The social web has been up in arms over the last two days over photographer Thomas Hawk’s forceful ejection from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. I’m not going to go into the details of the event here, although you can read Hawk’s account, veteran blogger Cyndy Aleo-Carreira’s reprimand, or Mona’s interaction with the museum itself to learn more.
However, you should know that the incident evoked thousands of Diggs from concerned community members and dozens and dozens of shares, comments, and re-postings from the folks over at FriendFeed. Whether or not you agree with the community’s actions, and the subsequent name-dirtying of the Visitor Relations director that kicked him out across the Internet, the crowd became a mob, just as Aleo-Carreira put it.
When a mob becomes a meme
What’s interesting to me is that in other sites around the Internet, we’d call what happened here a meme, a “thought or behavior passed from one person to another,” as Wikipedia puts it. However, unlike most memes that remain completely digital, never leaving the bounds of the Internet, this one transcended the ‘net to have wide-reaching effects on both local museum-goers and freedom advocates throughout the country.
I think the Hawk SF MOMA issue may be one of the first of many mob-meme incidents to come.
This means that the implications and repercussions of the meme were considerably more pronounced, and this is what’s interesting to me. As the boundary between the Internet and real-life, face-to-face interactions blurs, I think the Hawk SF MOMA issue may be one of the first of many mob-meme incidents to come.
What memes do to outsiders
One last thought for the day is the effects these mob-memes might have on outsiders: those that don’t care, aren’t interested, or don’t have the full details to buy into the meme in question like the rest of the community. Personally, I felt some of this disinterest as the incident passed through my FriendFeed; as a matter of fact, I even partly question why I continue to blog about this affair even though it’s received too much press already.
Yet it’s still an interesting question: as much as memes have the ability to bring a community together, they still carry the possibility to tear it apart through alternative opinions and indifference. I personally was much less likely to check my FriendFeed news today and yesterday, for instance, because I knew the content that I was going to find upon viewing.
Making us think
The great thing about occurrences like this, even if negative, is that they raise a bunch of great questions that can really light a fire under a usually-complacent community. What are your unique thoughts about the SF MOMA incident? In particular, do you agree with this similarity between mob and meme? How do you define either term?
Image credit on second and third images: Thomas Hawk.
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The SF MOMA incident: a real life mob-meme
However, you should know that the incident evoked thousands of Diggs from concerned community members and dozens and dozens of shares, comments, and re-postings from the folks over at FriendFeed. Whether or not you agree with the community’s actions, and the subsequent name-dirtying of the Visitor Relations director that kicked him out across the Internet, the crowd became a mob, just as Aleo-Carreira put it.
When a mob becomes a meme
What’s interesting to me is that in other sites around the Internet, we’d call what happened here a meme, a “thought or behavior passed from one person to another,” as Wikipedia puts it. However, unlike most memes that remain completely digital, never leaving the bounds of the Internet, this one transcended the ‘net to have wide-reaching effects on both local museum-goers and freedom advocates throughout the country.
This means that the implications and repercussions of the meme were considerably more pronounced, and this is what’s interesting to me. As the boundary between the Internet and real-life, face-to-face interactions blurs, I think the Hawk SF MOMA issue may be one of the first of many mob-meme incidents to come.
What memes do to outsiders
Yet it’s still an interesting question: as much as memes have the ability to bring a community together, they still carry the possibility to tear it apart through alternative opinions and indifference. I personally was much less likely to check my FriendFeed news today and yesterday, for instance, because I knew the content that I was going to find upon viewing.
Making us think
The great thing about occurrences like this, even if negative, is that they raise a bunch of great questions that can really light a fire under a usually-complacent community. What are your unique thoughts about the SF MOMA incident? In particular, do you agree with this similarity between mob and meme? How do you define either term?
Image credit on second and third images: Thomas Hawk.