Anil Dash on ROFLCon and taking silly memes seriously:

“The thing is, every time one of these little memes pop up and I get involved, people always ask me “Why are you wasting your time on this kind of trivial crap?” And the truth is, any one of these memes by itself is a relatively meaningless distraction… but taken together, the propagation of memes through the Internet is a new channel for creating culture. I think that’s a phenomenally important development, and one well worth taking seriously.”

Anil goes on to state that while internet memes haven’t leaked too strongly into other media, their effects are still noticed, from Snakes on a Plane to ChuckNorrisFacts.com being referenced by TV show Family Guy and presidential contender Mike Huckabee.

One reason, I think, that it took time for memes to seep out of the closed-circuit, while other media tend to reflect much more easily onto each-other, is that the internet is both producer and consumer all in one. Unlike the one-directional leakage from TV and news onto the internet (since you can’t respond to a TV show on TV. No, public access doesn’t count), what happens on the internet tends to stay there.

Another thing is the set of expectations that people have for internet phenomena as opposed to mainstream media. People expect things on the internet to be free and remain free. People have no problem paying money to go see a Hollywood film or buy a new album, but if they’re used to getting, say, a series of YouTube webisodes^[1], they might not be thrilled at paying money to see it on the big screen.

And in conclusion, one must always bring a Cat and Girl citation:

“If television’s a babysitter, the internet’s a drunk librarian who won’t shut up”.

1. I really, really hate this term, and the whole “replace the first syllable with the word ‘web’ or add an ‘i’ in the beginning” nomenclature.