"Know Your Meme"
summary
Compares 1895 fieldwork using a 315-pound phonograph to today's streams of saved chatter and argues documentation is now both trivial and overwhelming, citing 96 billion hours of daily attention as the scarce resource. Uses concrete cases—scan communities using PaintShop Pro, the loss of Geocities, YouTube remix that made Keyboard Cat a meme—and describes building and running Know Your Meme with community moderators, metrics (views/likes/tweets) and a Kickstarter-funded book to record attribution and cultural spread.
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chapters (6)
- 0:00Introduction and inspiration
- 1:49Digital vs analog documentation
- 4:42Popularity as cultural filter
- 6:26Cultural stakeholder ownership
- 8:51Firsts and attribution challenges
- 10:33Call to action and acknowledgments
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