Imagine that you live in a house. Imagine that you hear a knock on your door. Who could that be? you wonder, you weren't expecting anyone. You put down your copy of The Theory of Relativity on your mahogany sidetable--this is probably the umpteenth time you've read the gosh-darned thing--and you head over to answer the door.
It's me.
"I herd u liek mudkips." I shout the moment we make eye contact.
You slam the door in my face before I even get the opportunity to ask you if I can haz a cheezburger.
What is this, you think, 2005?
The Super Bowl happens to be on tonight. Katy Perry is performing during the halftime show. It was a great performance, your Twitter feed is abuzz with people gushing over the gold lion and the shooting star and those sharks!
Little did you know, those sharks were by far the most important moment of the entire night.
By morning, there are sharks everywhere. Though, to be specific, the images are all of the same shark: the left shark has captured the hearts of the internet. It was slightly out of sync with its dancing, so presumably people somehow sympathized in it or identified with its struggle. Regardless of the why, left shark has become an internet phenomena, a type of phenomena that is specifically branded as a 'meme'.
Memes have been around for just about as long as the internet has been a thing. They are defined as humorous images, videos, etc that are copied and redistributed, often with variations, by Internet users. Memes are basically an inside joke that you share with the entire Internet - though that wasn't always the case. Memes used to be something akin to any other pop culture reference, albeit a different breed of pop culture; it was something fellow memers would use to assert meme cred - or, layman's terms, it was a nerd thing. Before social media was as hugely popular as it is today, memes were generally restricted to forums and imageboards, but now there are websites completely devoted to creating and reposting memes.
I personally find the entire concept oddly fascinating. Why do we find so much joy in these completely irrelevant references? Why do we insist on reposting the same image over and over again with slight variations why do we all insist on killing the joke? Some memes are so incomprehensible that incomprehensible memes are becoming memes themselves they are reproducing on their own the meme-cycle is self-sustaining has memeing gone too far?
Let's take a look at a modern form of memery: the tumblr meme. Tumblr is a website meant for posting bits of text, photos, art, links, and the sharing of those posts through something called 'reblogging': a user reblogs a post in their feed so that it can be seen by all of their followers. Someone could post a picture of a duck, expose it to their 10,000 followers, and if 10% of those followers reblog the picture, and if each of them have at least one follower, you could have at least exposed that duck to another 10,000 people. So, things can spread pretty quickly.
Tumblr's particular brand of memes often work like flash fire: they spread quickly and often they send people running. They pretty much happen overnight. I have fond memories of waking up, checking my tumblr, and finding that every other post on my feed is a Kanye West related pun (Kanye West puts on armor, he's preparing for his Kanye Quest). And yet, after this one day of madness, the meme dies. On particularly active weeks, there might be recap posts recalling what memes occurred on which day of the week. I even remember a post at the end of December that recapped the year in terms of memes.
What are memes? We just don't know. They're some sort of amalgam of inside joke and ridiculous fashion trend, to be used when they're in style and never spoken of again when they're no longer popular. Perhaps someone someday will cultivate enough interest in memes and meme culture to pursue a life researching them. I hope that person will reconsider, since I am not sure I will ever be able to forgive myself for ever putting this much thought into the world of memes.
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Data breaches of any kind alwyas pique my interest. I feel that they happen so often now that the public barely has time to react before there is another one. While I do agree that companies like that should know better and have some kind ofcyber security in place, I think it’s an even bigger deal once you look at the small businesses.
ReplyDeleteDespite the latest innovations in credit card machines and better (read: more secure and private) ways to pay, there are still plenty of businesses you could go to today that could be keeping a lot of your personal information in plain sight. My friend used to work in the retail and services industry where she had very easy access to member registration information such as addresses, phone numbers, emails, credit card information, etc. This practice has generally been unchanged because it is viewed as something that can be dealt with *after* the money is made instead of before.
It’s ridiculous the amount of trust we put into the most basic aspects of business transactions, and I feel that it is generally overlooked because it is so close to home. It’s easy to get angry at some big corporation that should’ve known better, but much harder to say the same thing to the bakery store across the street or that tanning salon that you have a subscription at. I think the pressure should be on us as a society to step up our cryptography game and start protecting our privacy a little better and start demanding better standards be used no matter what size of a company you have.