I was thinking a bit today about a piece I’ve been trying to revise into something that might see publication. It’s a sort of over-grown classroom activity with notes for fellow instructors.
This one chunk is something I wanted to toss up here so I remember to think more about it:
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.
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, re-purposed 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.
Memes have fallen into an interesting academic black hole. People who read my writing about memes aren’t happy with how I go back to what they consider “pedestrian” moments (the Rickroll, for example), but at the other end of the spectrum the newest generation are using meme as a verb and are quickly dissolving any structure that might hold what a meme is together.
I’m not sure that pursuing it academically is the right move, but I wonder if there isn’t something for us to learn from the interesting fact that scholars– at least in composition and English studies, where my meme work has circulated a bit– don’t want to see a history that relies on important touch points, but without that history, the conceptual framework is dying in practice.
What will happen first? Will academic study allow for the idea that tracing things like the Rickroll are valuable (and not “talking about old stuff”– one editor actually MOCKED me for mentioning it), or will we stay in a weird middle space where everyone expects to tie “meme” to Greece and Aristotle but for examples to be so fresh they haven’t yet been out for Harambe?
This is the question that matters, really. Not whether or not we agree on how to address something like internet memes but whether or not we have in place a structure that will allow for it. It’s a problem that plagues game studies, as games don’t generally age well (other than classics), but academic understandings of how to publish are actually getting slower as technology advances. So if we only want the freshest cuts but also demand that everything refers back to an old white dude, it makes for a weird maze to navigate.
Maybe we’re making it too hard because we don’t all understand what is at stake.