Paper scribe Zach Kelly, who frequently writes about music for the mag and the mag.com, has an interesting piece over at the Village Voice wherein he discusses "How the Internet Is Going to Kill 'Call Me Maybe.'" In the past few weeks, Carly Rae Jepsen's insanely-catchy song has gone from being an early contender for Song of the Summer to a full-on, shark-jumping meme, with the likes of Donald Trump, NPR and even Barack Obama getting their grubby little paws on it. Kelly has some interesting thoughts on why the Internet, and the meme-ficication of the Internet in general, is a bad thing for Songs of the Summer, but one paragraph in particular spoke to me:

"The best thing about a good summer song is that it's both personal and communal, that no matter how many times you hear in the car on the way home from work, you'll still probably put it on while you fix dinner in your apartment. But is there such a thing as 'too communal?' And in the case of 'Call Me Maybe,' is there a chance that we'll all have killed it before we got the chance (or earned the right, rather) to really hate it?"

While I don't have any real vested interest in "Call Me Maybe," and don't particularly care about its fate, I think Zach has touched upon something that I am constantly trying to grapple with when it comes to my frustration with the Internet, and memes in general: when something becomes "too communal." While I love participating in pop-culture phenomena and most things viral (whether it's live-tweeting the Oscars, watching Mad Men, reading The Hunger Games trilogy, eating kale, clicking on videos of sloths) it's when my favorite minor character from Growing Pains who I loved between the ages of 9 and 12 gets his own single purpose Tumblr page; or when a restaurant around the corner from my apartment in Brooklyn gets written up in the New Yorker, amasses 874,000 yelp reviews, and then gets a shout-out on Girls that's then mentioned on Eater.com; or when I can't step foot on the Internet without seeing a Mad Men episode re-cap -- these moments, these restaurants, these TV shows then become "too communal," and my personal connection to them vanishes. My tastes and opinions are everyone's tastes and opinions. Some find that fun and comforting; but I hate it. (Paper's editor-in-chief, David Hershkovits, in his "Death of Cool" piece, dissected this concept as well.) I've subsequently become a bit more guarded in terms of what I share with the world, and the types of media I consume. I am less interested in blogging about wonderful things I've read, seen, heard or eaten. And at the same time, I'm also wary of becoming as OBSESSED with things like I used to be -- because being OBSESSED with an episode with Mad Men or REALLY RELATING to Girls or LOVING THE PORK BUN AT MOMOFUKU or POSTING A GIF OF A CUTE CAT on my Facebook wall feels just so...  dull. The result is that I've recently had this overwhelming desire to protect everything I love and care about from the Internet, for fear of losing it. Call me a snob, call me annoying, but whatever you do, don't call me... maybe. Snap!