The Great Usenet Meme Shift
Jorn Barger
shifts', where over a period of decades or centuries a community begins
to pronounce words differently, in a more-or-less systematic way...
I assume that communities do this because the new pronunciations sound
_cooler_ to them, and make them feel superior to their neighbors--
aristocratic British accents being the example I take (perhaps wrongly)
as prototypical.
Rap seems like another example, not of a vowel-shift but of an _ideal of
superiority_ that includes speech-rhythms and gestures and verbal tics
like 'knowwhutimsaying?' and lots of slang. (Personally I'd put
Mystikal in the number one spot here, for sheer cool style, but I don't
expect him to be closely imitated. Eminem is maybe more influential.)
But if you look at any random urban cross-section, you can probably find
many, many different _ideals of cool_ that people aspire towards-- eg
50s greasers who still want to be like Elvis.
And it _may_ be that these different ideals can be arranged into a sort
of historical chain-of-being, with the grosser/coarser ideals having
originated tens of thousands of years ago, but other ideals being much
more recent innovations. (I've been reading a series of well-researched
mysteries set in Ancient Rome-- by Lindsey Davis-- and she has one
character wearing lots of pimp-like gold chains. Bad taste is eternal?)
But Internet etext doesn't allow vowel shifts! Cool superiority has to
be conveyed by 0th3r innovations.
So we should expect different newsgroups to host different communities
with different ideals of cool... but since there's no geographic
barriers, the generally-coolest may quickly become universal ('quickly'
in the geologic sense-- maybe just a few years).
And ark seems to favor an ideal of cool that's humorous, first of all,
and quirky and allusive. (You can keep your 'aristocratic' vowels in
rec.org.mensa!)
But it seems to me this local ark-ideal is often very effective, even in
hot debates in other groups. (An example, from the memes-I-miss file:
Kibo once said "DUH! DUH! DUH! DUH! DUH! DUH! DUH! DUH!" which I
immediately found useful in an html flamewar. I just tried to find it
with GooJa, but there's a whole lotta duh-duh-duh-ing going on.)
The phenomenon of hivemind is an interesting part of this innovation--
because the ideal is constantly evolving, I often see people trying out
ideas that had occured to me too. Sometimes these even go back decades
before the Net-- eg I had a friend who liked to say 'psuedo' in
highschool.
So what's my point?
...That was it, I guess.
--
Robot Wisdom Weblog: http://www.robotwisdom.com/ "If you worry that
reading the news online will rob you of the serendipity factor you get
with the newspaper, Jorn Barger solves the problem." --Dan Gillmor
Lord Limbic
>
> The phenomenon of hivemind is an interesting part of this innovation--
> because the ideal is constantly evolving, I often see people trying out
> ideas that had occured to me too. Sometimes these even go back decades
> before the Net-- eg I had a friend who liked to say 'psuedo' in
> highschool.
>
> So what's my point?
>
> ...That was it, I guess.
"Perhaps the single defining hallmark of genius is to do something that noone
else has ever done before, or even thought of doing, and make it look
blindingly obvious afterwards."
Ben Wolfson
<jo...@enteract.com> wrote:
> Every so often I see a reference to the linguistics-concept of 'vowel
> shifts', where over a period of decades or centuries a community begins
> to pronounce words differently, in a more-or-less systematic way...
You'd best change that to "COMPLETELY systematic, SIR!" if you don't want
an unfriendly visit from the Neo-Grammarian Thought Polizei!!!!!
>I assume that communities do this because the new pronunciations sound
>_cooler_ to them, and make them feel superior to their neighbors--
>aristocratic British accents being the example I take (perhaps wrongly)
>as prototypical.
Not necessarily cooler--it can be the result of any kind of
group-formation tendency. E.g. natives of Martha's Vineyard who have
stronger accents tend to have a better opinion of themselves and a worse
opinion of non-natives.
--
BTR
Why does this Wolfson person see fit to clutter up Usenet with such
absurd nonsense?
-- Bob Cunningham in <km4butor1ke8f5et2...@4ax.com>
David DeLaney
>jo...@enteract.com (Jorn Barger) wrote :
>> So what's my point?
>>
>> ...That was it, I guess.
>
>"Perhaps the single defining hallmark of genius is to do something that noone
>else has ever done before, or even thought of doing, and make it look
>blindingly obvious afterwards."
>
>http://www.vic.com/~dbd/nll.11.94.update
Yeah, but what did he know?
Dave "fatally young" DeLaney
--
\/David DeLaney posting from d...@vic.com "It's not the pot that grows the flower
It's not the clock that slows the hour The definition's plain for anyone to see
Love is all it takes to make a family" - R&P. VISUALIZE HAPPYNET VRbeable<BLINK>
http://www.vic.com/~dbd/ - net.legends FAQ & Magic / I WUV you in all CAPS! --K.