A long long time ago, towards the close of the previous millennium, a man in his twenties decided to fling his random thoughts and musings onto a web page for all the world to see. This seemed like a good idea at the time. For good or for ill, this was one of the first sites in Australia to call itself a “weblog”. (Weblogs actually existed for some time before the term was coined, but that’s another story.)
Pranks were pulled, opinions were proffered, publicity was propagated, to the point where the proprietor saw his name pop up in the weirdest of places, such as the New York Times. (True!)
This “blog” carried on for a few years, but after countless nights of post-midnight pyjama posting, the humble blogeur got more interested in other things, the archives taken down and mothballed as juvenilia, and time passed.
Mammals rose and took ascendency as the reptiles diminished in size. The internet became more and more a cacophonous free-for-all where people shouted at each other using inaccurate terms to describe their antagonists’ political views, while others shared pictures of their cats as they degenerated into baby talk about “feels” and “noms”. Dialup diminished in the place of always-on DSL connections, allowing the potential of novelty pop songs to be tapped and monetised (and sometimes unmonetised).
The smartphone revolution allowed people to take pictures of their lunch for the ominous omniscient cloud, while trolls and flamers attempt to defeat each other on points of semantics in a manner that is just plain rude.
In such times of confusion and turmoil, perhaps it is time Virulent Memes returned from its sabbatical to once again drop truth bombs on the unwary. Because sometimes 140 characters is too short to get a point across.