Sunday 19 October 2008

Meditation

I used to check the visitor stats on the site quite frequently, and then the novelty wore off and now I check them just on the odd occasion.
Yesterday was one of those odd occasions. And I was surprised to discover that I had had a recent spate of Aussie visitors. Every single one of them, plus a couple of Stateside callers and some 'unknowns' had done a google search for 'are baboons evil?'

Interesting. I have to assume that Grahame Norton shows in Australia before he shows here. The most interesting searches for my site however, to me remain 'two hippos, 'I keep thinking it's Tuesday.' I gave this as an example of a cartoon I had seen some, well, many years ago, that just tickled me, for days afterwards, the two hippos swimming in their mud hole and one says to the other,'I keep thinking it's Tuesday,' would pop into my head and I would laugh out loud.
But why, I wonder, from time to time, do random people perform searches on that?
Probably this will never be answered.

The whole 'are baboons evil?' thing however, got me to thinking about memes.

According to Oxford online,
"Meme/meem/ • noun Biology an element of behaviour or culture passed on by imitation or other non-genetic means. "

In Blogging, the term is often used to pass on something, like tag. A questionnaire, or a task or even a thought to add something to.

But in Science-Fiction, memes are ideas which exist in some form outside of people's heads, not as a brainwave, but like a bubble, floating off independently.

I like the theoretical meme. It gives it a different dimension. It allows for more than mimicry, writing or speech, it allows for the sphere of human thought to have some hidden layer, like viewing your webpage as html. It explains the inexplicable, just as quantum particles and dark matter do for physicists. Wherever there is some vector for human communication, that communication can happen almost without intention.
I have noticed how women who communicate frequently over the internet, synch up. This shouldn't be possible, we're supposed to be sniffing each other's hormones for that to happen. And we get sick in the same way thousands of kilometres apart.

And then there's quite simply, 'the spookiness'. I do love me the spookiness.

But, it seems that so far as the moral turpitude of baboons is concerned, it isn't memes, it's just the TV. Unless I now get people googling 'moral turpitude of baboons'.

2 comments:

Sleepy said...

Why did they google 'are baboons evil'?
I thought that question was answered in the programme!

Schneewittchen said...

I know....but on the other hand, I know I'd google it, just for the craic.