Depending on who’s asking, a meme is a novel evolutionary concept, a complex cultural phenomenon, of a picture with a writing in Impact font, white-filled, with a black border.
Topic 5, at the conclusion of our ONL journey, discusses briefly what we have learned, and asks us to put our conclusions in meme form.
What is a meme? Richard Dawkins coined the term in 1976, and explains it very well in his popular book, The Selfish Gene. It comes from the greek “mimesis”, which means imitation, but it’s written to look like the work “gene”. Dawkins defines it as a self-replicating unit, the sole purpose of which is to transmit itself. Whe talks about a selfish gene, he postulates that life is not the perpetuation of as species, or of a population, but its the race of single genes in replicating themselves as much and for as long as possible, and the host just happens to evolve for its own better survival, as a vessel for the genes.
Dawkins and others took the concept from gene to meme, in order to encompass the transmission of culture: a meme is a unit of culture (a feeling, a citation, a pun) that perpetuates itself, sometimes in a viral-like manner, long after the initial host has died. “Cogito ergo sum” is basically Descartes’s meme, living through centuries thanks to us listening, speaking, and writing: and it has been changed and adapted in a billion of variations and jokes. The reason is that it’s much more than a piece of written word: it’s a feeling of knowledge, it’s a sense of belonging. It preserves itself and it evolves, and most of all, it spreads.
Now, I’d like to discuss a meme format that was used by my group for the final assignment: the Distracted Boyfriend.
It comes from a stock photo, picturing a guy, glancing at a girl in a red dress, while the girl who accompanies him takes notice and looks hurt. Its first meme version was made on January 30th, 2017, to jockingly portray musician Phil Collins “looking at pop music” and ignoring the prog genre, which was his main genre until a certain time. This humurously hints at how prog fans consider him a sellout, for making popular productions, instead of keeping to an obscure and difficult genre (whose fan base tends to be quite snobby).
Immediately (February to August), the format was used in a thousand other variation, and, since it was born in 2017, it was soon called out on its sexism, for playing on the trope of the man who cannot control himself when a pretty skirt meets his gaze. Give it a few months, and the gender bent version of the same stock photo, with the same models, was found, and equality was restored in the form of the Distracted Girlfriend Meme.
The reason I wrote this long description, was to contestualize the meme: the interesting aspects of its use in this course were, to me, two:
- my group mate who had the idea of using it, initially set it wrong, by not attributing the writings to the correct members of the love triangle; we corrected it during the group session.
- a member of another group called out the meme as sexist, much like the general public did in the summer od 2017.
Since I am an unapologetic millennial nerd, meme-making culture is very much embedded in my daily life. I browse reddit, I belong to meme-making groups on facebook, etc, so my interest was piqued by watching members of different cultures/generation face the comprehension and the making of a meme, with different degrees of success.
The assignment was, in my opinion, perfect: it was asked of us to portray not only a feeling given by the course, but to set it to be transmitted to the following iteration of the course. And by using the meme, which is the modern vessel of virality, and the ultimate symbol of the digital residency.
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