Like most cities, the Internet is both a beautiful and wondrous place, and an evil and filthy place at the same time. Today, I’d like to discuss one of my favorite things about it: Internet memes. For those of you who don’t know, a meme is sort of an infectious idea. It can be a picture, a video, a slogan, whatever. It becomes part of internet culture (usually for about twelve hours before it gets old) and then is discarded for the next one.
The way these things start just fascinates me to no end. One person on a forum, a news site, television, or anywhere says or does something ridiculous and it catches on like wildfire through the Internet hive-mind. The next thing you know, it’s all over Twitter, it’s on Facebook, it’s on Reddit, it’s on Digg (the next day! Ooo, burn!), and even television hosts jump on the bandwagon.
For the most part, these memes are pointless and are little more than cheap entertainment. Take “Sad Keanu,” for example: Someone finds a picture of Keanu Reeves gloomily eating a sandwich on a park bench and posts it on Reddit. People then start feeling really bad for Keanu because he really has had a hard life and is a genuinely good guy, then they start Photoshopping him in all kinds of crazy images. It just snowballs so quickly and with such enormity that it makes you wonder what the power of the collective could accomplish if it got hooked on something worthwhile.
It’s interesting to note that while the potential for great things is there, the fact of the matter is that most of the folks who have the potential to use a meme in order to change the status quo have no real interest in doing so. They’d rather go online, get their kicks and be done with it. This is why all the hubbub about Scientology has died down, but Hungrybear and his double rainbow are getting loads of attention.
