Both memes and needlework are collective folk texts
“Teks,” the root of “technology,” meant a treatise on an art, craft, or grammar, before the meaning transferred to mechanical arts and then to digital tech. The lineage back to arts and crafts is a compelling link between “text” and “textile,” where collective folk texts are remixed and remade endlessly.
Both memes and needlework are collective folk texts that spread because people remix and remake them. The words “text” and “textile” have a common origin, from a Proto-Indo-European root teks, “to weave.” Writing and weaving are both acts of creation by bringing together. A storyteller is a spinner of yarns, and the internet’s founding metaphor is of a web. If we go far enough back, before printing presses and cameras and photocopiers introduced the notion of faithful reproduction, all transmission is re-creation. Teks is also the root in the word “technology,” which at one point meant a systematic treatise on an art or craft, or even a grammar, before it referred to a study of mechanical or industrial arts (a 1902 dictionary gives the examples of “spinning, metal-working, or brewing”) and then to digital tech. —Gretchen McCulloch, Because Internet
Fun fact: Susan Kare, who designed most of the original Apple computer icons, cited her experience with needlepoint and mosaics as preparation for creating icons from small arrays of pixels.
- see also: all transmission is recreation
- previously: healthy stories are fluid not fixed — the healthier the story, the more it is remixed and remade for different contexts