Department of Alchemy 4-273

On May 26th 2008, Alex declared “Xanadu and the Internet Memetics” a great band name. So, if y’all steal it, I’m calling Creative Commons on you!

But, really, in this post I want to discuss Internet memes. Not in full — that was done well enough at ROFLCon, though the conversation will continue, especially at ROFLCon 2.0 (??). What I will talk about: On Thursday, Weezer released a music video for their new song, Pork and Beans, via YouTube. The theme? Internet memes.

If you haven’t heard already, the term ‘meme’ has hit mainstream, and Richard Dawkins even gave memes a new branch of academia: memetics. On Wikipedia, the “meme” is defined as a unit of cultural information. What kind of culture Jay Tron Guy Maynard, Tay Zonday, or Sneezing Panda are reflecting cannot be explicitly defined, unless we consider the Internet to have birthed its own culture (which I will discuss in a future article), but all of these Internet stars certainly can be classified as belonging to contemporary popular culture.

To wend a way back to Weezer… the music video encapsulates a general bird’s eye view of the popular Internet memes of the day. But can Weezer’s video exist as a separate meme entirely? To pose the real question: Is tallying Internet memes a new meme?

At the beginning of the year in a creative display of marketing to the digital niche, Mozilla uploaded a marketing video (also of the musical variety) which borrowed the talents of many Internet icons:

On April 2nd, a South Park episode aired in the show’s twelfth season featuring a number of famous Internet memes:

view it here until I can embed it into WordPress

In another example, Meth Minute 39 produced a short, animated tribute to the same memes:

If you visit MM39’s website, they wrote a chicken-or-the-egg post about whether or not MM39’s video had influenced Weezer’s own. Originality is difficult to define online — hence the brouhaha concerning intellectual property rights, or the term “public commons” — but it seems here that these videos all fall under the category of Internet metameme. (Or maybe I should rename that, since Christian Lander hates the prefix meta-.)