the u in meme

Well, this week there’s been a lot of meme fun. Yesterday I mentioned the bullies in the biblioblog schoolyard. Today I want to say a few things about memes as an exercise in group cohesion and peer-to-peer affirmation. I wonder to myself whether blog friends are real relationships. How different is blogging from a pen pal, or to put it negatively, phone sex. In a series on the “New Nomads” in the Economist, there is a lot of interesting discussion about how we manage our virtual and real existences.

A blogger will never visit you when you’re sick. Or bring you tea in bed. There is a certain accountability to real flesh-and-blood people that doesn’t exist in blogging. I don’t know if you remember when the founder of the Christian Carnival just disappeared. Pop. One day Dory was blogging. The next day, gone. Her stuff is still there but nobody’s home. I think about her a lot. And I get nervous when I don’t hear from some of the people I regularly interact with. Like my eccentric orthodox friend Esteban. ¿Dónde estás?

But on the other hand, I’m very nervous at the thought of meeting another blogger face to face. Online you can choose your words and also decide how much of yourself to reveal. For some of us that means a sweetened condensed version of the real thing. For others that means extra strength attitudes and opinions. The “real thing” I expect would be a bit dull in comparison.

By the way, other than people I already knew before blogging, I’ve only ever met in person one blogger: Wayne Leman. I met him and his wife at a small park in Albany. My kids were running around and screaming. And Wayne was making corny jokes. That’s something about Wayne that you don’t see on Better Bibles but more so on Facebook, by the way.

Even so, I am finding online relationships to be increasingly meaningful and constructive. You can’t dismiss the value of relationships simply because they’re not physically present in the same room. How often have you thought you knew a person that perhaps you worked with every day only to discover later that they had been hurting, or sinning, or just plain hiding a vital aspect of their being? Tangibility does not guarantee connectedness.

Blogging can sometimes be an inversion of the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young song, “Love The One You’re With.” They sang, “If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with.” Sometimes, our immediate surroundings can be boring or hostile and so blogging means “if you can’t love the ones you’re with, be with the ones you love.” Of course, most of us live in a more mixed environment which means we have to navigate between the two domains and practice keeping them in balance. I just had to walk away from writing this because I heard the kettle click and I went to make tea for my wife. And I also had a little chat with my son. Now while the tea is steeping I can finish my thought. Another example, last night I was pulled back and forth between following all the very amusing posts and comments on the Weird Worship meme and joining my family in the living room watching Mr. Bean’s Holiday. My family’s loud chortling finally shook me from the keyboard for good and soon my laughter was mingled with theirs.

I used to think that mobile devices would help me to spend less time in front of my desk and more time relating to the people around me. I eventually found that this isn’t the result. When you have basically the whole Internet available on your phone, you essentially become never fully present. If a conversation lags, or you feel the least bit bored, well, let’s check the Bloglines feeds and see if anyone is saying anything amusing. That’s bad news. Loser with a capital L. I ranted about this in my article The “I hate memes” meme. So, in all of this online social networking we need to maintain a balance. I’ve started to wean myself of blogging on Sundays. In fact, our whole family goes gadgetless on Sundays. No GameBoy for the kids. Or computers. Dad stays off the computer and phone. My son was having such terrible withdrawal symptoms that I found him on a Sunday afternoon spelling words upside-down with a calculator. It is nice to spend some time doing nothing. Connecting with our surroundings. Reading books or going for walks or fooling around in the garage.

Back to that CSNY song:

There’s a Rose
In a fisted Glove
And the eagle flies with the dove

While all the fisted glove stuff is fun, and I treasure the chance to fly with eagles on occasion, I hope that never becomes the whole blogging experience. What a pity if the rose were crushed by the glove. Memes are a chance to give someone a rose. Tagging is the equivalent of sending someone a valentine. And in all our blogging we need to balance being eagles and doves.

A beautiful and absurd scene in Mr. Bean’s Holiday is when he’s traveling with his two new friends, a young Russian boy and a lovely French actress. Neither of them realizes that Bean speaks English so they just talk to him in their own language. The viewer follows everything by subtitles. The boy looks at the lady and asks Bean in Russian, “Is she your girlfriend?” And the young lady motions toward the boy and says, “Is he your son? Are you married?” And Bean who can only focus on his quest to get to the sea, replies, “Oui, Cannes!” What he discovers of course in his quest is the reward of loving proximal relationships rather than the mumbling bumbling mental worlds that we sometimes inhabit. The movie ends with Mr. Bean surrounded by a huge crowd singing, “La Mer.” Choked me up, dang it.

So having said that let me make a few recommendations about what to do when you are subjected to a meme:

Lingamish Tips on Surviving Memes

• If someone tags you, write a post about it on your blog even if you don’t reply directly to the meme. They sent you a rose, don’t respond with a fisted glove.
• If someone doesn’t tag you but you like the meme, comment on the original meme and then write about the meme on your blog.
• If the meme bugs the heck out of you, rant about it on your blog.
• If someone incessantly tags you for idiotic memes, send them a note saying, “Less memes, please, because…”
• If you find yourself only flying with eagles, ask yourself why you are no longer a dove.