This was a welcome surprise in my inbox. I’ve consistently enjoyed your writing.
Memes have been a topic of my own musing lately and you pinned down very similar conclusions as mine. I remember when the RSA animate videos first came out around 2009 and I would be transfixed by watching sometime visually transcribe on a whiteboard, what a lecturer was talking about. There was something absolutely mesmerizing about seeing the words of a lecture pass into a visual story of the artists direction. It felt that it made the ideas more understandable to see them presented as images. I think memes act in the same way, providing a visual, condensed form of ideas, often jumping over the gaps of literacy, presenting packets of meaning to all who have enough time for a glance.
They are also a sign of our inherent desire for shortcutting. To present everything all at once. “Just present the Meme and I will be healed”.
I had never considered the insider/outsider dynamics of memes, but now I realized that there are definitely some memes I won’t send to my parents and others I won’t send to non-Christians. And on the other hand there are memes that cross boundaries and present ideas that can bring others along into different ways of thinking without them even knowing it. It’s a dangerous kind of sorcery on one level and a providential way of spreading Truth on another...
Brilliant. One of the joys of life to me is always in ambiguity - in a meme, a sermon, a photo, a piece of iridescent fabric, or a glimpse from the corner of my eye. In recognising that we can’t nail down definitive meaning keeps my sarcasm and cynicism at bay, but the quest is always there.
It's always a good idea to carefully analyze our methods of cultural communication, so I applaud your analysis. Another way that memes work is as a shorthand for metaphor. We could write out a long simile about how our boss hates it when we surf the net on company time . . . or we could use a "distracted boyfriend" with superimposed captions. Of course, as you say, the danger is that we are making cultural allusions that only reinforce our in-group's perceptions; I think you're right that derisive laughter is a scourge brought on all too easily by memes. Your points about fan service were also well-put; the pandering to fans is why I haven't watched the new Spiderman movie yet.
It would be worthwhile to research when the practice of meme-ing actually started. I know Dawkins coined the term in the 1970s, but I notice that old books (Eliot's "Middlemarch" comes to mind) frequently have a short quote from some other author at the head of each chapter; perhaps these were, at the time, analogous to memes today.
Thanks for these thoughts, William. The shorthand-for-metaphor idea is spot-on. Memes are a way to "carry across" meaning, and are often a brilliant way of summarizing more expansive intuitions. I agree that it would be fascinating to find out when meming kicked off. I think even of how Shakespeare borrowed heavily from Ovid, say, or how so many of our idioms are meme-like (e.g. not enough room to swing a cat, get a taste of your own medicine, go on a wild goose chase, etc). Meming makes sense since it mirrors the analogical structure of cognition (as Hofstadter and Sander argue in their book Surfaces and Essences). But this new visual form seems to resist being totally embedded in thought (ontologized) the way that idioms are.
This was a welcome surprise in my inbox. I’ve consistently enjoyed your writing.
Memes have been a topic of my own musing lately and you pinned down very similar conclusions as mine. I remember when the RSA animate videos first came out around 2009 and I would be transfixed by watching sometime visually transcribe on a whiteboard, what a lecturer was talking about. There was something absolutely mesmerizing about seeing the words of a lecture pass into a visual story of the artists direction. It felt that it made the ideas more understandable to see them presented as images. I think memes act in the same way, providing a visual, condensed form of ideas, often jumping over the gaps of literacy, presenting packets of meaning to all who have enough time for a glance.
They are also a sign of our inherent desire for shortcutting. To present everything all at once. “Just present the Meme and I will be healed”.
I had never considered the insider/outsider dynamics of memes, but now I realized that there are definitely some memes I won’t send to my parents and others I won’t send to non-Christians. And on the other hand there are memes that cross boundaries and present ideas that can bring others along into different ways of thinking without them even knowing it. It’s a dangerous kind of sorcery on one level and a providential way of spreading Truth on another...
Brilliant. One of the joys of life to me is always in ambiguity - in a meme, a sermon, a photo, a piece of iridescent fabric, or a glimpse from the corner of my eye. In recognising that we can’t nail down definitive meaning keeps my sarcasm and cynicism at bay, but the quest is always there.
Beautifully put, Dottie.
It's always a good idea to carefully analyze our methods of cultural communication, so I applaud your analysis. Another way that memes work is as a shorthand for metaphor. We could write out a long simile about how our boss hates it when we surf the net on company time . . . or we could use a "distracted boyfriend" with superimposed captions. Of course, as you say, the danger is that we are making cultural allusions that only reinforce our in-group's perceptions; I think you're right that derisive laughter is a scourge brought on all too easily by memes. Your points about fan service were also well-put; the pandering to fans is why I haven't watched the new Spiderman movie yet.
It would be worthwhile to research when the practice of meme-ing actually started. I know Dawkins coined the term in the 1970s, but I notice that old books (Eliot's "Middlemarch" comes to mind) frequently have a short quote from some other author at the head of each chapter; perhaps these were, at the time, analogous to memes today.
Thanks for these thoughts, William. The shorthand-for-metaphor idea is spot-on. Memes are a way to "carry across" meaning, and are often a brilliant way of summarizing more expansive intuitions. I agree that it would be fascinating to find out when meming kicked off. I think even of how Shakespeare borrowed heavily from Ovid, say, or how so many of our idioms are meme-like (e.g. not enough room to swing a cat, get a taste of your own medicine, go on a wild goose chase, etc). Meming makes sense since it mirrors the analogical structure of cognition (as Hofstadter and Sander argue in their book Surfaces and Essences). But this new visual form seems to resist being totally embedded in thought (ontologized) the way that idioms are.