https://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2008/09/08/the-rise-of-the-meme/feed/PJ Media is a leading news site covering culture, politics, faith, homeland security, and more. Our reporters and columnists provide original, in-depth analysis from a variety of perspectives.en-usWed, 10 Jun 2026 07:24:54 -0400<![CDATA[The World Wide Web is almost 20 years old.  It was originally created to solve the problem of sharing and updating information among collaborators. In seemed natural at the time to create a one-to-one correspondence between a document and a specific Uniform Resource Locator (URL).  A document, and hence an information object, lived at a particular address. If you wanted to visit it, you went there. This had the architectural consequence of making all documents &#8212; hence ideas and information &#8212; technically equal. From the point of view of the computer, all destinations were IP addresses, which are a sequence of characters. Descriptors like &#8220;http://www.theatlantic.com/&#8221; and &#8220;http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/&#8221; are really just aliases for the actual IP addresses adopted for the convenience of the human user. But technically, they were equal; and more to the point, equally accessible to users on the Internet.]]>Mon, 08 Sep 2008 17:54:12 -0400<![CDATA[Richard Fernandez]]>https://pjmedia.com/richard-fernandez/2008/09/08/the-rise-of-the-meme-n186049