While reading a William Gibson novel, Pattern Recognition, a virtual, semiotic funfest, I wanted to refresh my understanding of the word "meme". Discovering that my bed-worthy Webster's Collegiate, circa 1977, was too outdated to help and my newish Websters 3rd too heavy for horizontal use, I decided take the contextually-appropriate Google/Wikipedia route. This led to more info grazing and I found this online Time article about 4chan, an "off the chain" website, where users share assorted visual tidbits and other stuff.
According to Time, 4chan is a meme hothouse which started out as an anime/manga fan site modeled after a Japanese site called 2chan. At some point, 4chan had a Saturday thing called "Caturday", where users posted funny pictures of cats. This in turn spawned the LOLcat phenom. Interesting stuff.
Lately I have been really interested in the whole viral info transmission concept. It figures in several good nonfiction books I have been reading; The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell and The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson. The internet is a great place to see it in action because it happens so quickly and so visibly.
It is also interesting to me that 4chan is a mostly unrestricted website that allows for a high degree of anonymity. I think that theoretically, at least, information evolution/transmission probably occurs more rapidly in this kind of open environment (the watched pot and all that). I found the anime/manga connection interesting too. Otaku figure heavily in Pattern Recognition as well. Just another drop in the meme pool.
Internet People by Dan Meth
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