Go and have a laugh at the meme generation

KARLIN LILLINGTON NET RESULTSI REMEMBER the first time I heard the term "viral" used in relation to websites. It was a good few years ago now, when the word had only just entered the trendiest of web-users' lexicons. It arrived in a press release and I had absolutely no idea what the PR person was on about.

"Viral"? That didn't really sound like something desirable for anyone's site, but apparently it was - that much I could tell from the press release. It annoyed me, however, that someone who should be taking the time to explain things in a clear and basic way on behalf of their client company was instead using the latest hip jargon.

Not that this is unusual for technology or web-service companies. If there's one thing journalists who cover those sectors know well, it is that sinking feeling you get as you launch into the first paragraph of a press release riddled with technology and sales buzzwords.

Only doctors and lawyers can build equally impenetrable walls of linguistic meaning. The difference is that at least doctors and lawyers have the excuse of professions whose active, daily terminology is based on dead languages and multi-syllabic complex words. The technology industry just comes up with baffling or silly ways of saying simple things and inflicts them on the rest of us. When it wants to be particularly annoying it switches to the murk of acronyms.

Anyway, in the 1990s the term "viral" had just started doing the rounds and, as so often with these terms, I'd heard it a few times without really knowing what it meant. Then I got the release and, in some grumpiness (and striking a blow, I hoped, on behalf of other hacks exasperated by the constant, casual use of jargon), e-mailed the PR person back asking her to please explain what this term meant since the whole point of her release seemed to rest on my thinking I should know and care that this word applied to that website.

And to her credit, she did, and thus I learned "viral" was the word being used to describe a net phenomenon where everyone suddenly seems to know about a site or an idea or a product due to one person mentioning it to another via e-mail, an online bulletin board, or just plain old word of mouth. In other words, the word of the site spread rapidly, like a virus. Okay, that now made sense.

Sometimes, rather than the descriptive word "viral" being applied as an adjective to such things, the even more jargony and Pseuds' Corner noun "meme" is used. A meme is defined by the online Wikipedia (wikipedia.org, itself an online meme and viral website) as "any unit of cultural information, such as a practice or idea, that gets transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another".

The term was coined (in this usage anyway) by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene - something I didn't know until I read the Wikipedia (and assuming this is actually correct, as the Wikipedia is notoriously susceptible to inaccuracy - which is one reason it's a bit scary that it is a viral, much-used site).

As a concept, it perfectly suits what started to happen once there existed a publicly accessible internet, a communications medium based on many-to-many connections and thus perfectly suited to the rapid spread of information.

Last week, a conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology looked at the phenomenon of online memes - not in a hard and serious way, but having a bit of fun with the idea, in the nature of viral websites themselves. The event, called ROFLcon (ROFL being the common internet abbreviation for "rolling on the floor laughing"), has an excellent weblog at www.roflcon.org (don't miss the links to sleeper internet videos).

The event brought together discussions of such sites and some of the people who create them (or increasingly, "star" in them, thanks to viral videos from YouTube and other video sites). As the event title makes clear, a certain element of silliness is definitely central to meme sites - think of early viral sites like the Hampster (sic) Dance, or Ikissyou.org, or that site with the live webcam of a cheddar cheese aging (I kid you not).

Online memes have certainly become more widespread, thanks to more people being online, the advent of weblogs (with their comments sections and linking between blogs), the blossoming of social network sites that allow news of ideas, sites and products to ricochet through the net, and of course, the video sites.

Yet I doubt the vast majority of people who look at these sites and videos would refer to them as "memes" or as being "viral". As with art, people tend to know what they like without having to know the language of a collector or the arcane psychological detail behind why they like something. Just go and have a laugh.

[  klillington@irish-times.ie  ]

blog: www.techno-culture.com