i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/16/fashion/16meme.html?_r=1&ref=fashion

This New York Times article offers a weird and funny example of how content can take on different meanings in different cultural contexts and corners of the web. In 2000, a man in Florida uploaded a picture of his baby son, Stephen, onto his personal website. The photo included a caption about how Stephen was a happy baby. Nine years later, the man stumbled on a range of edited versions of the image from across the web, created by a bunch of strangers in Japan. Among other things, the baby’s face was pasted on an image of Kurt Cobain’s head, carved into Mount Rushmore, and depicted in a video game.

The baby had become an Internet meme, an “idea, image, catchphrase or video that goes viral, mutating via amateur remixes into unexpected forms.” KnowYourMeme.com, a website devoted to tracking and documenting Internet memes, helped the family trace the odd evolution of the photo using Google Insights and site reader feedback. Apparently, the original photo appeared on an anonymous Japanese image board in 2004, where someone created a web form allowing users to add cartoon bubble quotes to the baby’s image. The image spread from there.

This article resonates with themes covered in INFO 202 lectures 4 & 5. A single image, in this case a picture of a particular baby, had very different meaning on a family website and as a cultural icon divorced from the original person it depicts. Different identifiers appeared in the two contexts. On the family website, the baby was identified by his proper name, Stephen. To Japanese meme enthusiasts, the child took on the much more generic identifier, “Mr. Baby.” The actual identity of the baby was irrelevant in this context. It was the familiarity of the face as a template that was important.

The reasons for organizing images of Mr. Baby were also different. On the family website, the purpose was to create a narrative around the newest member of the household. The type and level of content organization was based on supporting this story. As a meme, Mr. Baby was a playful artistic phenomenon. He image was funny and interesting in part because it was so random. His face was set up as a blank slate to which a community could add their own meaning and interpretation. As it spread throughout the web, there was no single organizing mechanism around this face. For the family, the snapshot was a moment captured in time. For the Internet more broadly, the image was an evolving, living entity with meaning that continued to change over the course of several years.