Meme on a Monday
February 25, 2008 by missscarlett
I was tagged by the Yarn Slayer!
The rules…
1) Link to your tagger and post these rules on your blog.
2) Share 7 facts about yourself on your blog, some random, some weird.
3) Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blogs.
4) Let them know they are tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.
Ok. Here goes.
1. The first time I read one of these I thought it was a typo - for some time afterwards I thought it was some insider-jokey-reference thing that was supposed to be written about Me Me Me
2. I still don’t really understand the word - couldn’t there be a simpler explanation? or a different word?
3. I love cheesy, overblown, overacted Hollywood musicals like Gigi or The Unsinkable Molly Brown
4. But I hate West Side Story. Ugh.
5. I also hate The Outsiders - or most gang related youth tragedies and I say it is because they’re so pointless and the people make such ridiculously doomed choices….
6. but I love The Departed and Gangs of New York? Am I agist?
7. My politeness is practically a compulsion. There are people I detest with vehemence whom I cannot be rude to. I will have vowed to ignore them (I don’t want to start fights!)but I run into them, I smile and ask how they are - and the scary thing is, I think my interest might be sincere!
I’m not going to tag anyone because I’m like that. I have also been known to step on cracks, walk beneath ladders and welcome black cats to cross my path.
So, the word meme was originated in a book called The Selfish Gene, and was originally intended to encompass the way cultural behaviors and ideas pass throughout a culture, or between them. (Kind of like a cultural gene, as opposed the the biological one, except that the manner of transmission is more like a virus than genetic code.) One of the key things about the idea though, is that this was to encompass the more passive ways in which culture is passed - not the teaching of an elder to a younger of “this is our story, this is how we do things”, but the mimicry and imitation of “Jennifer Anniston has great hair on Friends, and suddenly EVERYONE is getting their hair cut the same way.”
By that definition, what you did here is actually NOT a meme, although the word is used so much in this way in popular blog-language, that the usage is inescapable at this point. A true meme would not have tagging where, you are (in theory) compelling other people to particiapte, but would instead be something like progress bars for projects on a blog side bar. One person figured out how to do it, then a few other people saw it, liked it, figured out how to do it, then a few MORE saw those, and so on, until a large percentage of all knit-bloggers have progress bars on their blog sidebars, and potentially, no one knows anymore where the practice came from.
1,2,3,4,5,6 - yes! 7 - I have no problem being rude to people who are rude to me. But I usually just ignore them or give them the silent treatment.