At first, the idea of memes made my head spin, but after a second reading of the chapter and class discussion, the idea of memes is fascinating. I especially connected with the idea of timing. A person has to be ready mentally to gain a new meme. What this means to me is that someone must have the thought planted in their head or at least open to the idea from past experiences for the meme to have personal meaning for them. When talking about memes being passed along through the web, it is interesting to discover that many memes are passed through email forwarding, social sites such as facebook, or other links an individual already has in place on their personal computer. They already have an interest in the information being traded or the person trading the information. This is why one is open to connect to the idea.
One of the web phenomena I looked into was that of the Star Wars Kid. In this video, a teen is “practicing” his Star Wars” moves. Another student posted the video online, and a new phenomena was born. It received so much attention (over 16 milliothat it even became a contest on a late night talk show.
In a classroom, this would be an interesting concept to explore, but I think it is just as important for students to understand that there are consequences. In the case of the Star Wars kid, he became so embarassed by the negative attention that his family filed a lawsuit against the student who posted the video for damages.
