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.

Memes

Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passed it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. As my colleague N.K. Humphrey neatly summed up an earlier draft of this chapter: `... memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically.(3) When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isn't just a way of talking -- the meme for, say, "belief in life after death" is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual men the world over.'

~Richard Dawkins
(Full Chapter From His Book: The Selfish Gene)

Uncharted: Demo Due November 8

The game is set to be released on November 19th

This PS3 owner is very happy indeed, just gotta finish R&C and Manhunt2

I think I can stay on track with these games, as long as I don't waste time on friends or sleeping

A Future TV Hit?

So Variety, Tvguide and a bunch of other places are reporting that Buffy/Angel/Firefly Mastermind (and my personal God) Joss Whedon is teaming up with Eliza Dushku (Faith on Buffy/Angel, Tru Calling) for a new Fox show entitled The Dollhouse.

The basic premise is that agents at a secret facility are given personalities based upon the assignment they are given, after they complete the assignment those personalities and abilities are stripped away and new ones are put in their place. Dushku will be playing Echo, an agent, becomes aware of what is happening to her.

Sounds pretty damn interesting, and with Fox giving Whedon a 7 episode commitment we don't have to worry about the show going the way of Firefly...who am I kidding, it probably will be cancelled after 4 eps. Then again Pushing Daisies is surviving on ABC so maybe there is hope for shows that are a little more unique...