How long will it take for the :) meme to disappear?

[BillyTheMountain]

The biologist Richard Dawkins proposed memes as units of cultural evolution. In order for culture to be able to evolve, it must be able to be broken down into units that are able to reproduce themselves; a meme thus is a discrete idea that is capable of replicating.

In order to replicate, memes must be capable of being stored and spread. The human mind is the ideal vehicle -- it is able to store ideas and reliably reproduce them through language. Not all memetic replication must be achieved through language as a person may simply observe a good idea and imitate it, but language greatly increases the speed and breadth of a meme's progress.

Meme theory holds that memes evolve in the same manner that plants and animals evolve -- by the process of natural selection.

As an example, consider a recent meme: the symbol that has permeated e-mail. As one of many symbols called "emoticons," is particularly well-suited to the medium of e-mail; it connotes a playfulness that would be evident in voice communications but is otherwise lost in a world of ASCII characters. As people have received e-mail messages containing , they have recognized its usefulness and incorporated it into their own messages. has proven particularly fit, has replicated at breakneck pace, and is now ubiquitous. A meme's fitness is its replicative power; in the case of , it is a function of the meme's unique appropriateness to the medium. It has replicated so well because it is so good at what it does. And as with genes, there are mutations -- , , :0, etc. These mutated memes have all replicated because of their own fitness.

And eventually, due to overuse, their cleverness and originality will diminish, and they will gradually disappear.

VOTE: How long will it take for the meme to disappear?

Billy

[yoopers]

Time comes and goes but a smile lasts forever.

[GILD]

Originally posted by BillyTheMountain
VOTE: How long will it take for the meme to disappear?

as long as it will take Greg to stop tolerating them

[Klaas Bil]

Originally posted by yoopers
Time comes and goes but a smile lasts forever.

Or maybe: smiles come and go but time lasts forever? Ne'ertheless, I voted 10+ years.

Remarkably, I have learned to type the symbol in 'ancient' times as colon-dash-closingbracket (anybody else?), instead of colon-closingbracket, and I still do it the same way. Colon-closingbracket translates (*) to the smiley icon on this site, both if I type it on the newsgroup (often) or on the forum (more rare). So that's why you mostly see the :-) in my posts as opposed to the .

Even more on topic for this thread: I think that by now the :-) has almost completely lost the evolutionary battle, yielding to the proliferation of . However, I regard the two as subspecies of smileys, not as separate species, so the smiley has survived a long time already.

Klaas Bil

(*) Whether you want it or not. Except in the subject line of threads, as we see at the top of this page.

[GILD]

i can't stand emails that are forever trying to download the images from some website so i can get some kitten waving a tulip at me from the bottom of the email
'-) is fine and littered all over my emails

[harper]

Originally posted by GILD
as long as it will take Greg to stop tolerating them

If you did a more thorough search on RSU I think you would find many more instances of my complete disdain for emoticons which, as we all know, are the bane of the internet. Usually your searches are more in depth so I will assume that you were particularly tired that day or were horribly hung-over with devilish images of horrifying emoticons spinning around your head. In the case of the latter, my sympathy goes out to you.

[GILD]

unfortunately i can't claim any of those wonderfull sounding excuses
i wish i could have a hangover at 17h00 on a workday
oh well, one day...

now tonight is another story, Liverpool playing Juventus
don't talk to me in the morning
irrespective of who wins
(but we all know it's going to be liverpool so there u go, walking alone)

the reason for the link to that particular quote is simply because it's the only time my emmenthaler memory can recall ever seeing u make comment about emoticons
i've been pretty scarce on RSU recently, getting bogged down in JC and the MR thread in particular, so i may have missed the rest
i find the search function very difficult to use and unless i specifically remember the post and something of it's content, i have trouble finding it
fortunately, posts and their contents are of no financial gain in my life, so i remember them well...



see, i can't help myself, i have to use some of those things
sigh

[Jethro]

I think that our natural inclination to be superior and trendy will force emoticons eventually to go away. One day, the sooner the better, people who use emoticons will be seen in the same light as people who say "wassup?"

[JJuggle]

Originally posted by Jethro
I think that our natural inclination to be superior and trendy will force emoticons eventually to go away. One day, the sooner the better, people who use emoticons will be seen in the same light as people who say "wassup?"

You'll be gone first, dude.

[James_Potter]

as long as there is internet, and people to use it, and as long as those people have emotions of some sort, there will be (:'s

[Jethro]

Originally posted by JJuggle
You'll be gone first, dude.

Oh, I have outlived the CB radio craze, pet rocks, and Disco*; I think I may well outlast emoticons.

*I may have actually killed disco

[JJuggle]

Originally posted by Jethro
Oh, I have outlived the CB radio craze, pet rocks, and Disco*; I think I may well outlast emoticons.

*I may have actually killed disco

My mother killed Jimi Hendrix, but that's a long story.

You may well have outlasted those things but you are pre-dated and will be outlived by that which is oh so precious as to be nearly universally adopted by the masses and attract the attention and interest of multi-billion dollar corporte imaginations. Afterall, Mr Natural reacted much the same to the smiley face as has Harper - and the two bear a striking resemblance to each other - and where is Mr Natural today but in the few burnt out head shops left on St Marks Place in NYC and the Haight in SF?

[harper]

Originally posted by JJuggle
My mother killed Jimi Hendrix, but that's a long story.

You may well have outlasted those things but you are pre-dated and will be outlived by that which is oh so precious as to be nearly universally adopted by the masses and attract the attention and interest of multi-billion dollar corporte imaginations. Afterall, Mr Natural reacted much the same to the smiley face as has Harper - and the two bear a striking resemblance to each other - and where is Mr Natural today but in the few burnt out head shops left on St Marks Place in NYC and the Haight in SF?

I would guess that the emoticon would justifiably outlive me. Mr. Natural is alive in my burned out head.

[Jethro]

I prefer to count myself among the faithful who envision a brighter day when we will embrace the power of words over symbols. We have done it before. Since you mentioned Harper...back in the day, people would communicate by scatching symbols onto cave walls. As evolution did its thing, we came up with something more sophisticated, something that would further seperate us from the animals--an alphabet. Computer geeks have dealt a great blow to evolution with the use of emoticons, but I feel certain that we will be able to rise above it.

[JJuggle]

Originally posted by Jethro
I prefer to count myself among the faithful who envision a brighter day when we will embrace the power of words over symbols. We have done it before. Since you mentioned Harper...back in the day, people would communicate by scatching symbols onto cave walls. As evolution did its thing, we came up with something more sophisticated, something that would further seperate us from the animals--an alphabet. Computer geeks have dealt a great blow to evolution with the use of emoticons, but I feel certain that we will be able to rise above it.

Cute. Coming from the guy who gave us the third post down.