As a xennial, I exist on a strange cusp. Having lived both the ‘analog’ and ‘digital’ life I’ve often swung between a quest for simpler, low-noise Gen X life, and a paralysing millennial dependence on the Internet. However, the lockdown during this mad year of the pandemic has landed me firmly on the web-side of the fence. For many of us, it was the Internet that kept us tethered to sanity while we lived in our lonely islands for months. Between the despair of doomscrolling COVID-19 news and endless, pantless Zoom calls, a joke here, a meme there kept things going.
Our collective uncertainties and anxieties encapsulated neatly into those top text-bottom text macro image WFH memes reassured us that we were not in this alone. Everyone was struggling, everyone was *crie*-ing. In fact, memes have been doing this noble job of lightening many of our existential burdens for a while. Their easy form and manner have made memes so vastly popular that they may well be the most legit representations of the culture of the Internet.
But how did this fascinating, now ubiquitous phenomenon come about? To who or what do we owe this super mix of information, humour, art, and subversion? The process is as interesting as the product.
Origin story
First things first: what is a meme? The Oxford Learner’s Dictionary defines memes as “an image, a video, a piece of text, etc., that is passed very quickly from one Internet user to another, often with slight changes that make it humorous”. The word has roots in Greek words such as ‘mimeme’ or ‘mimeisthai’, meaning ‘imitation’ or ‘to imitate’.
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Although this broad-spectrum definition seems to encompass most of what we consume on the Internet today, it hasn’t always been the case. There are some definitive beginnings of this phenomenon, which psychologist and memeticist Susan Blackmore attributes to the poster boy of atheism, Richard Dawkins in her book, Meme Machine. The term first occurs in Dawkins’ famous book The Selfish Gene (1976) about evolutionary biology, where he uses it to describe some modalities of genetic transmission.
It is interesting to look at the other definition of a meme in the Oxford Learner’s Dictionary, which says a meme is “an idea that is passed from one member of society to another, not in the genes but often by people copying it.” The emphasis, in this definition, on the transmission not being genetic shows how the original context and usage (Dawkins’) have changed, although the term remains the same. It is actually demonstrative of the life-cycle of memes themselves — ideas that start as something and turn into something else. Just as French-American painter Marcel Duchamp did to Mona Lisa. In 1919, he made a cheeky version of the painting on a cheap postcard that he called L.H.O.O.K. When he added a moustache, a goatee, and witty wordplay on what was arguably the world’s most famous face, conceptual art as we know it was born. He called it ready-mades then; we call them memes now.
Child of the Internet
The form and name may have originated in Duchamp’s studio and at Dawkins’ desk, but the meme is truly the child of the Internet. Around the year 2000, when most xennials were still fighting with their dads to get that dial-up connection, obscure message boards had started spawning funny short format content that would become the precursor of memes.
Images, flash animation, snippets from video games, and demotivational posters started populating sites like Albino Blacksheep, Funnyjunk, 4chan and Reddit. The most memorable memes to have come out of these sites from the late 90s to the early 2000s were the Ugachaka Baby, LOLcats, Pepe the Frog and Rickroll, among others.
But it was the launch of Facebook in 2004 and YouTube in 2005 that truly changed the game. The ease and speed of creating and sharing that these platforms afforded not only democratised content-sharing but also changed the way we used the Internet. By the end of the first decade of the new millennium, the Internet went from being a largely formal medium of information exchange to a place of fun and entertainment.
Around 2011 these content formats came to be widely referred to as memes, and over the next decade, they became very common and continue to remain so. The top text-bottom text image macro came into full force at this time, and meme generator sites have ensured that this remains the most popular format.
In the last decade, Nyan Cat, Advice Animals, Success Kid, Doge, rage face, classical, deep-fried and movie-still macros have been among the commonest, abundantly and relentlessly flooding Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and messenger services like WhatsApp. Their simplicity — to the point of obviousness — makes them so replicable and shareable that they have crossed over into what are called dank memes.
The dank and destructive
In the memeverse, dankness is protean and often people on the far side of the xennial cusp are left wondering what some memes are all about. The Urban Dictionary defines a dank meme as “a meme in which the comedy is excessively overdone and nonsensical, to the point of being comically ironic.” While the ‘elders’ don’t get the context of some highly topical memes derived from sources after ‘their time’, the ‘youngers’ don’t get the obsessive good morning messages (which, by the way, fit the meme bill). The arcane and the absurd both get clubbed into this category of dank memes, which sometimes raise giggles and sometimes eye-rolls.
However, the subculture — or shall we say the mainstream culture — of memes is not just fun and games. There are serious questions to be raised around toxicity compounded by their virality. In the darker, troll-infested corners of the Internet, the meme becomes a potent weapon of harm and can inflict severe mental and emotional damage on its targets. Their high relatability can and does affect values and vocabularies, especially among young users.
hen most xennials were still fighting with their dads to get that dial-up connection, obscure message boards had started spawning funny short format content that would becoonal posters started populating sites like Albino Blacksheep, Funnyjunk, 4chan and Reddit. The most memorable memes to have come out of these sit
That said, there is an upside to the viral quality of (clever) memes. At a time when state censorship is beginning to pose serious problems in India and many other nations, memes are used as a medium of subversion and dissent. Done cleverly, the messaging of memes can be sharp, hard-hitting, and yet never amount to ‘implicating evidence’. Because the tools of meme-making are so easy and accessible, the art is available for anyone who cares to make it. From the #BLM movement to feminism, from queer rights to climate justice, from the CAA-NRC protests to pandemic relief, memes are used to democratically communicate ideas, to challenge authority, and perhaps in the near future will even be used to bring down entire systems of oppression.
Art or not
With so much value riding on the cultural products that are memes, could one ask if it is time to elevate it to a proper art form? (It might make Duchamp happy!) If Banksy’s meant-to-be-temporary graffiti art can find its way into museums on scooped-out walls, perhaps memes — at least the best ones — deserve to find their way into institutions too, or to be treated as commercially viable art objects.
In a recent online session organised by Avid Learning titled ‘Meme Art and Art Engagement in the Post-Internet World’, questions about unionising, monetising and copyrighting memes were raised. An argument against it is that it may destroy the very ethos of meme culture, which is free and democratic ‘art’. Any form of institutionalisation entails hierarchy and elitism, which would defeat the very purpose of memes.
Their brief shelf life and campy aesthetic notwithstanding, memes are important cultural markers of our times and their museum-isation is underway, whether we want it or not. Virtual ‘spaces’ like the Slovenian Museum of Transitory Art and, closer home, The Meme Project by the Godrej India Culture Lab are dedicated to researching and archiving memes. Real-life counterparts include exhibitions like ‘What Do You Meme?’ curated by Maisie Post in London in August 2016; ‘Two Decades of Memes’ in Queens’ Museum of the Moving Image, curated by the website Know Your Meme, in 2018; and an ongoing Meme Regime exhibition tour, curated by Anuj Nakade of Pune-based TIFA Working Studios.
Whether memes get that artsy upgrade on their evolutionary path remains to be seen, but that they will continue to exist is guaranteed.
How do we know this? Because of a reference Dawkins once made that sounds disconcertingly familiar today. He said: “In the original introduction to the word meme in the last chapter of The Selfish Gene, I did actually use the metaphor of a ‘virus’. So, when anybody talks about something going viral on the Internet, that is exactly what a meme is...”
Need I say any more about living with a virus?
The author is a culture writer and an Interfaith Studies scholar.
The Link LonkAugust 01, 2020 at 03:44PM
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From the #BLM movement to the pandemic, memes go for the jugular with their wit - The Hindu
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