Livejournal Viruses

[samfu]

Its funny how many of these meme thingies (henceforth referred to as MeTh) are going around I suppose. What's even funnier is the connection that my mind makes with these MeTh and general viruses that plague the general bio-matter of the universe. The main difference is that the resistance to such a virus occurs on a conscious level as opposed to a

Comments

[matrixboarder]

You are such a scrooge!

[samfu]

Yeah, I hear Scrooge was big into Virology.

[singingjana]

I like your analogy. A meme could be considered a conscious virus, if people were actually doing them because they wanted them passed on. But they don't care about that. People do memes because they want to talk about themselves, to no one in particular, and answer questions that others think to ask. People like to be given a prompt and say, "well, how WOULD I answer that, or how WOULD that describe me?" It's addictive. I propose, that rather than a virus, a meme is actually an intoxicating substance, one that affects the ego rather than the physical body. What do you think?

[matrixboarder]

An intoxicating substance is not passed on like a virus is. But, good note.

[tommusic]

Interestingly both ideas rely upon the person exposed to the meme to be susceptible to it.

I would argue that each of the views are valid.

Imagine a room full of crack addicts (i.e. people that are very interested in the consumption of crack). If someone in the room happens to visibly have some crack with them, people that notice will suddenly want to get a piece of the rock. They are predisposed to it. They see it, they want it want it got to have it.

However, consider also the scenario of a room full of impressionable teenagers. Suppose there was someone doing macramé (or some other craft) which on the surface seemed kinda mundane. Let us also suppose that the other kids are bored, and this macramé-er happened to have enough equipment for two other kids to be able to try it out. If that kid then picked two people and offered to let them learn, suddenly it becomes exclusive. Perhaps even desirable, even for the people that never really cared about macramé to begin with.

Some people hate hate hate the idea of finding out "

[singingjana]

I love you, Tom! :)