Lolcats. Ima chargin’ mah lazor. All Your Base. And this may or may not be Sparta. As the Internet moves beyond the youthful innocence of its early years, more and moar memes are appearing (thankfully, a smaller percentage of them from the chans), and random ideas that would have been too labour-intensive to be funny in the days of fax are suddenly splitting sides. The extreme brevity and laziness that creates them has even been given a name – ‘brainfart’. It’s really quite astonishing if you stop and think about it.

I like memes, they make me lol. But I’m also intrigued by what they might mean. I use the term ‘meme’ in its populist sense rather than the more accurate one laid out in The Selfish Gene (which I’m sure would offend Professor Richard Dawkins if he read this, but given how offensive I find some of his writings I think we can call it even). It was once said that ‘words are hooks to hang ideas on,’ but if that’s true, couldn’t the same be said of memes?

Almost by definition, an Internet meme conveys a specific idea instantly, without any need for context or further content. Indeed, much of the humour is derived from ideas out of context, or from piling ideas one on top of one another. The thing that intrigues me is the kind of mindset seeing them results in: you almost don’t need to engage your brain to laugh at them, because recognition is instant, and you don’t need to keep your train of thought on the tracks for very long, as in an instant the next meme is loaded up, and your thoughts are shunted off elsewhere.

Memes are just the most dramatic example of this trend, but it’s evident all over our culture. Take Wikipedia for example. No pre-requisites are needed to access its pages, and readers are left to comprehend everything from String Theory to Fertiliser as they can. Nowadays we process more information in a fortnight than our ancestors did in their entire lives, and thanks to sites like Wikipedia, we process it in a completely random order. The good old days of the classical education are gone, and in its place is an uneven user-directed mental smorgasbord that leaves users with extremely detailed knowledge in some areas, but total blanks in others. The literal ‘random access’ provided by computer technology results in ‘random knowledge’, ‘random understanding,’ and perhaps therefore, ‘random intelligence.’

I’m not actually complaining about this: to me it looks like a step in another direction, which is neither a step up nor a step down. The last time it happened came with the invention of writing, switching from illiterate to literate thinking, which allowed us to think in much more abstract ways, but destroyed our ability to memorise properly. Now we seem to be making another switch, from linear, structured, ‘literate’ thinking to randomised, unstructured, ‘memetic’ thinking.

What might this bring? I can think of two consequences right away – innovation, and inconsistency. A thinker who is unbound by logic or even sentence structure is free to put any ideas they like, bringing forth frightful, bizarre and wonderful new creations. The consequences for this might even, eventually, mean the end of division between the scientific disciplines (yay to that happening). However, unstructured thinking doesn’t require the thinker to be particularly logical or consistent, and I see a hell of lot of this among my peers (e.g. accepting that the Earth is unimaginably old, yet also accepting that its ecosystem is fragile enough for only 200 years of minor human activity to destroy it. George Orwell called this "doublethink").

Given the general emotiveness of the human creature, which has the same effect on our logic a bucket of water has on a calculator’s, this will probably never be a problem. But I still have to wonder. The effect of randomised mass communication on the human soul has yet to be measured. And there’s still the other question – does the technology match our thinking, or are we fitting our thinking around the technology? They used to have a curse…