea, and on YouTube you can find a good number of videos playing with this meme.

im in ur base, killing ur d00ds

2006-11-12T19:43:00.000-05:00

There is a meme floating about the net that consists of an image juxatposed with the text "I'm in your X Ying your Z." The origin is explained here. Here are some further examples:

Picture pages, picture pages...

2006-11-10T17:46:00.000-05:00

Another YouTube meme, this one arguably more properly a meme than the LonelyGirl15 craze, consisted of a rash of people who put together videos of pictures of themselves over long periods of time. Here's an example:

As the meme was fairly artistic in nature and seemed to grow rather quickly, it was easily exposed to a bit of satire:

Get Some LonelyGirl Action

2006-11-10T17:39:00.000-05:00

This is the first of the LonelyGirl15 videos:

Pink Prisons

2006-11-10T17:37:00.000-05:00

Here's an example of memetics in effect outside of the internet -- pink jails.

How Did This Happen?!

2006-11-07T10:39:00.000-05:00

So how do these memes get spread so virulently around the internet? Well, there are several methods by which widespread memes grow. Obviously, video memes on YouTube spread easily simply because the site is so popular. But other memes, the ones that are just sort of floating out there connecting seemingly disconnected sites, get spread by a variety of means. One method is through popular blogs focusing on net news. A good example for this category is BoingBoing. A similar method is "open blogs" such as SlashDot. Any member of such a blog can post a story, as opposed to a few managing editors on a blog like BoingBoing.

Another manner in which these memes pass around is through simple e-mail transmission. This was the most common method in the early days of the internet. Almost everyone has received an e-mail from a friend with a link to some goofy website to check out. In the contemporary online environment, this method is fading as social bookmarking sites become more popular. The original and simplest example of such a site is del.icio.us. Free accounts on del.icio.us allow a user to bookmark a page to be saved on the del.icio.us server rather than in your personal browser. You can also tag these bookmarks with terms that make them searchable. In turn, you can search and view other user's tags and bookmarks. On the front page of the site, a combination of recent and popular links is displayed. That's where the memes really enter the picture. As more and more people link to a site, and their friends in turn see the link, go to the site, and then link it themselves, the odds of a site, a video, or a song hitting the front page increases. Once it hits the front page, the cycle continues to multiply as countless other users see it and check it out.

Of course, there is always mere word of mouth, as well. The biggest of these memes tend to transcend the internet to some degree or another and work their way into pop culture for their fifteen minutes.

What's in a meme?

2006-10-19T10:37:00.000-05:00

From the Oxford English Dictionary:

meme, n. -- A cultural element or behavioural trait whose transmission and consequent persistence in a population, although occurring by non-genetic means (esp. imitation), is considered as analogous to the inheritance of a gene.

In the development of internet culture and, consequently, modern culture in general, the meme plays a huge role. A meme is a sort of cultural virus -- an idea that spreads rapidly, is everywhere before you know it, and then usually runs its course just as quickly. An example could be a quote from television or movies that suddenly everyone is using, such as the explosion of "Oh my God, they killed Kenny!" right after the premiere of South Park. It didn't take very long for that meme to play out, either. This is fairly typical of the life-cycle of the meme.

Like a petri dish or a pre-school full of snot-nosed brats, the internet has proved to be the ideal breeding ground for these cultural viruses. Memes rise and fall constantly in the world of internet culture. Sometimes they remain contained within certain subsets, be it users of a particular site or fans of a particular game. Other times, they spread out to infect the internet as a whole. What makes for a stronger meme? Why do some spread everywhere, and others stay more contained? How long is the approximate life of the "average" meme? The search for these answers will be the core of this case study.

Here is the Wikipedia entry on memes.

Here are some websites about particular memes:

Snakes on a Plane

Chuck Norris

All Your Base Are Belong To Us

You're the man now, dog.

The Internet, a series of tubes.

2006-10-03T00:41:00.000-05:00

Response #2

2006-09-28T17:28:00.000-05:00

In Lewis Lapham’s Gag Rule he recounts the time between the incident on 9/11/2001 and the start of the war in Iraq. He primarily focuses on how the media covered the causes for war and the changes in domestic policy and law that were justified by the new “War on Terror.” The mainstream media is harshly criticized, to say the least. Lapham asserts that there was and is an utter lack of real reporting done by mainstream news. These traditional news outlets simply exist to pass along the party line and maintain the status quo.

