Some thoughts on icons as memes

From an IM conversation with Lou...

Icons are a way of linking the idea of "meme" with "community" online. Icons, on Live Journal and for other online communities (and occasionally IM windows) were originally meant to be images of the user to attach to a community blog-to give a visual, social cue that users could link to the person posting. Over time, icons started skewing away from being representational of the users. Fans started started using screenshots of their favorite characters, they started framing and photoshopping them to fit with their (the community's) attitudes toward the fandom.

Some people excel at making them, so they get together to form a community for posting and sharing their icons. Other people steal or borrow, reference the users, and links are made between journals, between communities, between people.
What's interesting is when you see that icons are supposed to be representation of the user but instead are representations of the attitudes of the community. Icons have let us lose all possible touches iwth the physical body and individual and venture into communal space.

Icons are enthymematic--shorthand for situations and they generate narrative as well as mimetic desire.

Again, though, people wouldn't do this without communities in which to share them: check the old school fandoms of Kirk/Spock. People made the vids and fics for the conventions, for the 'zines, to mail to each other....not for their own enjoyment. And that's not even getting into RPG--a community built around people not being themselves.