More on memes.

In light of our current topic, I'm going to drone a little more about memes. The articles we've been reading seem pretty consistent to what I know about them. Memes are social fads that have been around forever, but are now spreading even faster due to the power of the internet. Actually, when I start to think about it, there's a lot of things that spread very similarly to memes in real life, but they just took much longer. Most legends seem to be pretty similar to memes. Vampires, werewolves, bigfoot. They all must have started somewhere and spread throughout the the world. The only large difference I see is purpose. The hamster dance was made to be funny, but legends were mostly made to... Well... I guess for the most part to entertain people. They were told around campfires like scary stories are now. So... Uhh... I guess that idea just got scratched. I suppose another difference is the time they have taken to set into our culture. Think about the hamster dance. When is the last time you saw that? How many years has it been since that thing was flying about the internet? It's old news! People have moved on. In another decade or so, it's likely it will show up on VH1s I love the 90s revisited and we will never hear of it again. Why is it that we're going to be making werewolf movies forever, but no one's going to care about modern memes in a coupe years? I think it's the time that older memes had to set in. Back when the idea of werewolves was spreading and becoming popular, what was there to take it's place? Nothing. There weren't people jumping up to make new legends, they were only expanding on previous ones. People didn't just move on after a few months. They stuck with it for centuries until werewolves had a deep history and legacy.

Even though modern memes and ancient memes fit the same definition, can we really call them the same thing? Isn't that kind of insulting to our culture that's developed over dozens of generations to be lumped in with things like the dramatic chipmunk? It just doesn't seem very fair. I personally think that the memes of the internet need a new name. Flash memes. I'll admit, I stole the idea from flash mobs, but it fits! They form suddenly for no real reason, they maintain themselves for a short time and then they dissipate.

Lastly, I'd like to add a little criticism towards the discussion we had on Wednesday's class. I really felt that the side of World of Warcraft was poorly supported. I was the only one there who actually played the game, and I really felt that the other people who were trying to support the game weren't helping at all. Yes, there are people who are payed to play the game in china and sell the currency for real money. Yes, there are cases of people dying from playing the game too much and neglecting their own bodies. These are extreme cases though. There are over eight million players in the US. The number of people who have negative consequences from this game is so small, it's not even funny. There are millions of players out there, just like me, who play this game as a hobby. I have legitimate friends in this game. it's the equivilant of a pen pal, but you get to chat whenever you get on. 90% of the content in this game requires a group of people to complete! Unless you go on a chinese server, you're going to interact socially with these people! You might realize the one person in particular seems better then the others. In the future, maybe you call on him to help you again. Then one day he calls on you for help. You get to know each other, inside jokes form, topics outside of the game come up. Before you know it, this person is your friend!!! It's no different than gaining friends through blogging, or even in real life! Completely legit' I say!

Now before I go, here's a video that's relevant to both memes and WoW. LEEEROOOOOOOYYY JEEEEENKIIIIINSS!!!!!

This video spread like wildfire across the internet. It probably did more to promote the game than Blizzards advertising at the time! Basically, it's a group of people talking about what their plan is for taking on the next room, when suddenly, Leroy runs in and screws everything up. To the untrained ear, they sound like they're legitimately talking about the game, but if you've played the game, the stuff they're spouting off is idiotic. The video was made as a joke, but when non WoW players saw it they thought it was even funnier because the people sounded serious. There's a nice chunk of strong language in the second part of the clip, just to give you the heads up. Enjoy.

How About Some Blog on Blog Action!

Yeah, it's a little crude, but it's the first thing I thought of when I decided to write this entry about blogging. I can honestly say that I was very impressed by this week's reading. I was one of the people talked about who didn't like blogs. I still don't really understand blogs. Sure, I write in it and other people read it and comment. So what? Why do I care if a small audience finds my personal life interesting? Why should I tell them about my life anyways? Honestly though, this reading has completely convinced me to make a real blog after this semester is finished. I'm not sure how much I'll update it, or what I'll put in it, but I apparently need to seriously try making one before I write it off as stupid. Meg's article was particularly interesting to me. Her and Jason are internet celebrities now. And it's just because they write stuff on their blogs!!! How crazy is that? Not that I expect to become famous across the intrawebs overnight or anything, but it certainly would be cool. But that's not my real motivation for writing a real blog. I'm not that vain. I really just need to try it for the sake of trying it. I suppose I've written it off as a sort of feminine thing. I mean, it's the equivalent of diary, isn't it? Except now you can have a crowd of people to react to it. Now I think I've reached the root of my problem, the people. I keep picturing this crowd as the part of the internet I avoid, flaky teenage girls. The kind who clutter their facebook pages with every stupid app they can find. I know those people would revel in showing off their lives to the world. The people who post on Gaia forums and think Neopets is the best game ever. AHHH!!! See! Look at me!!! I'm making horrible generalizations about this! This is why I really need to make a blog! There's a 90% chance I'm being an elitist moron and there's a great community out there!!! You know what? I'm shortening the time limit. Next week, I need to get a blog. Right after my ENGR 126 exam, I'll make one and it will probably be great.

Well, that's all about blogs that i have to say for now. I must admit that I am extremely excited about the meme stuff that we're getting into, simply because I'm a meme addict. I've been on every major meme to strike the internet since peanut butter jelly time. Most memes don't make it off the internet, that's why you have to stay clued in at the places where they're born. Message boards, youtube, image boards. All the places where they spread to first. Honestly, I'm very impressed with youtube as of late when it comes to good memes. We've got chocolate rain and the dramatic chipmunk in a relatively short time span, and they've both surfaced to real life. Just incase you somehow managed to miss them, here's the videos.





