Thursday, February 09, 2006

Hacking playground memes

My girls were very keen to teach me the three hand gestures used in the Phones 4 U adverts.

"Hannah taught it to us," they said.

"Why?" I asked.

"Because it's in an ad."

"Yes, but why do you want to do something from an ad?"

Finding that particular advert personally very irritating indeed, was enough to fuel a satisfying rant:

"Girls, have you heard of memes? There's a point of view that our entire purpose on earth is to reproduce our genes. Some people say a chicken is just an egg's way to make another egg, and there's no meaning to our lives. We're just doing what our genes require us to do.

"But luckily, it's not that simple. We're social animals. We have culture, and we pass that on. So now, our entire purpose is to reporoduce these ideas, which people call memes. So now, our lives have no real purpose. We're just doing what these memes need us to do."

"Unless... how about this? Why does it have to be phones? WHy not something else?"



Hopefully, "bogies 4 U" is going round the playground even now...

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