I spend a good deal of my time online, complimented by thinking about this thing I am using. I wonder how it affects my memory, my thinking, and/or my interactions with people [in real life]. This network emerged as I entered my early adolescence and is where much of my culture lives. Groups and subgroups [e]merge solely because of the internet, while others join in upon realizing its ability to amplify their reach. Like Borges’ infinite Library of Babel¹, this digital landscape is humanly inexhaustible. There is clearly room for us all, so we develop ways of interacting with one another in this new space.
Culture is driven by ideas, behaviors, and styles that spread through a community. These are memes. From The Free Encyclopedia: the word is a shortening (modeled on gene) of mimeme or “something imitated” and is used as a concept for discussion of evolution of cultural phenomena. Whether by careful propagation or reckless reproduction these ideas live and die, are reborn and transformed. On Canal Street we are witness to remixes of Milton Glaser’s Heart NY while in the back room counterfeiters go to painstaking lengths in providing Louis Vuitton bags for tourist budgets. These are memes.
The internet has changed how we go about doing almost everything, so too it has changed the way we interact with and replicate culture—ideas, behaviors and styles. Internet memes, with their crude gauche, do well to highlight the transient nature of their home. These are wide views with an extremely narrow subject focus.
The plastic nature of the internet pairs nicely with the anonymity it provides. Unburdened by accountability a person can participate freely, creating, remixing, and sharing culture. In the past the integrity of a meme was tested by a person’s life. A boy builds a hut the way his father did. If he did not pay well enough attention and did a bad job of it he chances bodily harm. There is no such risk for internet memes. They might degrade or splinter. An idea might transition into a new style, or one device can be repurposed with new content or a new subject. There is no fear of failure and/or humiliation, bad ideas are dispensed of so that better ones might come forward. The trouble is recognizing the difference between the two.
Each iteration of an internet meme is a still, a single frame, of the ongoing and frequent movement within its lifespan. Viewing memes all together or in a sequence will show patterns more clearly. I feel it important to pay attention to patterns of thinking such as these. Designers need to be concerned with how culture is made and transferred, it’s the business we’re in.
¹In the vast Library there are no two identical books. The Library is total and its shelves register all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols: in other words, all that it is given to express, in all languages. Everything: the minutely detailed history of the future, the archangels’ autobiographies, the faithful catalogues of the Library … the true story of your death, the translation of every book in all languages, the interpolation of ever book in all books … When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness. All men felt themselves to be the masters of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal or world problem whose eloquent solution did not exist in some [part of the Library]. The universe was justified, the universe suddenly usurped the unlimited dimensions of hope … As was natural, the inordinate hope was followed by an excessive depression. The certitude that some shelf in some [part of the Library] held precious books and that these precious books were inaccessible, seemed almost intolerable. (Excerpt from The Library of Babel as it appears in the sixteenth printing of Labyrinths, Select Stories & Other Writings, by Jorge Luis Borges and published by New Directions Publishing Corporation in 1964.)