Britney Smears

In the never-ending effort to ensure the meme of chaos remains forever linked with disorder, randomness and in this case, schlock narcissism, Britney Spears and her new husband, Kevin Federline named their six-part 'reality show' - Britney & Kevin: Chaotic. Hyping the show as raw, and as one review offers makes Nick and Jessica look like Fulbright scholars. It made me wonder how all ill-formed memes, chaos included, eventually Jump the Shark, which is itself a good meme that tracks the catastrophe side of that cusp-catastrophe dynamic.

Whenever you look at any slice of pop culture, you're really looking at an iterative environment even though it appears to be recursive. Key ideas are recycled, even within career paths. Britney has drawn from the American innocence of Sandra Dee which was then exploited in the film Grease only to be raw material for Madonna, who embedded all of that for Britney.

So while the core message of a virginal lolitta, who subsequently loses her innocence, descending into sexpot status, only to re-emerge as enlightened monogamous wife and mother is not new, Britney has compressed all that into about a 6-year cycle. This fractal compression of what is normally a 20-year process (as it was with Madonna) waters down the impact and overall resiliency of the memes associated with the source or media virus.

As with chaos theory, once the culture finds a way to pigeon-hole the core concepts into established and more stable ideological structures (butterfly effect, natural disasters, end of the world scenarios), it's up to the meme engineerto mutate the message and steer it into more viable vectors. The best memes tap into either sex or violence or both, since survival draws from both extremes. Ambiguity and paradox also help memes find worldspace to grow.

Question: Does the recent Newsweek scandal suggest that the us-them aspect of the first tier vMemes are undergoing such an engineering process that will cause the dividing line to revert back to the West vs.The World and not itself?

Discontinuously, MRF 05.19