Comments on: The Meme is Killing You

By: E!

E! — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 19:38:48 +0000

I know I see what you mean about lazy communication, but we all speak in shorthand with people who are close to us, don’t we? In defense of the meme, I think maybe memes are just very big in-jokes for a very big group of friends. Finding instant commonalities and reasons to laugh together with people we’ve just met can’t be all bad.

By: Drey

Drey — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 19:26:01 +0000

I wrote a whole poem from that line.

By: E

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 19:17:15 +0000

I like your shoes; they’re so needlessly complex

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 02:22:25 +0000

there are so many nails to the coffin of what you were put on earth here to do, but never get around to…

By: Dan

Dan — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 21:14:59 +0000

You wrote an entry about inane memes to deride them as mind-numbing diseases. I expect to see your next post to be about the next witty comment you hear. They deserve to flourish too.

By: Drey

Drey — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 05:41:34 +0000

I’m not saying that *society* is a virus, but that memes are a social virus. I think memes are a by-product of internet culture, but they can no more uphold the culture itself than the shadow of a table can uphold a turkey dinner. But that’s the danger: We’re leaning on memes as though they were sturdy.

Saying “the cake is a lie” is social currency, a kind of geek handshake. But that phrase can be used to do all kinds of heavy lifting. You’re saying something clever, but you yourself are not clever. Suddenly you’re thinking of ways of inserting the phrase into a conversation where you might have said something else, perhaps something original, something that was *you*.

While we’re all “thinking” about “the cake is a lie,” what *aren’t* we thinking about? How useful is it for hundreds of thousands of people to be simultaneously witty about the same idea?

By: Sigmund

Sigmund — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 05:21:01 +0000

It is cliched to say that society is a virus, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Memes are just human civilization in small, bite sized form, sort of like a jelly candy shaped like an apple. It looks the same, and you eat them both, but one is filling and has nutritional content, while the other isn’t and doesn’t. Aren’t they, in a way, what a culture is based off?

Just speculating here, thanks for something to think about.