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Squatting Ideas

Every so often, and I really mean this, I'll find myself sitting in a school canteen where dustbins have been liberated of the social obligation to wear their lids, and I'll hear a distant voice of a rather nasal and high pitched quality proclaim something nearly as annoying as itself. 

These incidents happen to coincide very closely with the times in which I start weighing all the pros and cons of the Internet. Usually, the nasally voice is allowed to continue with its gummy bear muffled ramblings since the alternative would mean me getting closer to its source, but I still can't help but wonder during those moments whether the Internet's advantages outweigh the terrible scourge of most Internet memes. 

Yes, that's going to be the topic of this article, and while you're probably digging trenches for the rhetoricky, rant-ish invasion about why can't all these people just grow up and start making up phrases of their own, that's only going to be part of this article. The other part is hopefully going to be a soulful attempt to remember what memes used to be. The end of this paragraph's probably a good place to start, so let's get to it then. 

Memes, when you boil away the thick black coating of Rickrolls and bodily fluid exchange, are really just recurring or continuous ideas within a society that are transmitted from one mind to another by way of a completely mentionable act: communication. And that's never been easier (seeing as how technology tends to get better in every aspect other than eco-friendliness when going forward in time) given advent of the Internet, phones and large buildings with nice hollow spaces right in their middles which make it very hard for you to have affairs (or one, if you'd like) with your attractive secretary(s). 

So with the mention of the Internet and its ability to proliferate memes like a cold does in a Chinese train, the thought of testing the durability of your router may have occured to you. But hold that thought for a second. Memes are something more. (No, just put the router down. Really. It's not going to be worse.) 

Every form of "received wisdom" is a meme. The concept of wearing clothing (some, at least) in public or not going spelunking in your nostrils (those who do have developed apathy shields that would greatly ensure their survival in the event that Halley's Comet came over to grab its belongings. So on further reflection we're mostly safe.)  are all memes. They're generally well accepted ideas that have been deeply rooted into many different cultures, and the cultures that don't have these memes are either exiled or considered "damned outrageous". And the thing is, many memes have served us well, because without memes, it would be practically impossible to get anything done with large groups of people (With the exception of rioting. On second thought, scratch that. Rioting's no exception.) because of the absence of a common idea or set of ideas that unifies them in some way. If it weren't for the meme that stealing and murdering were bad, we wouldn't have a legal system. If it weren't for the meme that goats are by no means a form of standardized (or vending machine compatible) currency, we wouldn't have, well, currency. 

Memes, we can clearly see at this point, are ludicrously two sided (the number of two sides there are is impossible to conceive). It can either be the trusty concrete that we have our riots on or the sewer of humanity where our last hope, in the form of very talented humanoid turtles, lies. So the problem isn't the existence of memes, but rather recognizing which ones should be existings and which ones shouldn't. 

Because while memes can be useful foundational ideas, they can also become the equivalent of soft plywood supports for one of those kampong houses. It seemed like a great idea at the time when the rest of the house was made of soft plywood and its inhabitants consisted of the ocassional hummingbird that would fly off once the boards started creaking, but when its inhabitants atart consisting of walking things the whole thing starts to fall apart. 

My point here is that memes can squat on mental chairs that should really be given to new ideas after a good dusting. While some foundational memes may have been excellent several decades ago, they start to lose their appeal and usefulness today. (The example of wearing clothing comes in here again, and it's nice to know that we're going full circle and that all we need to do is start talking to serpents again.) The problem with getting rid of such memes, though, is that they really don't want to get off their arses, because some have been so deepy imbedded in our culture that getting rid of them seems unthinkable. (Like say, in the case of hoping for a Hollywood film that doesn't have a romance thrown in like soya sauce on ice cream.) 

So they sit there and shove away any new ideas that want to so much as offer them some Pocky. They end up being there for the sake of being there, and then the process of creating new ideas starts making funny gurgling noises that aren't very funny at all in retrospect. 

Internet memes being used so often in some conversations is a clear example of this. Once people start using those memes as placeholders for phrases that haven't been echoed by at least one world, then no other ideas can. 

Memes need to be constantly rexamined to make sure that they aren't irrelevant, and deciding whether they're irrelevant or not is going to take a lot of notepaper and a good supply of Pocky.