I'm reading a book right now that got me thinking. There's a very minor character who is an anarchist and thinks that books will be phased out in the future. Replacing them will simply be memes -- the viral spread of information through direct communication. The point was that people prefer shared experiences, and all the stuff that matters enough will be sufficiently transferred throughout society. Less-than-vital knowledge will be filtered out, and I assume people will be drawn towards others with similar knowledge.

First it piqued my interest because I immediately thought of Internet Memes, and how happy it makes me in real life when I pick up on a reference that someone throws out there.

Then I started thinking about what my friend Tom and I used to call "pop-culture friends." It was a negative term, and it basically meant all the people in high school with whom I talked endlessly about "South Park" and Quentin Tarantino, without knowing anything about their families or lives or hopes or dreams. Tom looked down on me for having so many friends like that, and I was the recipient of many an eye roll when I used to pepper our arguments with, "This is exactly like the time on 'the Simpsons' when Homer told Lisa..."

Now, of course, I realize how wrong Tom was. (And so does he, as, in adulthood, he has since admitted his wrongs, and we often have conversations about Quentin Tarantino's guest appearances in "South Park" episodes.) I can often tell which friends I will get along best with by sharing social memes with them. I knew Gabe would be an awesome friend because he loves MTV's "The State" and also says, "When you assume, you make an ass out of Uma Thurman," which is such a random and esoteric reference to ONE sketch on SNL in the early '90s, even though I still say it all the time.

I knew I was among friends last night when in the middle of an otherwise intelligent conversation about Camus and Sartre, I quoted "Camus can do, but Sartre is smartre," to which my friends echoed in unison, "Well, Scooby Doo can doo-doo, but Jimmy Carter is smarter."

And even though the minor anarchist character was meant to be kind of tongue-in-cheek, and even though it's a Dean Koontz book, which I guess is like literary junk food, it really made me appreciate how much we yearn for people who understand us. It made me think that maybe my extensive knowledge of lolcats and amazing ability to apply webcomics and forum threads to everyday situations maybe isn't all for naught. After all, that old Far Side comic where the parents dream about the kid playing video games for a living while he appears to be wasting his life away...sort of came true. I have friends who are "Nintendo Experts" and "Skilled Computer Games Operators," as the comic jokes.

It makes me think that we've come full circle, and society is coming back around to verbal storytelling to pass on our heritage to the future, only now it comes packaged with technological visual aids, blogs, and youtube videos to punctuate our points. We're entering a familiar but different chapter of social interaction, where we rely on our friends to inform us, via technology, of the new social developments, as they rely on us.

And that, my friends, is why I deemed it appropriate to show my friends "2 Girls, 1 Cup" at my dinner party last night. For science.