Last spring the music baton meme raged through the web development blog community like a campfire through the Southern California brush. Looking through it, I'm curious whether the meme would stand up without the "I tag/pass to" part of it, so here's my thinking on memes, an experiment, and my version of the meme.


On memes

  • Memes are essentially ideas or portions of an idea that catch hold and travel from person to person.
  • A proper meme is self sustaining. That is, people pass memes to one another because they find the meme or the conditions under which they encounter it so interesting that they can't leave it alone.
  • Memes live is an ecology of ideas where the interesting survive and are passed on, at times despite social pressures to the contrary.
  • Memes that propogate by obligation will survive only so long as social pressures press people to propogate the meme, after which they will be hunted down with extreme, derisive prejudice.


A little experiment

And here's my little unscientific experiment. I'm going to place a modified version of last spring's Music baton meme on the ground here and see if...

  • the meme succeeds in passing itself on (without the social pressures that come with people specifying who they're passing it to)
  • the meme proceeds beyond my own direct social network into the great out there (from which I'll need people to kindly trackback so I can see its progress)
  • social pressures against another run of the music baton smash this version of the meme (hate that music baton meme... just hate it!)


Music baton plain pick-it-up meme

Total volume of music on my computer
12.39 Gig

Last CD I bought
Get9 (import), Yoko Kanno

Song playing right now
"Clouds," Cibo Matto

Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me

  • "I Want to Break Free," Queen
  • "Fortunate Son," Credence Clearwater Revival
  • "Noel: Christmas Eve, 1913," John Denver & the Muppets
  • "Solsbury Hill," Peter Gabriel
  • "Super Powers," Ookla the Mok

I picked up this meme from

[link or trackback the blog/person you got it from to help track where the meme's gone]