fett on 19/4/2006 at 20:43
\0/ \0/
TF on 19/4/2006 at 21:37
ownes
Agent Monkeysee on 20/4/2006 at 02:24
Quote Posted by Gingerbread Man
More interesting to me are the predictors and mechanisms of meme death.
One of the predictors has gotta be when the mainstream media starts paying attention to it.
Gingerbread Man on 20/4/2006 at 02:38
That's actually what I find more interesting... when "mainstream" media catches notice of it, nine times out of ten the meme's already dead, buried, forgotten about, resurrected by asshats, and thoroughly reviled by those who thought it was the Bee's Knees the first time around. Usually it's overexposure in mainstream media that kills something for the "fringe" populations, but in the case of the Internet, these things are usually long dead before they break through. Dead and hated enough that it's never even a question of "dude, that is so old... I remember when that first started, and it was funny then but not now" -- it's more like:
Asshat: BADGER BADGER BADGER DID YOU EVER HEAR THIS???
Internaut: (goes into an instant fury and actually punches the Asshat)*
I'm assuming it has to do with the relative speed and diversity of usage... I mean, the Internet is a user-directed / controlled medium that operates in real-time and without quality control. It also doesn't conform to any particular schedule, and timezones / geography mean nothing. So something can circle the world in a day and then jump the shark inside of two weeks.
<small>* may or may not have actually happened</small>
Para?noid on 20/4/2006 at 02:40
Breath comes out white clouds with your lies
And filters through me
You're close to the final word
You're staring right past me in dismay
A liquid seeps from your chest
And drains me away
Mist ripples round your thin white neck
And draws me a line
Cold fingers mark this dying wreck
This moment is mine
Help me cure you
Atone for all you've done
Help me leave you
As all the days are gone
Night fall again
Taking what's left of me
Slight twist, shivering corpse
Ornated with water, fills the cracks
Clasped in my limbs by tradition
This is all you need
Scots Taffer on 20/4/2006 at 02:42
Is it a matter of debate or pretty much undisputed fact that SA is pretty much the originator of much of the internet geek meme?
Quote Posted by Gingerbread Man
Asshat: BADGER BADGER BADGER DID YOU EVER HEAR THIS???
Internaut: (goes into an instant fury and actually punches the Asshat)*
This did happen. My middle name is Internaut.
Also, yeah, the media gets hold of internet memes once they're long since dead and buried, like the Set Us Up The Bomb fiasco (anyone remember that).
Gingerbread Man on 20/4/2006 at 03:01
Gunes have in the past attempted to assert that they coined the term "clusterfuck"
SA's relevance to the greater scheme is nowhere near what they believe, but they do (it does?) -- by virtue of networking and numbers -- manage to infect with astonishing speed and spread. Mostly internally, but there's always a small cadre of spotty gimps who are of the intractably Don't Get It persuasion, and it's those knobs who tend to cause the SA White Cells to begin combat operations as well as being responsible for leaving quarantine and Patient Zeroing other, less scrupulous, communities. SA is certainly the best place to watch accelerated generations of meme civilisation in action, complete with death stages and consequent scorn heaped on those who didn't get the memo 20 minutes ago when something became Uncool, but to be honest I think hated outlets Fark and eBaum's World wield a higher-calibre strain of virulence.
Origin isn't important. A million things originate every day. What drives the meme is the infection, and the greatest contagion derives from hotbeds of constraint-deficient dung heads who then run around chortling like retards let loose from their string at the zoo outing and fuck everything in sight with the dignity and decorum appropriate to their stratum.
Um.
In other words, people who generate these things usually display a degree of possessiveness that leads to careful avoidance of misuse. It's the chortling retards fucking everything in sight that spread the things through forwarded emails, ultra-shit "photoshops" and YTMNDs slapped together in truly brain-wrenching misapprehension of the original context, and are ultimately responsible for the life and death of whatever it was. Just not the birth.
But to be honest, who cares where Typhoid Mary got the disease, right? That's not the salient part.
Malygris on 20/4/2006 at 03:07
You talk funny.
Scots Taffer on 20/4/2006 at 03:17
Quote Posted by Gingerbread Man
... but to be honest I think hated outlets Fark and eBaum's World wield a higher-calibre strain of virulence.
Origin isn't important. A million things originate every day. What drives the meme is the infection, and the greatest contagion derives from hotbeds of constraint-deficient dung heads who then run around chortling like retards let loose from their string at the zoo outing and fuck everything in sight with the dignity and decorum appropriate to their stratum.
Yeah, Fark and eBaum's world can definitely be charged with having the greater influence and therefore impact on the geek meme purely through volume and exposure. I would argue that origin is important for one reason or another, but in the end, wherever you are on the internet where the latest fad hits, you still feel like you're in ground zero of this destructive force that makes no sense whatsoever.
In other news, I spent about a week browsing YTMND and found it to be a simultaneously horrifying and pleasurable experience. There's a whole subculture within a subculture there that made me o_O for a while.
(
http://msfcbf.ytmnd.com/) And shit like this, for example, blows me away. I just can't get my head around it, yet I'm utterly compelled to stare.