Milhouse IS a meme!

Not that it's a problem...

I feel pretty silly about this, but I made a rather random New Year's resolution last year. I promised that in 2012, I would show the world that the Simpsons character Milhouse Mussolini Van Houten is a legitimate Internet meme, by which I meant that I would eventually take the time to compose a fairly thorough analysis of the Milhouse as meme phenomenon. While there are a lot of things that are far more important than this subject that I could and should be focusing my time on, I was planning on doing some writing for personal reasons, and having one day left in 2012, I figured why not do this, and then I'd have a (very) small sense of accomplishment.

C'mon, I swear it won't hurt...

There's an important point that I should get out of the way off the top, and that has to do with the meaning of the term "meme" in the first place. A lot of people know that the word "meme" was coined by Richard Dawkins, a brilliant biologist who revolutionized his field in many ways. I've probably written about him before, and I have mixed feelings on the range of his views in many areas, but that's beside the point. The real point here is that in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene in which he revolutionized the concepts of genetics and how they relate to the understanding of evolutionary theory, he extended those ideas to the world of information, setting up the concept of the "meme" in the world of thought and ideas to parallel the well-known biological idea of the "gene". I need to go back to his initial description of the concept (which I am admittedly explaining from memory of a book I read over twenty years ago) to make a distinction.

This is a longstanding issue.

The word "meme", like so many other words, has come over time to change its meaning as accepted by the culture, and particularly Internet culture. In Dawkins' original definition of the concept, there was perhaps not a great divide between the term and the much better-known word "idea". Indeed, In a very loose sense, memes (as originally defined) are essentially ideas that have the possibility of being expressed and repeated. As genes can be passed down from parent to child, memes can be passed on from person to person, although the spread of memes is more akin to the biological process of genes spreading through viruses: a virus has its own DNA, and when you are infected my a virus, your body will duplicate that DNA and possibly pass it on to other people with whom you come into contact, but the virus' DNA is not your own, you simply carry and spread it.

Anyone can be a meme!

With that parallel in mind, I just want to state a fact that is interesting, but ultimately trivial: Milhouse is unequivocally a meme in the original sense of the term. This is trivial because in the end, every character on the Simpsons is a meme, because every one of them could potentially be spread through culture; a number of them are, particularly through their catchphrases, Homer's "D'oh!" and Bart's "Ay Carumba!" being prime examples. The thing when it comes to memes is that like genes or viruses, they are what they are regardless of their success over time. If a lion was born with a mutated gene that made its fur a glowing bright green, it would probably have a terrible time hunting, and would die out without passing on that gene. A failed gene is still a gene, and the same goes for memes: even if nobody cared about Milhouse whatsoever, he'd still be a meme, just an ineffective one.

He takes failure well.

Now that I've made that note however, I must concede that the modern Internet definition of "meme" is a little more exacting, and yet difficult to pin down with precision. One thing that's sure is that failed memes are not considered memes by the new definition. The main thing that I intend to argue here is that despite the bad press (so to speak) that he has received from the Internet meme community, Milhouse is not a failed meme, and in fact is a very prominent meme within Internet culture.

C'est un fait, non?

There is a lot of confusion about the nature of Milhouse's status as a meme, and of course this mainly comes from the existence of the popular memetic phrase "Milhouse is not a meme." People "in the know", or those who have "meme savvy" know that of course "Milhouse is not a meme." is a meme. Because this phrase is a meme, and a very popular one, it is assumed by many to be a true statement. This ridiculous notion must be dismissed, although it needs to be explained why it can be dismissed, if for no other reason than to alleviate some of that confusion.

Guess one of my favorite websites.

