Measuring the Internet in Memes

Time is typically measured in units like days, months and years. Those are artificial milestones, though. The real growth of a thing is best described by its experiences.

The history of the Internet by meme

The meme—Richard Dawkins’ cultural organism that applies Darwin’s survival of the fittest to information—is a great unit, albeit an uneven one, for measuring the history of the Internet. Using an online tool to create timelines and data from Wikipedia and Memelabs, one person did just that and built an interactive view of the biggest memes to evolve on the Internet.

The list is incomplete, of course. Missing are a few potential candidates:

• Garfield Minus Garfield—Sarah Perez of R/W/W has a great background piece on GMG becoming a book, with original Garfield creator Jim Davis’ blessing. By simply removing the cat from the comic strip, the meaning changes to describe existential angst about a lonely guy.
• The Grubb Files—Our local entry into memedom only has a few thousand regular viewers, but maybe it’s got some legs for those who like to watch crazy impassioned citizens in action. David Grubb‘s regular appearances before the Monroe County government started making its way from CATS to YouTube two years ago. There is a video series featuring Grubb’s wit and wisdom delivered in the public forum.
• The Fail Whale—Twitter’s impact isn’t restricted to the 140-character messages it delivers. The microblogging leader has also changed the vocabulary and icons we use to denote failure to deliver. Artist Yiying Lu is making a career out of one print. Again, Sarah Perez does a great job with the backstory on TFW’s transition from tech message to cultural icon.

Monroe County’s contender for next great Internet meme
The first modern timeline may be a 1627 effort by Joseph Mede charting the events of the coming apocalypse, but it is Jason Priestley who is considered to be the first to make popular use of timelines in 1765. I learned about this history of timelines in a timeline of information history published on the AI3 blog by Mike Bergman (Zitgist). Timelines are a big enough deal these days that businesses are being formed just around timelines.

Dipity, the platform upon which the Internet meme timeline was created, also released timeline tools for Flickr, YouTube and Digg. Like Dandelife, they offer personal timelines, too, to tell your life story in terms of meaningful events.

The content of the Internet Meme timeline is open to augment with additional history, sources and new phenomena as they surface. There are also views to show the content on a map, as a simple list, or in flipbook format.

Someone, please, add the Fail Whale.