Not Sure If Brilliant or Merely Pedestrian: Toward a Rhetoric of the Meme by Phill Alexander
Figure 2: Self-referential Sarcastic Wonka
Why such fascination with memes and memories? While the generally accepted “memes” that traffic the internet are now ubiquitous—image, quaint or amusing text, often based on memorable moments or designed in ways so as to be oft repeated, the lolCat, for example—the richness of memetics, and what the meme could mean to scholars and students, is obscured by the meme’s surface simplicity.
Understanding how memes function opens doorways through which we can differently teach, compose and observe collaborative actions. The meme itself remains relatively simple, but the work it does and the ways in which memes are employed is far more complicated than many may expect.
The typical internet user knows the word meme to refer to a relatively basic and yet pleasantly complex genre of visual composition: a photo with text—often humorous our ironic—superimposed. The text is usually in the “Impact” font due to the fact that Impact is both bold and still surprisingly thin, allowing for maximum text in minimum space without the loss of legibility that comes from most thin fonts. A classic example of such a meme would be “Sarcastic Wonka,” a now “classic” meme that anyone can make easily at memegenerator.net. See Figure 2 above for an example of how quickly I was able to mock up a mockery of my own work.
These memes are transmitted on a daily basis by users of all manner of social media, from Facebook and Google + to Reddit, Tickld, the infamous and alleged origin point of such memes 4Chan, and numerous others. They’re emailed, printed and posted on bulletin boards. They serve as a way to transform shared moments into repeated, repurposed moments and in other cases to spread cute animals and witty sayings far and wide.
These image memes might seem simple. They are, in fact, simple to produce. At the same time, the undergirding theoretical construct of a viral idea, one that demands attention and replication, that requires slight modification within a constrained and obvious set of rules, shines through clearly when looking at an image meme. To see why, precisely, look to the history of the meme itself.