::scr clue

[Simon Batistoni]

On 18/03/02 14:34 +0000, Simon Wistow wrote:
> Memes - doncha just love 'em. 
>
> ... 
>              
> (via Kuro5hin) which shows the evolution of a ameme. As Mr Batistoni
> pointed out - expect Domo-Kun tshirts pretty soon. All your merchandise 
> are belong to us to paraphrase that last great craze, the so called
> Verboten Meme. [0] Also expect to be getting this again in about 2 weeks
> time, then in two months time, then in 6 months time and then ....
> 
> The evil-in-human-form (I ought to know, I worked for an Adverti$ing
> company for 3 years) over at uk.net-marketing would give their right
> mandibles to be able to make memes at will. But they can't. They've
> tried. Hell, I can't and I'd guess that with the amount of mailing lists
> I'm on I've got as much chance as anybody. Occasionally one works - the
> Burning Rubber man or whoever he was last year was done by a marketing
> company IIRC but failed miserably since it FAILED TO ADVERTISE ANYTHING.
> phules.

The problem with memes is that the qualities which make one successful
are very very nebulous. There are so many concepts and inspirations
pulling together to make something which people really get on a wide
enough scale that they start propagating it like mad.

In the case of the kitten meme, there are a bunch of things coming
together:

1) A joke about wanking 

2) Reasonably skillful lampooning both of Daily Mail style "think of
the children" hysteria, and of 1950s Public Service Announcements (the
typeface and the declaritive style of the text suggest this to me,
anyway). 

3) A really rather cute little
kitten 

4) A really rather cute little kitten in danger of being eaten

5) Really rather cute, but menacing-looking monsters chasing the
kitten

This works on so many levels for so many different people - those who
don't find wanking funny still find the kitten cute, some people
prefer the idea of the kitten being eaten, and so on and so forth.

Interestingly, I think Domo-kun may break out from this meme and
become a craze in his own right because he's so fucking cool :) But
any potential domo-kun craze is an unimportant part of the kitten
meme. 

In fact, for me, knowing more about the shadowy, tooth-laden creatures
chasing the kitten spoils the joke considerably. Domo-kun's best
friend appears to be a bunny wabbit, fer chrissakes, so he's unlikely
to be a wanto devourer of all that is cute and fluffy.



Dawkins' original concept of the meme, which he came up with in "The
Selfish Gene" in 1976, was a fairly unworked idea - he simply proposed
that we might have replicators which work for cultural frameworks in
the same way that genes do for physical beings.

Being Dawkins, I think he was thinking on a grander scale than the
things which we tend to call memes today - he would prefer to consider
the Bible as a meme, rather than the kitten/wanking joke, because it
has had a far more profound, and inescapable effect on large swathes
of human society. Whether we like it or not, many of our sexual
attitudes, and even the structure of our entire week is dictated by
ripples which have spread from the bible, for example.

I doubt that the sabbath will be redefined on domo-kun's behalf.


Of course, not only do different memes have different scopes of
effect, but the same meme can mean different things to different
groups of people.

On one level, AYBABTU and the Kitten are, in fact, the same meme: part
of the Photoshopping craze which has engulfed SomethingAwful.com, and
slightly more latterly, fark.com.

Fark now run daily photoshopping contests, some of which are lame,
some of which come up with genuinely funny stuff. And, of course, AYB
was effectively just the results of a photoshop thread at
SomethingAwful, packaged up and redistributed.

Photoshopping is now starting to get noticed by the mainstream media,
which both indicates that it's now reaching a fairly wide audience,
and that it's likely to go one notch higher imminently:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,48116,00.html


It's impossible to know what will make cult status on the net, and
what won't, which is why marketers (who are, for the most part, led by
"what worked in the past") have a particularly hard time trying to
spontaneously launch them. Most memes are a surprise, an accident of
time and place.

Am I Hot or Not was another marketroid's wet dream, but the fact is
that it was basically two guys working out of a bedroom, who thought
it'd be a fun hobby to have a site where hot women submitted their
photos. They themselves were shocked when the entire world decided to
submit its photo, and idle away countless hours voting on who was hot.

But the site was fascinating on so many levels. For some people, you'd
wonder why they'd bothered to put up an awful photo, and be rated a
consistent "1". Other times, it'd be interesting to see that there
really are beautiful people out there. It could tell you an awful lot
about what you found attractive in people, too.

Of course, marketers did try to cash in on it. The Sun ran a copycat
for a while (tied into a film promo, I think - could have been "Am I
Scary or Not, attached to Scary Movie), and you can still find all
sorts of Am I $Foo Or Not sites. But the secondary copycats feel
cheap, somehow, like a group of people repeating a comedian's jokes to
each other right after the stand-up show has finished. There are very
few net users who don't recognise the concept, but they remember it as
the original meme, slightly reinforced by the ubiquitous copying.


Right, I picked this ball up and started running with it, but I'm not
sure where I've got to. Help?

-- 
"In marketing the word 'free' means the cost is concealed.|   christopher
Nothing is ever free. There is always a price to pay, in  |          ross
terms of money, or effort, or time, or quality."          |tunnel visions