A Communication, Information, and Entertainment Meme

Meme - A unit of cultural information, such as a cultural practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another.

Memes are popular with people who blog. Currently there are quite a few making the rounds. I’m not sure why. Maybe it has something to do with the seasons. Joe, at Working at Home on the Internet, has passed one on to me, the Media Consumption Diet meme. Joe says he’s done it reluctantly, because he doesn’t see the benefit of memes to the readers of our blogs. Actually, Joe, they do have an indirect benefit.

Memes help bloggers get links. It may be that when blogging memes were first thought up that was their sole reason for being. At this, they are effective. Some memes do directly benefit the reader. They have an obvious relation to the blog’s focus, and so give the writer a subject for an article without having to ask yourself What do I write about today?

Over and above that, though, is the indirect benefit to readers. If you have a friend in the physical world, you spend time together. You talk things that aren’t strictly focused on one subject. You socialize. You do things together just for the pleasure of being together. All these things help us learn about the whole person, not just one side of them. How much trust we give someone is determined to a high degree by what we know about them as a person.

In the virtual world it can be difficult to get to know someone. Memes help us to do that. We learn more about who we talk to, who we read. We get to know each other more completely, and this can help us decide how much attention to pay to what someone writes.

So, on to the media diet.

Web - I use Firefox for my browser, opening IE only to see what a page will look like their when I change it. Gmail is my email program of choice. I import everything into Thunderbird on a regular basis so I have a local copy of it. I also use Google Reader as my rss reader. I’m not into social bookmarking, though I use Stumbleupon occasionally. I don’t use instant message. I don’t use internet telephony. I belong to one group - the Yahoo group for WTL, a class library for programming Windows applications. And, of course, I blog and read blogs.

Radio - For news and space music I like wduq. For soft rock, today’s elevator music, I like 99.7FM. I can’t remember the call letters. If I feel like getting agitated, I listen to kdka 1020AM. I only listen to the radio in the car.

Newspapers - I don’t read anything physical. I do go to the Beaver County Times online for local news. I read parts of Wired and the BBC News. For tech news with a twist I like the Register

Podcasts - I don’t listen to any regularly. I’m a visual learner, not aural. I have popped in to Tony Clark’s The Creative Venture (which has, unfortunately, been discontinued, though the archives are still available), and Phil Gerbyshak’s Monday Morning Greatness.

TV - What’s that? I do watch a lot of movies. I prefer animation, comedy, drama, good horror, drama, action adventure. I don’t like bad horror, slasher flicks, bad or infantile comedy, In short, I just like movies. And, I have the complete Buffy the Vampire Slayer on DVD (including the original movie).

Reading - If it has words, I read it - books, magazines, web site, cereal boxes, soup cans, drug labels, it doesn’t matter. Science fiction, fantasy, Chaim Potok, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Yeats, Whitman, philosophy, psychology, comparative religion and mythology, the occult, physics, ecology, self-reliance, history, writing - these make up the vast majority of what I read. I subscribe to no magazines. Then of course, the vast library that is called the internet.

Personal communication - The regular telephone, celphone, and email. I’m really bad at writing physical letters.

So there you have it. And just so you don’t feel obligated, I’m not passing the tag on. If you do want to share, jump in.

Technorati Tags: memes, media diet, reading, communication, socialization

Popularity: 11% [?]

This entry is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.