I came across this blog post page by Rich Webster entitled Memetic Heretic while researching how memes come into being, develop and die on Digg the colorful and influential social bookmarking cum networking site. Here are the words that Rich uses to describe his own meme:
"My li’l meme is the “worst president ever” logo. It’s a little disturbing talking about memes, mainly because the meme-master of the universe has been Karl Rove for the last few years. The key to a meme is to get it repeated so many times people accept it as a defining “wrapper” around whatever cultural, political or business dogma is floating down the river of collective consciousness.
The Repugnicans had one for every occasion from “it’s too complicated” which they all repeated to kill the Clinton Health Care plan, to the “FlipFlop” meme for Al Gore or the Swift Boating of John Kerry.Memes run like wildfire through the conservative community… they dribble through the liberal/progressive community.
Free thinkers don’t trend well. Go figure."
With reference to how many times Rich's blog post about memes has been "got" or "dug" (or should I say "digged" on Digg) I am surprised that his Memetic Heretic post, which is of very high quality, has not had more diggs.
What I see on Digg is a lot of activity where people "shout" at each other to try to get their page, often void of content, up the rankings. That irritates many other Digg users to the point where they shut off the feature that lets them be "shouted" at.
The mention of Karl Rove in Rich's blog reminded me of an article in The Atlantic Monthly that explained his rise to power and fall from grace: The World According to Rove.
I will continue to do memetic theory research, using Digg as my searching ground.
The word Digg obviously comes from the 1960s/70s slang "Do you dig this, man?" or "Dig that." One etymological theory is that the slang meme "dig?" came from the Irish Gaelic spoken by immigrants in New York in the 1900s who peppered their sentences with "Tuigean tú?" or the more correct version, "An dtuigean tú?" which means "Do you get what I mean?"
If you know of telling examples of the DIGG tipping point in which seemingly run-of-the-mill pages tipped into replicating memes please let me know.
The illustration at the top is a contemporary one of Annie Moore, the first immigrant to the United States to pass through the Ellis Island facility in New York Harbor
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