Blog Memes and Identity Loss

What Kind of Undies Are You?

In the February 4th, 2007 Daytona Beach News Journal front page article entitled "Myspace Becomes Their Window to You," staff writer, Michael Lewis tells the story of student athletes from Florida State University being publicly embarrassed by the exposition of their MySpace pages during a rather unusual annual orientation/ rules review. In the article, Lewis cites Pam Overton, an associate athletics director for FSU, who says, "The biggest thing I remember was how stunned they were that we could find their pages so easily."

While exposing the drinking habits and sexual assertiveness of young college athletes poses more of a threat to their college careers and parental support than to their personal safety, there is something to be said about the ease of finding information on any particular person using social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace. One particular aspect of information spread that I find particularly alarming is through memes.

A meme, by the most basic of definitions, is simply the passing of thoughts or information from one person to the other. On the Internet, memes are passed at an exponential rate through blogs, bulletins, emails, and personal profiles. They are usually jokes, surveys and quizzes, or simply quotes. Some memes are in the forms of quizzes, where you take a quiz asking, "What kind of undies are you," and you find out a personality description compared to the item in question, which in this case, was undies. Certainly those quizzes, along with the passing of the moral of the "Foo Bird" story isn't a dangerous act, however, during my time at MySpace, I've seen some particularly disturbing memes that weren't quite as funny as the "Foo Bird" jokes.

These questionable memes come in the form of surveys. They ask a large number of questions such as, "What's your favorite color?" and "How many brothers and sisters do you have," and "What are their names?"