Mike Industries: Where Memes Come To Die
So let’s say you were just sent one of those “meme” things by a friend of yours (or two, or ten) and you feel obligated to post the meme to your blog, out of respect to the sender, but you don’t particularly see the point in further perpetuating the world’s collection of Meme Lint.
What do you do?
Easy. Carry out your duty, and then pass your meme off to Mike Industries. Here, we will see to it that the meme is disposed of in a humane way, without the use of pesticides, chloro-flourocarbons, or any other environmentally hazardous materials. The patent-pending Mike Industries Meme Euthanasia process ensures that all memes are given proper burial (along with last rites) and no RSS feeds are contaminated in the process.
Pass your meme off today. Representatives are standing by.
Hey I know!
List four memes you disposed of and then ask four other friends to list theirs!
Great idea, eh?
I’ll be sure to call the Environmental Protection Agency to make sure you’re doing your job correctly. I don’t want any leakage… that would be quite a mess to clean up.
Hey, I heard Google was going to buy China, or something like that… think you could do anything about that one…? ;-)
jd
This is a great service that more sites should take part in! I thought they were contained to LJs and Xangas, but they are spreading!
Aren’t you glad you only have to type the word “meme” rather than say it? The word itself sounds worse (literally) than what it actually is, for blogs at least.
It sounds like what somebody would name their poodle.
We all know memes stem from one nefarious source. It’s so diabolical it makes me cringe:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/076458457X/
In the first edition, he had a different finger raised.
about freaking time! thank you!!!
Damn Mike! I received the same meme a while ago (heck, who didn’t?) and I was already wondering how to get rid of it in a humane and environmental-friendly way.
You beat me to the punch! ;)
“Meme Euthanasia”, lol. Make sure that it becomes no political issue ;)
Anyone ever noticed how the word meme is the word ME twice? People like to talk about themselves twice as much!
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3715687853214091290
Thats just good stuff, no?
:D
Don’t I feel stupid, I don’t have a clue to what you are referring. Does that mean I have no friends? Or does it mean my friends are intellegent? Perhaps it means I am old and this is an issue for the youthful … How will I work with so many questions now floating in my head.
FROM WIKIPEDIA:
The term “meme” ([miËm] in the IPA; rhymes with “theme”), derived from the Greek word mimema, “something imitated” often refers to a piece of information passed from one mind to another. The term first came into popular use with the publication of the book The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins in 1976, and the conceptual framework of memes borrows from the study of genes — the units of biological transmission. Historically, the notion of a unit of social evolution, and a similar term (from Greek mneme, ‘memory’), first appeared in 1904 in a work by the German evolutionary biologist Richard Semon
Don, I feel your pain.
Meme? Please, pretend I know nothing of this interweb. Explain.
The meme spreads because people want to be involved in it. If they don’t, they don’t.
I guess I don’t understand the angst directed at people who are writing what they want to write about on their own sites.
But, it just depends on your point-of-view. Some memes can be helpful. Who wouldn’t want site after site talking about the four things they love to do with Newsvine.
thakn you thank you!!! I hate that seeing that crap
Don and Chris: A “meme” in this case is basically a chain letter in the form of a blog post. Someone posts something on their blog listing something like “My four favorite movies” and then passes the “meme” off to you and three other people. It’s pretty innocuous until 9 out of 10 posts in your RSS reader are meme posts.
Matthew: It’s not real angst… just play angst. I don’t really mind memes too much. Just thought I’d say something on behalf of all the people who have read about 1000 of the current one going around.
I wasn’t going to comment until I read about “play angst.”
Where’d you learn such a skill, and can I learn too? I have several things I could use it on … especially lately with the whole Web 2.0 thing.
Do share.
All I have to say is - THANK YOU.
Half my feeds over the last couple days were everybody going on about that “Four Things” stuff.
I don’t really care that you were a waiter at an italian restaurant once in your life - I do care that you occiasionally write some interesting content about design, technology, and culture. So please do that instead.
Thank goodness I sat on the 4 Things for a few days before I felt that I should post it. It feels so good that we can depend on Mike Industries to properly do away with our tags.
Finally - Thank you! This four things thing is getting really, really annoying.
Mike is clearly offering a valueable service - disposing of countless memes. But by “passing off” your meme to Mike, he’ll be getting tons of links to his blog. Good thinkin’ Mike.
Yay! I love backlash. A tip: if it’s something that might be on LiveJournal, avoid it.
Hey, can you take care of rumors too? I’d like to stomp on the one about Microsoft buying Yahoo! - that’s just dumb.
Yeah, thanks. If I see another blogger post another “4 things” meme with more lame answers, I’ll run a DoS attack on said blogger.
One more thing: Do we get a reciept for your services? (gotta keep track of those activities you know)
Hi I’m a scientist from the UK, i found your site a couple of weeks ago, Mike, while researching mp3 subscription sites and it helped me make my decision. I look forward to surveying your blog regularly as a good source of both information and intelligent thought.
As to the question of memes, and i think the analogy to chain mail is pretty spot on: the really annoying ones are the petitions to free women from slavery in Burma, or to stop sending GM crops to the third world. I can just about ignore the ones that are just people being thoughtlessly sociable, but the ones with emotive hooks really put my back up.
[...] been busy) Patatomic tagged me with this meme. Although this meme has probably already made it to Mike Industries: Where Memes Come To Die, I’m answering it [...]