I just found out from the Colbert Report that Shepard Fairey, the guy who did the Hope Obama poster, is also responsible for the OBEY Andre the Giant stickers.
I think the OBEY stickers are probably one of the best non-internet memes I know.
↓ 16 Jan 2009
kapi:lindsayneedscoffee:davidmaddox:
The existential question.Internet, I love you.
this meme should never die.
↓ 10 Jan 2009
We all want to believe that the key to making an impact on someone lies with the inherent quality of the ideas we present. But in none of these cases did anyone substantially alter the content of what they were saying. Instead, they tipped the message by tinkering, on the margin, with presentation of their ideas….The line between hostility and acceptance, in other words, between an epidemic that tips and one that does not, is sometimes a lot narrower than it seems. The creators of Sesame Street did not junk their entire show after the Philadelphia disaster. They just added Big Bird, and he made all the difference in the world…The Law of The Few says that there are exceptional people out there who are capable of starting epidemics . All you have to do is find them. The lesson of stickiness is the same. There is a simple way to package information that, under the right circumstances, can make it irresistible. All you have to do is find it.
—Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point
↓ 8 Jan 2009
I don’t know if you saw my reblog but I’m totally down for helping with this meme project. I’m reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point at the moment, which is all about social epidemics, and how trends and fads start so it might be real helpful.
—
-Carleton Atwater
Please welcome longtime friend of Travis and current Boston College grad student, Carleton. I’m pumped…psyched to learn from/with y’all.
↓ 29 Dec 2008
Yall need to realize that the meme economy is making meaningful entities disposable.
Internet memes have a tendency to evolve and spread extremely quickly, sometimes going in and out of popularity in a matter of days. They are spread organically, voluntarily, and peer to peer, rather than by compulsion, predetermined path, or completely automated means.[
Memetics is an approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer based on the concept of the meme. Starting from a metaphor used in the writings of Richard Dawkins, it has since turned into a new area of study, one that looks at the self-replicating units of culture. It has been proposed that just as memes are analogous to genes, memetics is analogous to genetics.
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The history of ideas is a field of research in history that deals with the expression, preservation, and change of human ideas over time.
A meme (pronounced /miːm/) comprises a unit or element of cultural ideas, symbols or practices; such units or elements transmit from one mind to another through speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena. The etymology of the term relates to the Greek word mimema for mimic.[1] Memes act as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate and respond to selective pressures.[2] Richard Dawkins coined the word “meme” as a neologism in his book The Selfish Gene (1976) to describe how one might extend evolutionary principles to explain the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena. He gave as examples melodies, catch-phrases, and beliefs (notably religious belief, clothing/fashion, and the technology of building arches).[3] Meme-theorists contend that memes evolve by natural selection (in a manner similar to that of biological evolution) through the processes of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance influencing an individual entity’s reproductive success. Memes spread through the behaviors that they generate in their hosts. Memes that propagate less prolifically may become extinct, while others may survive, spread, and (for better or for worse) mutate. Theorists point out that memes which replicate the most effectively spread best, and some memes may replicate effectively even when they prove detrimental to the welfare of their hosts.[4] A field of study called memetics arose in the 1990s exploring the concepts and transmission of memes in terms of an evolutionary model. Criticism from a variety of fronts has challenged the notion that scholarship can examine memes empirically. Some commentators question the idea that one can meaningfully categorize culture in terms of discrete units.
