by Dan Reimold
for PBS.com
College memes are suddenly invading the Facebook streams of students at schools throughout the U.S., Canada, and parts of Europe. As The Cherwell, Oxford University's student newspaper, explains, the meme is "an idea or behavior that spreads through a culture by imitation. Internet memes follow this principle, humorous images are copied and re-captioned, concisely describing or satirizing the activity of an individual or group."Building on its burgeoning popularity in recent years on sites such as Reddit and 4chan and via viral creations like LOLcats and Rickrolling, the Internet meme has been rapidly and rabidly adopted by undergraduates since the start of last week.
A rash of student media reports and social media chatter confirm that undergraduates' online experiences are now hovering between "meme madness" and full-blown "meme mania." Last Friday, Syracuse University sophomore Bob O'Brien tweeted, "The 'College Meme Page' frenzy is unlike anything I can remember on Facebook. Seems every school is discovering it at once."
I don't mean to go all prescriptivist-lexicographer on anyone's ass, but it's unfortunate that the word 'meme' has come to be used solely for this kind of amusing (sometimes) diversion. Originally, the term was coined to describe any "unit" of information, and draw attention to the fact that those packets vary in their tendency to be replicated and spread, or not and be forgotten. So the Sermon on the Mount; the heliocentric solar system; vaccine paranoia and "the most interesting man in the world" are all memes.
ReplyDeleteThe idea behind calling them memes is to draw a parallel between the spread of particular ideas in a particular cultural environment, and natural selection on different kinds of living things in different ecological environments. For example, the heliocentric solar system didn't spread widely at first in a largely unreceptive 'environment', but was able to survive in a small niche of scientists (rather like a rare species surviving the ice age in a sheltered refugium). When the 'environment' of broader society became more receptive (perhaps because it made celestial navigation more accurate? I don't really know, but scientific ideas do seem to have become accepted when they become useful), it replicated (spread) more widely.
So the things currently described as memes are only a small subset of all the ideas originally encompassed by the term. The whole reason I raise this is that it seems so say something about the current 'environment' in which ideas spread widely if they are trivial and momentarily amusing, but not if they are nuanced and informative.
See also Hiram's post about the 'digital natives' who can't insert page numbers into a word document.
"Meme" sounds nicer than "cheap internet gag you will forget 15 minutes later." You'll agree that the novelty faded long ago because LOLcats are nearly five years old, the Russian Reversal dates to the 1980s but was revived in 2004, and so on. Right now they are beating the "arrow in the knee" bit from Skyrim to death. Sometimes a meme image or sound might exist for years before the Internet seizes on it; a good example would be the "Wilhelm scream" which is a film sound effect scream that dates to the 1950s, became a trademark in George Lucas and Steven Spielberg movies, and is now inserted into YouTube videos as a joke.
Delete"Nuanced and informative" memes are out there, it's just a matter of presentation. When auto-tuning became an internet joke, people took Carl Sagan clips and turned them into songs which were very popular, so it can be done.
I swear I thought this excerpt was linked to The Onion. People getting all breathless about certain jokes appearing in "undergraduates' online experiences" seemed typical of their style of cultural satire. What really convinced me was the quote from a college sophomore about this phenomenon being unlike anything he remembers of Facebook. Good grief.
ReplyDeleteJust wait for the LOLcat-derived humor-pic dissertation. It'll probably take less time than it should.
ReplyDeleteI admittedly like lolcats. I end every lecture with one. Most of my students seem to hate them.
ReplyDelete