I agree with much of Lapham’s assessment, though he often becomes caustic enough in his writing that his message will unfortunately be lost on some people it might otherwise reach. At the heart of the story, to me, is the third chapter, “Mute Button.” This is where Lapham addresses the idea that the media isn’t really biased towards the views of the political left or right. Rather, mainstream news exists in state that specifically avoids extremes and goes to horrendous lengths to give equal value to “both sides of the story,” even when one side of the story has no factual weight whatsoever. The actual bias that exists in the media is corporate bias, which often overlaps with right-wing bias, but is not entirely the same thing. Rather, its primary interest is simply in preventing radical change from happening, because in times of radical change the populace ceases to consume in the rabid way they must to feed corporate culture.

In the case of the Iraq War and the suppression of dissent in the mainstream media during that build-up, it is clear that therein lays the perfect example of where the right-wing interests and corporate interests overlap. Wars are good for the economy. They demand that missiles and planes and tanks be built. They demand that someone provide food for troops, rebuild war-torn cities, and provide great footage for the same news media that propagate the justification. While I think Lapham underplays the degree to which the mainstream media showcased dissenting segments of the population, I do think that he is right in the sense that no real value or weight was given to these interests. Stories on protests were simply presented as footage of crowds and a quick comment. There was no pursuit by the media of a line of questioning about the evidence for war to give voice to these protestors. The party-line was accepted and presented as completely true when in reality they were, at best, mere suppositions or, at worst, bald-faced lies. Those of us who opposed the war were generally treated as marginal and ignorant of said facts, or just paranoid peaceniks.

But it was during this time that the internet began to play a more significant role in the communication of the politically minded. When the evening news would not present the proper arguments against the war, the populace took it upon them selves to enumerate their grievances online. Message boards served as a way for opponents to the war across the country to communicate and organize. During the last election, blogging evolved as the massive force in politics and media it looks set to remain. Yet at the same time even the supposedly left-wing democrats failed to exploit this force, sticking rather with the same tepid, middle of the road approach favored by traditional corporate media.

Response #1

2006-09-24T20:49:00.000-05:00

The selections by Trotsky and Gandhi are in a way both calls for peace. Or, if not peace, they are at least rallying against a present state of violence. In “The Zimmerwald Manifesto,” Trotsky is trying to rally the proletariat of Europe to surrender their national allegiances and stop the fighting in World War I. In his “Ahmedabad Speech,” Gandhi is speaking out against violence performed by members of his movement in the wake of a massacre on the part of British Colonial forces. Both men are directing their manifestos squarely at those they wish to speak to. There is nothing about either of these selections that is intended as a message to the opposition forces. Although it remains true that both men present themselves as utterly devoted to the cause, as the manifesto author must, and in calling others to do so there is an indirect message to the opposition implied. But certainly that is not the heart of these writings. In both cases, what we have are men disappointed in the actions of those who are purported members of their given causes.

In Trotsky’s case, his disappointment lies with the proletariat of Europe failing to recognize that the war in which they give their lives in obscene numbers is a war of the bourgeois, a war of the old aristocracy even, but certainly not a war of the working man. Rather, it is a war that works expressly against the causes the Communists have fought so hard for, but this is disguised by the mask of nationalism. Trotsky’s writing evokes a man enraged and inspired, it conveys an overwhelming energy of devotion and belief in change. There are a few well executed moments of repetition (ex. “Millions of corpses cover the battlefields. Millions of human beings have been crippled for the rest of their lives.”). He punctuates longer paragraphs with ones as short as a word (ex. “Workers!”). The writing is fiery; Trotsky is opposed not to the idea of war, simply to the war presently waged. Were that war to shift to the armed uprising of the proletarians against the bourgeois, as it will in Russia, then Trotsky’s cause would be the whole hearted support of the war, regardless of the body count. For those lives would not be lost pointlessly. Those lives would be lost in the name of the greatest of causes.

Gandhi, on the other hand, is best known to the world at large for his opposition to the very idea of violence itself. Gandhi’s followers have not confused allies for the enemy. Rather, they have attacked the real enemy in the wrong way. There is to be no violent response, only peaceful refusal to comply. Gandhi’s style in the writing communicates just that. While there is very definite emotion communicated, it is less a plea less energetic and more emphatic. It is the disappointment of a man who has placed his trust in his followers. It is the disappointment of a man in his self, for bringing those who would do such deeds into the fold. They have shamed the movement, they have shamed Gandhi, and they have shamed their selves. In pointing out this shame, Gandhi seeks to exacerbate it. The followers who hear or read this speech must be so ashamed of these actions that there is a guarantee that it will never happen again.

The two approaches speak to the nature of the two causes, and the two men. There are so many similarities in both the specific cause and the greater behind these two selections. Yet there are also vast gulfs, in attitude, in execution, and in philosophy. Not surprisingly, the style of writing in these manifestos communicates that very clearly without ever needing to spell it out.

Internet Writing and Society

2006-09-19T18:28:00.000-05:00

It's a class at Stockton. This is my blog specifically for it. There will be some sort of big project posted here.

Sexy, no?