Afraid to Dive

A year has passed since the last time I wrote about memes. In this article I try to explain (mostly to myself in a form of self-reflection) what happened and what has changed, as well as what will happen next. Past Perhaps, it'd be best to start with what this blog was created for. Obviously, its very purpose is to transmit my ideas and to search all kinds of interesting things. Web culture, memes, classification, etc. — it was all about sharing something I knew myself and something I wanted to share. Yet, I've never had any audience and barely "advertised" what I did, hence you can call this blog a sort of personal story, as pretty much everything I do across the web. However, the memes stood aside, as it was really important to me to understand what they are and puzzle out that essential part of the web culture. Roughly speaking, I tried to play memeologist. This went on for a couple of years, as I was developing own meme theory, trying to solve memeological pr...

It is obvious that the internet has long been neither a means nor even a tool, but an extension of real life: the whole virtual world is at hand and in the blink of an eye. Indeed, the internet, if not dramatically changed, but at least affected almost all spheres of life, from economics and social interactions to culture. The latter, apparently, is of particular interest to this blog, and I would like to address this issue again, especially because, in a sense, this is my final work on web culture. No Boundaries Before realizing what weblore is, it is necessary first to understand the history of folklore and culture as such. Folklore is known to be an oral folk art characteristic of a traditional society. Thus, folklore belongs to folk culture, usually classified along with high and mass culture. Urbanization has brought what the Russian folklore researcher Sergei Neklyudov calls post-folklore . Virtually, it is "folklore" born in an urban environment: songs, urban leg...