language is a virus

It’s downright addictive , especially if you’re one of those people who already loves playing forensic meme0logist, a pastime to which ITQ will cheerfully confess. It would be especially interesting to see the lag times for various media/new media outlets, but my wishlist for a Canadianized version would also track the progress of a story or controversy — like, say, the fracas over the Pride parade fracas — from blogs to aggregators to the (so-called) mainstream media, or vice versa  — to see  how a story, once broken, ricochets between all three. Heck, why not throw in twitter, what with one of our more technophilic cabinet ministers taking to the tweets to defend a change in government policy? If you really wanted to get ambitious, you could even figure out how often a party-coined catchphrase or talking point makes the leap to genuine meme status, which – ITQ suspects – happens more often than we’d think . Really, the possibilities are endless — fingers crossed that someone out there is already hard at work on it.