this is not read-only WRiting and illustrations By alexander Chen ’ 14, social media and publicity editor In the past, creation was different. Whether it was the story of Genesis, da Vinci’s flying machine, or Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, creation based itself on inventing things that hadn’t existed before. Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig called this time period a “Read-Only Culture.” Society simply took the information as it came. This has changed. Creation has rapidly become what Lessig calls a “Read-and-Write” or “Remix” culture. We draw inspiration from things already made, and use it to create something new. Instead of being passive consumers, we have created a new relationship between former “producers” and ourselves, a relationship in which someone creates something and then others react to it, before creating something based off of the previous work. Perhaps the greatest manifestation of this “Readand-Write” culture has appeared in the realm of social media. With increased accessibility to the Internet, more and more people have the ability to create, recreate, and re-recreate works. Many of these works are classified as memes. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “meme” as “a cultural element or behavioral trait whose transmission and consequent persistence in a population, although occurring by non-genetic means, is considered as analogous to the inheritance of a gene.” The memes today are slightly different, though. They form part of the culture developed solely on the Internet. And this cultstyle culture has become so engrained in our lives that we now have what researchers call a “meme culture.”
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And memes aren’t just really-awful-yet-reallyhilarious pictures of “Ridiculously Photogenic Guy” (a guy running a marathon who, in a candid photo, smiled perfectly for the picture), “Ermahgerd Girl” (an excited 90s girl), or “Condescending Wonka” (an image of Gene Wilder from the original Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory). They exhibit nuanced trends in a rapidly changing culture.
Researchers Francis Heylighen and Klaas Chielens of the Vrije Universiteit Brussels explain that “memetics,” or the theoretical and empirical science that studies the replication, spread, and evolution of memes, is the basis of our generation’s cultural revolution. Rather than Mao’s Great Leap Forward, we’ve got “High Expectations Asian