Epimemiology
My long suffering Anth 495 compatriot ML, after surviving near lethal doses of my mad scribblings, has started her own blog.
The interesting thing is ML named the blog for the 23/5 meme that swept through the LJ community about 6 months back. I hadn’t heard of this one so had to trace its origins back via her links.
Along these lines, this week has seen an avalanche of forwarded emails from concerned friends warning me about thieves with perfume bottles packed with ether and the dangers of flashing your headlights at other cars (when you do get those unbelievable emails, please check the Urban Legends Archive. I’ve got it as a feed in my news aggregator to track new legends).
What I particularly find fascinating is how these things actually get started. And the fact, they occur in just about every culture to varying degrees. What the germ of a meme is that begins it propagating or how an urban legend actually moves from a whispered story to something like Mikey, pop rocks and soda pop (for those outside of North America, the post pic is of Mikey of Life cereal fame which I think is the first urban legend I ever heard as a kid).
Looking into it apparently the term originated from Prof. Jan Brundvand from his book The Vanishing Hitchhiker (also scarily, I’ve been told the title story on more than one occasion). One to add to the reading list.
In Anth 495, we studied similar ideas about the transmission of photographic tropes, how certain images and compositions are constantly recreated and embellished but tie into deep pre-conceived visual notions and convey certain messages in ways that make it difficult to discourse effectively outside of the context of these images. In particular, the idea that these tropes become part of the collective visual unconscious is of course a very similar concept to the idea of memetic transmission in popular culture.
So, once you’ve moved past origin and transmission though is the question of why these memes and visual tropes remain in the collective popular culture. It does seem somewhat viral as you do seem to have outbreaks and pandemics of certain memes whereas certain eventually become contained and are wiped out.
So, any ideas on what constitutes something going viral ? I kind of find it an interesting anthropological study. Other than actually examining the actual stories (and what they say about our modern culture’s oral tradition) I’m not sure how many people have actually done a lot of research work on them.
playing : Medley Egyptien by Claude Challe
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