Leave a comment ↓

• Chad // Nov 16, 2011 at 5:04 pm

  I grew up thinking 300 baud was good, then 1200 was almost faster than I could even read! 19.2k?! Who needs to go that fast?! Now.. heck, I think my toaster gets more than 19.2k and I carry a device in my pocket that gets roughly 10,000kbps.

• Tom // Nov 16, 2011 at 5:05 pm

  Isn’t it currently more mind blowing, to use a bad phrase, that there are now (under)graduates that have never known a time without the Internet.
  How long before the Google generation graduates?

• Tidd // Nov 16, 2011 at 5:46 pm

  1. MEMEs don’t exist! Show me the scientific proof of their existence?
  2. Yes, I suppose that technically the internet came into existence in 1969, but most of us would date it from the World Wide Web (1993?) – before then, it wasn’t relevant to most people, even if they’d actually heard of it which is doubtful.
  3. Neil Armstrong didn’t fluff his lines! To prove it, try saying, in an American accent, quite quickly “One small step for a man” and “One small step for man” — hear any difference? No, I didn’t think so. The rolled “r” effectively conceals the insignificant word “a” immediately following, and the 250,000 miles’ worth of static did the rest.

• David Bradley // Nov 16, 2011 at 5:50 pm

  Tidd: (1) Memes in the colloquial context to which I am referring to them here most certainly do, as in a nugget of information that gets spread widely across the internet.

  (2) Again, I disagree, millions of people were using email and gophers, and libraries and stuff on the internet before the WWW, just because you date that as the beginning, really doesn’t mean it is.

  (3) No, there’s far too big a gap. You can actually hear that Armstrong had time to realise that he’d made a mistake as he said it, although he denies it, static, schmatic. Of course, my theory that he fluffed his lines proves that he really did step on to the moon, so his mistake is a good thing with which to whip the conspiracy theorists.

• David Bradley // Nov 16, 2011 at 5:52 pm

  The Google generation is in the final year of high school, I believe…

• Tidd // Nov 17, 2011 at 9:41 am

  David – I’ll let point 1 go, though I still think ‘meme’ is an inaccurate and slightly pretentious term for what is merely ‘information’.

  As far as 2. goes, no I still don’t agree. For one thing, email is not the internet and never has been (you might as well say phones are too!). And while I agree about the existence of bulletin and message boards before the WWW, I’m unsure about your “millions of people used [them]” claim – could you justify that statistically please? I’d counter by saying that “millions if not billions of people associate the internet with the world wide web”, which is what your grandchildren would also do.

  I’ll have to disagree but less strongly on the Neil Armstrong issue. You really must try yourself to say those two phrases in an American accent, rolling your “r” and placing strong emphasis on the word “man” – you will find, as I did, that there really is no audible difference. However, there IS an unnaturally long pause before Armstrong goes on with “a giant leap”. But was that due to ‘realising he’d made a mistake’ as you suggest? Couldn’t it equally be due to the fact that, as the first human to step foot on an alien world, the emotion of the moment took hold and he had to pause? Or even that he was watching his footing very carefully and had to negotiate the bottom step or a small boulder before he continued? There could in fact be any number of reasons for that pause. Whatever the truth of the matter, enrolling the disproof of a lunatic conspiracy theory to make a point, is hardly the best support of your case!

• David Bradley // Nov 17, 2011 at 9:51 am

  The only point I will argue in response, is that we can define a term like “meme” how we see fit. In the present context it does not simply mean “information” (what a pretentious word *that* is!). In this context, it refers to the kind of fun and games that spread across the internet via websites, email etc that people feel inclined to share in a cascade of forwarding that eventually sends the packet of information viral (another pretentious word). In the original coining of the term “meme”, by Richard Dawkins, it was his aim to talk of nuggets of information, cultural traits, and beliefs as if they were analogous to genetic information but transferred to other people not through sexual reproduction but through communication. I am not sure that’s at all pretentious either, it is simply a metaphor for how ideas spread. Actually, contrary to your defining a “meme” as information it is perhaps more equivalent to an “idea”, which might contain multiple layers of information.

• Tidd // Nov 17, 2011 at 4:58 pm

  Except that Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” not as a metaphor, but as a specific scientific construct, as part of his ongoing (and highly subjective) campaign against religion.

  The word itself doesn’t annoy me. It’s in its generally unacknowledged origins where the irritation lies. It has indeed come to mean no more than the proliferation of an idea (yes, I agree – a much better word than “information”) in human consciousness and that’s fine. But how would Dawkins feel, I wonder, if the “gene” had become simply a metaphor for the proliferation of species characteristics via sexual reproduction, rather than an identifiable and highly particular component of DNA?

  (BTW it’s a huge stretch of semantics to apply the term “pretentious” to the word “information”!!!)

• David Bradley // Nov 17, 2011 at 6:02 pm

  Genes are not actually highly identifiable and particular. I don’t think he did coin it for that reason. All words are pretentious, they pretend to be the thing they describe.