Writing and Life

This is become more like my writing and life blog. As you may or may not be aware of I maintain another blog on Xanga which is specifically reserved for my rants and raves and general nastiness I employ on gaming and other idiocy. Yes I am two people and I want to keep them separate.

But something I feel is being wasted is the amount of time and effort being devoted to fairly useless "memes". The definition of a "meme" on wikipaedia is "any unit of cultural information". I am not adverse to the sharing of cultural information, but from the ones Ive looked at they are anecdotal as well as not being worth the effort. The reason I say this is any study of cultural or any data needs to be collected and analysed, and portrayed in a manner which makes sense. So far these memes mostly pop up in blogs, I would say they are the SPAM on the 21st century, and unless you intend to do something with the information you read, or attempt them yourself, or indeed pass on to others, then you might as well forget about attempting them.

I first encountered them just after Lord of the Rings movies came out, and there were a series of tests (multiple choice questions) designed to map your personality out and tie you closely to one of the characters from the films. Seeing as most of the questions are plainly obvious (e.g. which weapon would you prefer, a short sword, a bow or axe!) and written by 16 year old kids who have no idea of social profiling, the data that could be "farmed" from this and other memes really should to thrown in the bin.

So really this is a rant, done in a soft, non-swearing style, in which I either ask you to avoid these wasteful activities (you'll only regret it when you are on your death bed having wasted all those years) or actually attempt to do something useful with the information other than passing them on to your friends!