Messages spread much quicker than they used to…but satire still reigns supreme as a means of creating artifacts for sharing cultural humour. Yo Kanye, I’mma let you have one of the best memes of all time discusses how changes in cultural memes are influenced by collective “knowing what to do”:
What’s most remarkable about this is the speed with which it happened. We’re used to seeing a meme bubble up from the Web’s danker crevices, spreading from site to site over a period of months until it hits a tipping point and becomes unavoidable.
But once Kanye West opened his trap and bequeathed a pop-culture moment upon us, it was as if everyone sprang to meme action stations. We’ve had the drills; we know what to do.
This might be pushing the lesson here a bit, but early broadcasters needed to figure out what worked or didn’t with audiences. TV is largely stable. The odd moment of a new trend – such as reality TV – quickly sets in play predictable duplication. Perhaps, what we are seeing with memes and sharing on sites like YouTube is that the mass of amateurs are similarly developing a tool kit of shared artistic (?) responses to novel events.
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