Day Seven: Memes and MeMes

I’m bored with spewing out dull trivialities about myself, probably nearly as bored as you are with reading them. However there is still one day left of the International Week of the Meme and so I thought that instead of subjecting you to more narcissistic prattling I’d subject you to some half arsed amateur anthropology instead.

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The word meme was first used by the biologist Richard Dawkins in order to describe the way units of cultural information (such as catchphrases, fashions, and manufacturing styles and techniques) pass from one mind to another. The theory is that memes evolve in a similar manner as natural selection, some ideas are unpopular and so become extinct, others capture popular imagination and so evolve and mutate.

The word meme itself can be seen as an example of this. From its relatively obscure beginnings in 1976 it has risen to become a prominent concept in the collective consciousness, particularly within the online community. The internet is the perfect environment for the propagation of memes. Information flies back and forth over the globe and videos, animations, and jokes can find world wide fame in mere days.

Examples of popular internet memes:

• Star Wars Kid
• Chocolate Rain
• Chuck Norris Facts
• Numa Numa
• LOL Cats
• Hamster Dance

But to us bloggers the word meme has evolved to mean something a little different than “a unit of cultural information”. In her classic haiku “How Sweet The Honey”, esteemed Melbourne poet Ameila Walker shifts the very origin of the word (originally an abbreviation of the Greek for “something imitated”: mimeme) to a self obsessed plea for attention: the MeMe!. The urban dictionary claim this sort of meme is actually called a bleme, but this isn’t a term in widespread use.

The MeMe is often in the form of an interview of sorts, a set of questions providing a structure to work to. They are spread by tags, a form of social grooming for the internet age.

Some examples of bloggers posting MeMes

• Thinking Blogger Award – Honea Express
• My Five Obsessions – Phantom Kitty
• Seven Random Facts – A Family Runs Through It
• Fifty Five Questions – Americanmum
• Post Resurrection – Cafe Leone
• Interview Me – Island Girl
• Seven Things I Dig About Whit – ImPerceptibility
• What were you doing… – LA Daddy
• The Power of Schmooze – People in the Sun
• Five Questions – Quit Your Day Job
• Birth – School – Work – Death – Relaxed Parents
• Ten Years Ago – Sink Into The Pacific
• Five Things I Dig About Jesus – The Holmes
• Four Things – View From the Cloud.

* Not all blogs I regularly visit are on this list, just a cross sample and does not represent any kind of preference. If you feel you’ve been left you out and you are offended then I’m sorry.

Strangely enough Wikipedia has nothing to say about MeMes or blemes despite the fact they are an extremely common phenomena across the blogging community. Many people look down on them, considering them a lazy or trivial way of filling space for the chronically uninspired. Perhaps some of this snobbism is due to their proliferation on sites such as Myspace, often seen as the bottom echelon of blogging culture.

These negative attitudes are a little unfair. While it is true that a blog consisting purely of them is a rather dull read, used in moderation MeMes can be both interesting and a positive communal force; providing positive strokes for people who are tagged, and giving us all an opportunity to talk about our ten favourite films with dwarfs in them, or 5 reasons why we like sausages.

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And that just about wraps it up for the Week of the Meme. You can look forward to a return of the usual old claptrap on Monday.

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Related posts:

1. The talented Mr Honea
2. Right turn Clyde
3. A short autobiography
4. Day Five: Magazines
5. Day One: Obsessions and Blogging