Meme’s The Word

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My mom’s been using the internet more and more and like many of you out there I am concerned with parental safety on the internets. My mom’s in this grey, nebulous area where she’s not young enough to find *chan raids and sending disgusting pictures to your friends funny, but not old enough to know nothing about the internet beyond "the Google" and "it’s a series of tubes". I was already a tad worried when she started to become a YouTube addict, but her increasing activity on the intrawebs has made me realize just how far *chan memes have penetrated the internet as a whole.

Apparently light internet catchphrases have appeared in comments on places on Huffington Post. Mom also haunts websites whose sole purpose is to bombard you with photos of adorable kittens and puppies and these places have adopted the concept of "Caturday". Even more worryingly, they’ve adopted image macros of cats, even going as far as to make parodies of the phrase  "im in ur base killin your dudes".

In layman’s and internets terms a meme is called a "thought virus", and I have to admit I’m infected. Some internet badasses out there criticize the use of memes as low-brow humor completely devoid of wit or intelligence. Well… they’re completely correct, but they can go to hell because mindlessly spouting memes is fun and has irrevocably become part of the unique culture of the internet.

And when you think about it, indeed, the internet does have its own culture, one that tears down international borders, traditional barriers, and lets people of all races, creeds, nations, orientations and what not have meaningless heated debates about nothing with each other. The tubes are like some strange microcosm of the Earth, some sort of bizzaro world where normal human dignity and social interaction is all but forgotten, and where things happen and inside jokes begin that those on the outside won’t, and probably don’t want to, understand.

Someone not familiar with the intrawebs, for example, won’t understand why the Habbo raid was so funny (or why people would play things like Habbo to begin with.) And certainly they were even more bewildered when /b/tards showed up at movie thearters screening "Snakes on a Plane" in large afro wigs. Yes indeed, not only has *chan memes and behavior penetrated the rest of the internet, but now this internet culture is beginning to leak over into real life. It’s like The Wired from Lain or The World from the .Hack video games, only with more hentai and cats.