YouTube Weekend: The Meme

A lot of people have the wrong idea of what a "meme" is. Somehow the definition has gotten distorted and corrupted to mean "a thing that gets passed around on the Internet that requires you to perform some function and then pass it on to somebody else." But that's pretty far from what the word was coined to refer to.

Richard Dawkins originally used the term in his book The Selfish Gene to refer to a unit of information that is capable of reproducing itself. Memes are concepts, ideas, ways of doing things that are copied and replicate and spread from individual to individual. As he writes in Chapter 11 of his book:

Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passed it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. As my colleague N.K. Humphrey neatly summed up an earlier draft of this chapter: `... memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically.(3) When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isn't just a way of talking -- the meme for, say, "belief in life after death" is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual men the world over.'

It's rare that you witness a meme at its birth. But I think I have. Marc from Wilkes-Barre Online has made me realize that with this post.

I don't know how long Gort at Gort42 has been doing his "YouTube Weekend" posts, but it might possibly have been since before my friend John built me a computer that was capable of playing YouTube videos. It may go back to this post, which doesn't actually contain an embedded video, or it may have started even earlier.

The idea is pretty simple, as contained in this post:

It will be another light and lazy weekend. I'll just surf YouTube and share what I find just like last weekend.

(Oddly enough, the YouTube videos Gort had posted the previous weekend were a clip of the Zapruder film of John F. Kennedy being shot in the head, and "Seconds" - a song/video that incorporates bits about JFK's final hours - by the Human League. Not exactly the fun stuff I've come to associate with Gort's YouTube Weekends.)

Like Garfield Minus Garfield, this idea has legs: instead of doing a full post for a weekend, just do a quick post that includes a favorite video for the weekend. I've been doing it for a while, inspired in part by Gort, and in part by Michael Plank's Content, which has long featured YouTube videos - though, like Michael Plank, I don't restrict my video postings to weekends, and I often do the video posts in addition to, rather than in place of, my regular posts. (Some of my video posts are wordier than my non-video posts!)

Jen has gotten into the act at Jennifer D. Wade Journal. Marc at Wilkes-Barre Online has put his own spin on the YouTube Weekend with his Video Flapdoodle - see the first two entries here and here. Now even Bill at Bill's Notes has taken to posting YouTube videos with this weekend's posts. Twenty-seven YouTube videos, over the course of seven posts, all posted today. That's...rather a lot.

I'll leave you with a video. This is a home-made video, by a teenage girl in Glasgow, Scotland. It's a video for "When You Sleep" by My Bloody Valentine. "When You Sleep" is possibly MBV's most upbeat song. I've always thought of it as a "Summer Song", the sort of song I could imagine blasting out of a car as it rolls down the street, or out of a boom box while you're washing your car. The video is just her and her friends screwing around, but the style, the blocking, the editing, the matching up of video to audio, the use of in-camera imagery and speed changes to create special effects (check out the trampoline-and-lens-flare starting at 2:08), the everything is just gorgeous. It perfectly captures the feel of the song. If this girl does not go on to pursue a career in this, the world will be the poorer for it.

"When You Sleep" by My Bloody Valentine , video by lithiumkx: