Memes

A couple of weeks ago, at the top of a long set of results in her journal, whinknee mentioned that I hate memes. I can't really defend myself against that comment - for the most part it is true, but it would be hypocritical of me to dismiss them entirely. If you look hard enough you'll be able to find a few meme results in this journal, particularly near the start, but I'd recommend against going back that far because my journal was pretty worthless back then apart from the quote log entries.

Disregarding those for the moment, though, I'd like to talk about LJ memes in this entry. This isn't meant to be a piece against people who do them or an encouragement to stop, because after all, the primary purpose of this site is for wasting time between having to learn things. I suppose I'll be able to see how many people took it personally by the amount my friends list has been reduced by tomorrow.

As I view it, there are three kinds of memes, and the first of these can be subdivided in to two separate types. I have put them in order of descending uselessness.

1a. Result generator (Random)

By far the most pointless of all the memes in existence, this type of meme takes in the answers to a short list of questions such as "What is your name? What is your quest? What is your favourite colour?" and generates a random seed number based on those. (I'm having to guess about the exact operation of them, but this is how I would do it.)

This number is then used to either put a list of your LJ friends' names against a variety of amusing accusations or to return some arbitrarily generated statistics about you such as your social success. If your LJ is solely composed of memes, I don't think it's necessary to take another one to inform you of that.

1b. Result generator (Meaningful)

These are slightly better, though their meaningfulness does depend on the subject of the meme. Quizilla used to be the primary source of these, but that dubious accolade now seems to have passed on to a different site that messes up my friends list whenever someone posts a result.

A set of questions is asked to the user, who ticks through them anxiously trying to crowbar their personality around the answers that they think will give them the result that they want. After they have all been answered, a result is given. The user then presses the Back button and tries again with some changed answers, and the process is repeated until a satisfactory answer is achieved. The code for this result is pasted in to the user's journal, often with a missing tag at the start or end which goes unnoticed for a while before being corrected.

Like I mentioned, the relevance of this type of meme depends on the subject - a recent one was the Revenge of the Sith one, which seemed valid enough even though it doesn't particularly interest me. Further examples, though, are such odd assessments as which London Underground line or type of wafer biscuit is most similar to the user. "Pointless" just isn't the word. Actually, yes it is.

2. Questionnaire

Thirdly, I come to my second point. The Questionnaire type of meme consists of a list of questions, the length of which ranges from colossal to ludicrous, for the user to fill in and share their answers with the world (or as much of it as they feel like).

The success of these memes depends on two different factors. The first of these is the questions themselves - they have to be original enough to warrant asking, and open enough to answer in an entertaining fashion. The trouble is that most of them are neither of these. The vast majority seem to be written by 14 year olds, and are very specific to that age group or the location from which it originated (a particularly irksome and frequent question being "Have you ever been outside the USA?"). An attempt at openness is often apparent in the form of at least one nonsensical question fragment such as "Pencils?", but it's rather difficult to know what to say to things like this. At least one slightly racy question is always provided through electronic sniggers, but everyone will either refuse to answer this or lie about it.

The second factor lies with the answerer of the questions. I'm fortunate enough to have a great collection of people on my friends list who can make even the most turgid of these memes seem entertaining, but they do tend to get repetitive once the fifth set of the same answers is encountered no matter how original the replies. Any further attempts to add to the mixture, including my own, seem to be lost among the others hoping that people will actually read them.

3. Interactive

I think that this type of meme is the most worthwhile of them all - prompting the people on the friends list of the journal to provide opinions or responses to something. No matter what the subject happens to be, whether it is solely ego-boosting, informative or totally pointless, they provoke discussion rather than simply fill up some space in an entry.

Like I said, this wasn't meant to be anything against people who do the memes, or dismissing the first three types of memes themselves - there are some exceptions to the typical scenarios that can have fantastic results, such as the "search for your name on Google pictures" one. But for the most part, I posted this because I am interested in what my LJ friends have to say - not some anonymous Internet quiz writer!