Popular Culture and Memes

The Blair Witch Project, Don't Tase me Bro!, All Your Base Are Belong to Us, Hampster Dance, pwned

The above are all examples of internet based memes, basically using the internet to create a cultural awareness of a person, phrase, idea, movie, etc. Take a step back for a moment, actually step back through time, most people over the age of twenty can remember when the internet was a new idea, when aol and prodigy were the main competitors for our ISP, hell back then we didn't know what an ISP was. During this time our cultural memes were passed on through mainly television, movies and magazines. The information supplied to us was filtered through editors, publishers, producers, and actors. Our culture was shaped by a small percentage of the population.

Now jump ahead to 2007, when even as I write this I will sometimes type "teh" and know that the mispelling of "the" has become a cultural meme, even if used for mockery, we still have an awareness of the word.

The information we receive on a daily basis is for the most part unfiltered. This deluge of information is then sorted through either by us or by computer programs like google, which attempts to tell us what it thinks we will like. Youtube is a free for all of user created content, and even those that want completely uncensored video content can find it on other "tube" sites I won't list here.

So with all this information, the phenomenons that emerge take on a different cultural significance than those that came before it. Will that mean these memes will become extinct sooner in an age where there is significantly more information available than there is room in our brains or computers to store, or will they live on in servers, always able to be accessed never truly forgotten unless man decides to purge their system?

This is just a subject I've been pondering today, by no means am I presenting a thesis or anything behind minimally coherent. Yet I am presenting this information and placing it into the information dump of the internet, not knowing how or if it will mutate beyond its current state.