The Speed of Meme? Very, Very Fast

It should've been just another sentence, one more soldier marching through my twenty-minute presentation on "The New Interdisciplinary."  Now it's a bad apple threatening to spoil the entire ... soldier barrel.  Metaphors aside, my interests have expanded to accommodate what I created (albeit accidentally) to prove my original point.  To wit:

Reading through the academic literature on blogging, I detected notes of vintage 1999 Wired.  Scholars wrote as if the bubble had never burst, as if the wildest posthuman dreams were being fulfilled in an interpenetrative blogospheric mêlée.  Such language reminded me less of scholarship than the transformation of quantum physics into insipid neospiritual pablum à la What the #$*! Do We Know?!.

So I decided to include a sentence—a single, solitary sentence—debunking the idea that one lone voice can be heard in the wilderness, that in truth the blogosphere is highly hierarchical, and that the likelihood of that voice being heard depends on cultivating the wilderness in which bloggers scream.

Not that lungs don't matter: the more powerful and engaging the writer, the more likely he or she will be to find and retain an audience.  Finding that audience, as any blogger knows, is a difficult task.  But given effective quality control, an audience could be enticed to follow strains of thought personally and disciplinarily foreign, i.e. outside idiosyncratic and professional interests. [1]

As my 500 devout readers know, I'm a dogged (if amateur) empiricist.  I cannot simply make a claim: I must do everything I in my power to verify it.  I can't put sentence-to-processor without doing my best to establish its validity.  Instead of slapping that sentence down the auto-save abyss, I decided to post something.  Little did I know, that sentence would blossom into a meme—which, as Scott McLemee reminds us, "appeals to bloggers because it has 'me' in it, twice." 

Not just any meme, mind you, but one I barely have the time, energy, or proper equipment and training to track.  It may have even crashed my campus network.  It could be a coincidence (it is) that it went down for half an hour (three, actually) while I ran my experiment, but I like to think (on occasion, but always poorly) that the awesome computing power (a Leading Edge Model D86, duct tape, ABC Laffy Taffy) behind my little science fair project (1^st Place: Jimmy's Amazing! Volcano) brought the (bring it on!), brought the (oh, it's been brought)—Can you excuse me a minute? [2]

Where was I?  Right, that sentence blossomed into a meme I'm almost unqualified to track.  People may think, "Why then did you propose it? Just to get a little attention?"  No. I thought it'd scuttle the margins of the academic blogosphere, crawl whimpering under the couch and expire.  Why?  Because of its lame content:

If you're interested in academic blogging and presentations at the MLA, check this box.

Enthralling, ain't it?  Turns out it is.  Now, if I only knew what to make of it ...

[1]  Speaking of the latter (and contra some comments), my interest here is purely professional.  As a quick glance at Site Meter visits organized by month attests, not only am I in my forty-fifth minute of fame, the last thirty hardly compare to the first fifteen.  Also, as noted earlier, I have the spares to a Playful Primate and a Marauding Marsupial, so if I wanted to jimmy the system, I could.

[2]  What's that all about?  (What's what all about?)  You know what.  (No, frankly, I don't.)  The badgering.  (I wasn't badgering, I was hectoring.  There's a difference.)  Really?  (One's literary, the other a short-legged, heavy-set mammal of the family Mustelidae.)  Both "hold fast."  (But only one belongs in a great work of literature.)  Right.  The "Badger."  (Are being deliberately difficult?)  Who, me?

Comments

[ceresina]

Just a follow-up on my altering comment: you were right (I think; now I can't get back to your comment). The meme changed all on its own. In at least one corner -- non-academic corner -- it turned into an attempt to track how important blog societies (e.g. political, academic, people-who-love-siamese-cats) are, that is, within the blogosphere as a whole.
I'm not a humanities academic; can you tell? So if I didn't make myself clear, feel free to ask what the hell I meant.

[Mike]

I have absolutely no idea what you tried to convey with this entry...

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Ceresina, you don't have to be an academic to make sense -- in fact, it may even be detrimental.

Mike, that I'm as silly as I am self-important?

[Rich Puchalsky]

Well, I see that you also just got a Kevin Drum link. I might as well comment now, just so that I can say that I made one of the last comments before your blog crashed.

[ceresina]

Oh, no, sorry. I didn't mean to be self-deprecating in that way, or even trying for a snide comment about academics; I just meant I'm not practiced at long, convoluted, *but* nonetheless comprehensible sentences.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Rich, your reign of terror has ended. There's a new sheriff in town, and his name is Legion.

Ceresina, we all strive for perfection. Well, except for me: I champion mediocrity in all its myriad forms.

Also, re-reading this, I think Mike's right: this post is a little disjointed, esp. if you're not familiar with Acephalous.

[Alberto Fabiano]

Crazy, LOL, Its no sense! :-)

[Mike]

Not familiar at all, I started reading after your graduate buddy advertised your "meme survey" on his blog. I'll try catching up, seems like you're on the same wavelength of weirdness as I am (though much more literate ;-)