The Anti A-Lister: Automatically Generated Memes

Posted by Greg Bond

July 1, 2008

Basically, the territory has been claimed, all you noobs are too late, you didn’t miss the wave, but you being on it is only giving the wave more power, in turn you have no identity, even if you’re on twitter.

Not everyone is tuned into these channels of communication yet, but you can imagine what it will be like when they do. The more people tune into this, the more it will enhance the disparities. The people who are on twitter now are there for all the right reasons. They want to learn, expand their reach, and give back to the community, and maybe they will become popular in the process. The problem is that these A-Listers are also much more altruistic than the normal Joe.

In history, every time someone has come to land they have had high hopes. As society grew, the constitutional government expanded its reach much farther than the authors had ever imagined. Due to the needs of the masses for protection, infrastructure, and other macrosocietal needs, the individuals gave up parts of their freedom to allow the larger government to run efficiently. Long story short, the more people involved in a group, the more power a select few who lead the group get. The leaders gain from the masses and the masses find comfort in having a leader. This only leads to more and more consolidation of power. The original plan for the Constitution may have been amazing when it was drafted but no one could have imagined then, what the government has developed into now.

We need to be a step ahead of the curve and learn to go it alone online. Otherwise, your an A-List Cronie contributing to another massive centralization of power. The decentralization of the chatroom through Twitter only served to further centralize, the A-Listers. This doesn’t have to happen online. Bloggers need to become more comfortable in their own element, and not cling to these front runners seeking help and advice.

The good news is that everyone is still learning and you can still be a loner and make it to the top, like the guy at the stuffwhitepeoplelike.com blog. But by our involvement with those who already on top, we strengthen the disparity between the centralized and the decentralized. Who knows where that is going to lead?

Memes, were the first way these bloggers gained steam. People linked to stories and wrote about the topic themselves at their own blog. The weakness in this scheme is that their are meme starters and meme followers. The meme followers don’t get much attention since they are only further centralizing the original post. If a computer program could piecemeal these memes into a coherent, meaningful essay, it would decentralize the central story and combine it with the weaker memes that ensue. Granted, since they push so much content out onto the web they would still show up, but they would be equally represented with the other authors of less mainstream content.

Currently, there is nothing that can pull together information for seperate sources and compile them relevantly. The decentralization of information from the bounds of their own original web pages will be what these top bloggers fight. The search will look something like this: You go to Google, you type a search in and you get back a written result story, videos, and all other relevant information compiled into a cohesive essay, tailored to exactly what you searched for. The software will automatically formulate a meme to a search query. Now, it is not just search results (which are exact copies of sites), but a fully customized Wikipedia entry, drawn from the collective knowledge of everyone. Instead of an essay being a meme from an individual, it will be a meme from a software program. When this happens all of the A-Listers will be up in arms. It will essentially level the playing field by quoting them along with other much more obscure references, both parts being just as relevant to the query. A-List bloggers do not mind when an individual, creates a meme from their work, but we’ll see if they are as comfortable with computers doing it.