Peace out.

P.S. If at any time our wonderful, kind, and very intelligent professor thought she might be included in my description of bloggers, she is horribly mistaken! I did not at any point mean to include her in that category! That is all.

A Post About Nothing?

Hmmm...
Well, this is an interesting predicament. We haven't read anything this week! What's a guy to discuss and respond to? I suppose I could reflect on my writing process for my essay. Finding articles to support the argument that Youtube is not the amazing expressive wonder that Stephens appears to think it is. This isn't to say that it could eventually become viable, but right now it's not. It just isn't! What's the last real video with some real value to it to come from YouTube? I have yet to see it. Parodies and recordings of old show seem to be the only things I actually care about on YouTube. Actually, I do enjoy watching videos of video games and sometimes you see someone show off a pretty cool stunt or talent. But watching someone climb a building from the outside isn't comparable to what other mediums of expression offer. I already wrote an essay about this so I don't really feel like talking about it right now.

I'll move on to something else literature related. I recently started reading the biography of Einstein. It's interesting, but it's kind of dull. The reading is very flat like a text book. An interesting thing I learned was that Albert was a big fan of the violin. He would play it between his thinking sessions. I really just like to imagine what it would have been like to be him. He was a real genius, but he tried on multiple occasions to have a real family life. They all failed. He loved his children , but he could never stay with his wives. They all said that he just pushed them away. Even his children said that he never really let them get close. He understood so much about the universe, but so little about people in it.

I guess lastly, I'll just post a nice video of people climbing on buildings and doing all sorts of crazy flips. It's called Free running.

Thoughts on Images

In the last week, we've been reading a lot about the power of the image and how to best make use of it. Usually, it really kills me how much people analyze things. I get that feeling like when you say a word over and over again and eventually looses it's meaning. I sort of got that vibe from "Picturing Texts", but I was pleasantly surprised when I read "By the means of the visible". It managed to avoid making images into a dull textbook topic without giving up any intellectual value. So, if it would please the court, I would like to focus on that for this weeks entry.

I really liked Mr. Stephens' article. He delivers a truly unbiased opinion on both sides of the fence for images vs words. I was surprised that there was so much opposition to images in ancient times. I was well aware of the conflict and superstition that surrounded the invention of the camera, but I didn't realize how far back the fear of images reached. Some of it doesn't seem to make much sense, but then again, a lot of it does. I think the worries that people had about making images of god have come true. What do we think of when we imagine god? If you've seen Bruce Almighty, you may picture Morgan Freeman, but everyone else is likely to picture a kind old man with a white beard in a white robe. If god really exists, is that what god really looks like? Probably not. That's an image that people have invented for him and it's probably what the people of the old testament feared. God, the most holy and sacred of all things is being spread about with false images. Another fear is also coming true. He is becoming commonplace. By the spread of an image of him, people get used to seeing it. People become comfortable with it. He used to be a concept that was awe inspiring, but now that we can put a common image to him, he is something a bit less. We can look at him and compare him to worldly things, like Morgan Freeman.

Another fascinating thing that he said was that although we developed and progressed because we had sophisticated eyes capable of observing and analyzing thousands of different objects, plants and animals, we have reduced them to decoding a simple pattern of figures with similar color, shape and design places evenly on evenly spaces lines. Wow! We humans are certainly talented at doing the bare minimum! It astounds me that we couldn't come up with any more elegant method of communicating other than the word. Then again, we have, but they just haven't worked out. He discussed the failure of hieroglyphics's, but I was surprised that Japanese style of writing never came up. It was designed with the beauty of the image and the meaning of the character in mind. If you reach back to it's origins you can see that the characters for words like "dog" or "house" look extremely similar to an image of a dog or a house. It then slowly evolved further away from the image and closer to a simple symbol. I really think it deserved a mention in the piece due to the fact that it's similar to the egyptian writing, but also much more modern.

Well, that's about all I have to say about that. Till next time!

You can take the you out of youtube, but good luck getting the we out of web!

Despite the worries addressed by the article we read, I have complete faith in the internet's ability to not get sucked into corperate greed. Youtube has been under Google's control for quite a while now and the users have yet to truly suffer from it. Little to nothing has changed at all about the community. There are still hilarious memes. There are still TV shows and movies up on the site, despite the companies best efforts to get rid of them. It still feels like the users are in control and that's a good thing. I have a feeling that all the big companies are very careful about this factor and with good reason. Offline, if someone is dissatisfied with a product or service, there's usually not much they can do about it that doesn't involve spending a lot of time or money. Online, if a company loses the faith of it's users, they can jump ship to another website with different rules in seconds. They could even make their own website if no others seemed to fit what they wanted. This is precisely why I don't think the internet will ever lose it's "wild west" type of feel. In real life, the wild west got swallowed up because they ran out of space. You couldn't just run off and build a new town. On the internet, you can do just that! There are no space restrictions. The wild west lives on with every new site made.
It's impossible to kill the freelance, community feel of the internet because it's impossible to stop the freelancers and communities.

Now that that's taken care of, I think it's time to share something for that wonderful web community. It's a song by Weird Al called "Don't Download This Song", which he ironically released over the internet for free.