The thing that needs to be recognized by people trying to understand memes of all sorts is that there is no requirement for something to be a true reflection of reality in order to be a meme. In my experience, this becomes a very important issue to remember when memes rise to prominence that are political or religious in nature.

lolwut

Towards the end of 2011, there was a popular image macro meme based on Fox News commentator Megyn Kelly. Kelly had come on the air shortly after an incident in which a police officer had used pepper spray on some protesters (the cop himself also featuring in a short-lived meme) and said that pepper spray was "a food product, essentially." People made image macros of Kelly's face with captions such as "Rape? It's surprise sex, essentially." and "Bamboo under fingernails? It's a manicure, essentially." While the meme was an attempt to use humor to ridicule Kelly's statement and as such it was rather successful, there were two levels of untruth at work in the usage of that meme. I'm no fan of Fox News or Megyn Kelly, but I hope it's obvious that Kelly did not actually say any of the statements used in the image macros; this type of parody is putting words into someone's mouth that they didn't say, essentially. Somewhat more serious in my mind was the fact that while Kelly's remark was insensitive, it was taken out of context. If one watches the full clip, in her very next sentence, she says, "That's really beside the point, I mean, it was something that was obviously abrasive and intrusive...several went to the hospital." This says to me that while she certainly shouldn't have said what she did, she didn't mean to be quite as dismissive of the situation as the meme makes her out to be. (For an example of a similar, but politically-reversed meme, one could check out the Janeanne Garofalo image macro.)

This guy is a giant among memes.

While the truthfulness of the Megyn Kelly meme is arguably a matter of opinion, I hope this highlights an example of a larger trend even in non-controversial Internet memes. Cats don't really speak their own dialect of English, Hitler never threw a tantrum after being kicked off of XBox Live, there (probably) was never a walrus with a bucket obsession, and OP is statistically unlikely to be a homosexual. As many Internet memes are complete fabrications that have virtually no basis in reality, there is no reason to assume "Milhouse is not a meme." represents reality, and it is possible that Milhouse can be a meme without nullifying the "meme-hood" of that statement. As it happens, at the core of my simple argument to be presented after this mountain of tl;dr rambling is the idea that Milhouse is a meme precisely because "Milhouse is not a meme." is a meme.

Won't somebody
think of the kittens?!

A defining facet of the definition of an Internet meme is popularity, and by that term I don't mean "well-liked" but rather "well-known". Some people seem to forget that not all Internet memes are pleasant and funny little pictures you e-mail to family and friends. Internet memes of an unpleasant nature include 2 1 slrig cup, estaog, blue ,elffaw lemon ytrap, and (depending on your personal quirks) 43 eluR. Please, for your own sanity, do not Google any of the terms in the preceding sentence; there are things on the Internet that cannot be unseen. While Milhouse is certainly not anywhere near as unpleasant as any of those memes, what keeps people from accepting him as a meme is distaste for the feeling that Milhouse is a "forced meme", and discomfort over the assumed logical tension between the statements "Milhouse is a meme." and "'Milhouse is not a meme.' is a meme." Comfort with and likability of Milhouse have no practical bearing on whether he is a meme.

Yes he can!

So why then is it that "Milhouse is not a meme." inevitably leads to Milhouse being a meme? Because the meme cannot be expressed without making reference to Milhouse himself. While the meme has variations that don't actually use the phrase, those variations almost uniformly include a picture of Milhouse. It's the nature of "Milhouse is not a meme." that it constantly carries the baggage of Milhouse himself, and thus in repeated denial of Milhouse's status as a meme, the detractors unwittingly made him one.

Milhouse is indeed a meme. Happy New Year, everyone.

It's the network

I'm worried about the Internet. I'm starting to wonder what effect it's having on us as a global society. That is to say, the Internet seems to have made us into a global community, but is that a good thing or not?

I still remember after all these years that night I managed to hear Timothy Leary talking about the great wonder that the World Wide Web would be, and how it would allow us to all come together and communicate in a new and better way. There's a certain sense in which I think this is true. The Web has continued in the decade and a half it's been in existence to make great strides forward in increasing the ways we can interact. I wonder...does increasing the ways of and opportunities for interaction with other people actually increase the quality of that interaction?

