I have found myself, at least on a few occasions, talking to a person whose relationship to the Internets is much thinner than my own, trying to explain the nature of certain Internet memes. I find this a pretty tough task to pull off as I tend to make memes sound really infantile (and perhaps that is just what they are).

To explain this world to the uninitiated, I either: 1) very quickly give up and move onto some other less obscure 2) go into semi-professorial lecture mode and give a mini-low down on memes, some of the early examples, a small theory of self-referential irony, 4chan, rickrolls, encyclopedia dramatic etc etc and then show a bunch of memes as really you can’t do it justice without the audio visul component.

Now, I can just point people to the Meme Factory –to three youngish guys from Brooklyn who put together a **fantastic show**** a few weeks ago on, yes, Internet Memes. It was a dazzling ride into the (sometimes very obnoxious) territory that is memeology, addressing and displaying both the happy-cheery-cute side of memes as well as its darker side.

The video they have on their site documents their presentation and the word is out that they will soon craft something more like a stand-alone video-essay about Internet memes. As we wait for this next step in their project, this video is an amusing watch (though the interesting stuff starts about 3 minutes in).