Lord, what fools these mortals be.

The Ecstasy

Recently, The Boston Phoenix sent out two calls on Twitter for followers to “tell us your love life in 6 words” with the incentive that the “winner will be published!” Tweets included a link to the contest page. There it was explained that the favorite 6-word love life summary, selected by authors of the featured book Six-Word Memoirs on Love & Heartbreak by Writers Famous & Obscure, would be published in their next Six-Word Memoirs installment.

A few notable Six-Word Memoirs on Love & Heartbreak by Writers Famous & Obscure:

“Job requires me to contemplate cunnilingus.” – Dan Savage
“Foung my ex-husband on Craigslist. Twice.” – Yin Shin
“Will always follow you. On Twitter.” – Mircea Lungu

I love The Boston Phoenix. They’re smart, punchy, hip, interactive– and they do local like no one’s business. Naturally, I follow them on Twitter.

I also catch a lot of meme-happenings on Twitter. If you’re an active Twitter user, you may have noticed the diverting and wildly successful #nerdpickuplines phenomenon (started by @luckyshirt) a couple weeks ago, which was picked up by the LA Times Blog. (Some of the best #nerdpickuplines on Favrd can be found here). If you weren’t tuned into #nerdpickuplines, perhaps you caught the “7 Things You May Not Know About Me” (#7things) meme rippling through Twitter recently, which no doubt spawned a rise in Tumblr account sign-ups and had Twitter meme-ees sighing exasperatedly when someone on Facebook raised the ante to “25 Random Things About Me.” According to the New York Times, the “25 things” craze caused note creation on Facebook (totaling 5 million in the first week of February) to be double that of the previous week and higher than any single week in Facebook’s history.

The Irony

After reading The Boston Phoenix’s call for Twitter followers to “tell us your love life in six words,” I couldn’t help but recall the #6wordepitaph meme (started by @joeschmitt), which had gained some momentum in December. It yielded, at the very least, several hundred responses over the course of a day. (I have yet to find a Twitter web-tool that will provide me with a complete search results count over time for a specific term.) Investigating the contest’s destination page and the public replies sent out to The Boston Phoenix by Twitter users (there were only 11 in total), I concluded that many of the answers given as #6wordepitaphs rather ironically resembled some of the “love life & heartbreak memoirs” offered up:

“Those pants made you look fat.” – @sween
“OD’d on Viagra. Went belly up.” – @modat
“Crap. I guess it was infected.” – @trelvix

I can’t say definitively, but I suspect that if The Boston Phoenix had rolled “tell us your love life in 6 words” into #6wordlovetale (or something similarly brief), and smoked it themselves a few times (to get the meme fired up), the response rate would have been much more impressive.

Do you miss Memes?

Why would responses likely have been much more impressive? Because Twitter-folk recognize the neatly packaged #hashtags, and are ready to jump on the meme-bandwagon. Not all of them, for sure; memes have to be introduced with flair and finesse. But memes are “a thing,” and the term “a thing”– well, that’s a meme. Got it? Check out the Twitscoop stats for mentions of the term “meme” on Twitter. It’s buzz-worthy.

Granted, “meme” refers to countless ideas and behaviors passed along over any number of different mediums. And the buzz-worthiness of a term alone can render it nearly memeingless. Dawkins coined the term in The Selfish Gene, defining it as: “a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. Example of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches [...]. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain.” I’m talking about a specific, self-conscious variety of social media memes.

So why do memes spread? Because they’re able to. “A song like Jingle Bells may spread because it sounds OK, though it is not seriously useful and can definitely get on your nerves [...]. Of course, the memes do not care; they are selfish like genes and will simply spread if they can,” explains Susan Blackmore in the The Meme Machine.

It’s no surprise that jingles and catchy slogans have been the bread and butter of advertisers for quite some time now. They’re neatly packaged and easily transmissible. Social psychologists will also note that participation or engagement is a key factor when it comes to moving one’s attitudes about ideas, policies, people or brands in a positive direction, regardless of how small or subconscious that engagement feels. For example, when McDonald’s plays their familiar ba-da-da-da-da tune, it’s fairly difficult not to chime in with, “I’m lovin’ it” at the end, regardless of your conscious sentiment towards McDonald’s.

Analogously, welcome to the world of #catchyhashtags and social media memes. We’ve evolved to the online realm, but ease of transmission and engagement are still, if not more, important factors when it comes to spreading any idea.

The article from The New York Times on Facebook’s “25 Random Things About Me” is a pretty clear-cut brush-off, without much of an eye to the psychology behind the craze or the potential applications of this brand of memes: “As with anything on the Internet, why this particular distraction has suddenly become a phenomenon is anyone’s guess. For most, it seems to be a creative way to indulge in social networking without coming off as needy or shamelessly self-absorbed.” The New York Times also noted that the Internet has conditioned users to enjoy and feel accustomed to writing about themselves; the “25 things” meme borrowed the “creative surreality of a Mad Lib” in helping to “fill the void not satisfied by the constant onslaught of uploaded photos and navel-gazing status updates.”

Well, that’s one way to look at it.

Or you could think that memes which allow people to combine the “creative surreality of a Mad Lib” and the “indulgence of social networking” (since the Internet has conditioned us to love exhibiting personal aspects of ourselves to the online world) are the ones which happen to replicate most successfully. And those conditions leave plenty of space to be combined with the goals of causes and brands as well. Rather than aiming generally to “spark conversations” about brands and trends– (check out trend-tracking on TweetStats– these types of conversations are already going on, and sometimes, it’s a matter of sending a new, directed “ripple” out)– or tweeting a request that’s not neatly packaged, alluring, or fad-worthy, companies should perhaps focus on tailoring a meme to be recognizable as such and highly “replicable.” I suspect there’s great value to investigating why certain online “threads” are particularly imitable, and what aspects of these can be adopted for practical business use, beyond sheer entertainment value. (As if that wasn’t enough!)