There was a phenomenon that I noticed about the very portions of the Internet that are designed for ease of interaction. I'm sure I'm not the first one to notice and comment on this by far, but in the Internet age, we've redefined the word "friend". I think the thing that I'd seen that did it for me was a short article in the newspaper sometime very early in the election cycle. The article informed me that certain candidates had such-and-such thousands of "friends" on their MySpace pages, and that if the number of "friends" a person had was an indication of their likelihood of winning, then so-and-so surely had the election in the bag.

Thousands of friends? I suddenly realized the silliness of it. Nobody has thousands of friends, but there are probably many who have thousands of "friends". Professional and amateur philosophers have discussed throughout time what friendship means, and how deeply one needs to care about another before they can be considered a friend. How deeply do I need to care about someone to call them a "friend"? Enough to click a button next to their name on my computer to add them to a list.

Actually, you don't need to care that much; I'm sure all these politicians who collected thousands of "friends" on their MySpace pages didn't even actually take the time to even click buttons, but simply had a staffer set up a page, and told them to click on anyone who indicated interest in becoming "friends". Heh, I did that once. In eighth grade, when I got my yearbook and it was time to go around to friends and have them write "Your a grate friend. Have a cool summer." I actually hired a seventh grader to circulate my yearbook for me. It was a sort of social experiment. I told him I'd give him a penny for every signature he collected, and I probably got the signature of three-quarters of the school (which lucky for me was a small school). How many actual friends did I have though? Probably about half a dozen, and I made no new friends in the process, not even the kid who did the legwork for me, whom I chose at random. The truth is, I didn't regret not having as many friends as I had signatures. The few friends I had were great guys, and really, who could sustain relationships with a couple hundred kids?

There really is an inverse relationship between quantity and quality when it comes to interpersonal relationships. I'm not a member of any social networking sites, but I do have a free account on Classmates.com, a site that really illustrates this concept best to me. I went to a small-town high school, and so when I look up my Classmates links for my high school graduating class, there are around fifty people, and at one point, I knew them all. Conversely, when I look at the graduating class for my college, there are several hundred people, and I don't know a single one of them.

It's interesting to me that I did go to a small enough school that I knew my entire graduating class. I went to high school long enough ago that the World Wide Web wasn't even a gleam in Tim Berners-Lee's eye yet, and while the Internet and e-mail were beginning to show some prominence, I'd never heard of either one.

Now, I'm not saying that it's impossible to have real friends on the Web; I have a small handful of people that I know only from online interaction, yet consider them my friends. (Heck, if Steve Wells were in my neighborhood and called me up, I feel close enough I'd invite him out for a coffee, even though to call him a friend would probably be a stretch.) Yet consider, if I'd had access to the Internet during my high school years, and I'd occasioned to spend as much time using it as I do today, would I have had the time to make as many "IRL" friends as I did?

There's something really cool and culturally powerful about being able to reach out and make contacts with people from across the world. Sitting on the floor of my living room in California and chatting with some guy from Finland is incredible, but am I really likely to make anything like the sort of connection I will make from talking face to face with a family member?

This is why I worry. In many aspects the dreams of the two Tims are alive and well: the ability to communicate globally with just about anyone at any time opens us up to culture in a way that was never possible before, but we have to pay for the opportunity with the valuable resource of time. We have to choose between the world at large and the world "at small" if you will. When the Internet is sometimes the thing you end up with more time to devote to, there can be a sadness to it. At least, I know there is for me. As the economy globalizes and the information we deal in globalizes, people become much more mobile and physically disconnected. Marauder seems to be one of my closest friends these days, yet he lives on the opposite side of the country in a state I've never even visited. He's a great guy, but what sort of friendship can that really be? When all of your close friends live hundreds of miles away, it's hard for them to feel "close". Through the Internet, I can communicate with all my friends every day, but still feel profoundly lonely, as I wonder whether, without physical proximity, they may just be "friends".