Too Much Nick

Think piece I don’t have the energy to write but maybe you do:

Internet memes seem to be moving towards the smallest sub-cultural groups possible and catching on that way.

- I made Judgmental Bookseller Ostrich as a joke on how there was starting to be an advice animal for every possible field/major/career.

- People who didn’t care about Ryan Gosling care once there’s a blog of him talking about a field of stat-based library science all of 200 people have a degree in.

- Shit Girls Say became Shit every possible racial, religious, and sexual identity say or have said to them.

Like, now it’s not enough for things to be universally funny? If they are micro-funny I feel super-special that someone made them Just For Me and I’m obligated to share/love them?

So memes are getting bigger by getting smaller? The hyper-specification of internet humor? Identity-based memetics? Anybody?

Agreed: Memes are getting bigger by getting smaller. Memes are becoming platforms for audience-targeted humor. Advice animals remain culturally relevant longer than LOLcats, because each reader can more easily home in on the advice animals that appeal to her. Same with the Goslings, etc.

Why this shift? First, our tools are getting more sophisticated. Aggregators like Metafilter, blogs and Digg are being replaced by Reddit, which lets people break down their reading experience into subreddits by topic, and Tumblr, which lets people subscribe to blogs (encouraging more loyalty to single-topic blogs that they otherwise wouldn’t remember to visit daily) and easily spin off their own blogs. (Twitter does both of these on a smaller scale.) YouTube is more useful now that everyone can afford a decent camera.

Second (and in a virtuous cycle with point 1), normal people are getting savvier about the internet. Every aspiring comedian knows to make YouTube sketches instead of just hoping their improv group gets discovered. Social sharing (via Twitter, FB and Tumblr) means a video about what white girls say to black girls will more easily reach the people who recognize the trope, and it also makes normal people derive some pleasure out of passing along culture, which used to be this thing that only nerds did. Sites have filled every part of the nerd-to-normal spectrum, so there are millions of people out there who think that 9GAG or Memebase invented everything, unaware that it (almost) all trickled up from Reddit, Tumblr, the advice meme generators, 4chan, MLKSHK, Something Awful, BuzzFeed, etc.

Third, there are people actively trying to create new franchises. BuzzFeed is exceptional at this. (Digression: They come up with some really clever new stuff, while keeping the site palatable to a decently mainstream crowd. I hope they develop some interesting ways for audiences to filter out what they don’t care about, making them a platform that could compete with Reddit, as opposed to just competing with blogs.) Inventive blogs can accidentally create whole meme genres, as The Hairpin did with Women Laughing Alone With Salad, inspiring the stock photo cliché meme trope.

Not really important, but: What do we call these memes that can contain memes? Metamemes? Or is that precluded by the constant use of “meta” to mean “self-referential”? “Meme tropes”? “Megamemes”? “Meme genres”? UGH

Also: Am I missing some examples of three layers of nesting? Obviously the Ryan Gosling Hey Girl meme contains blogs that contain posts, but individual blog posts don’t really count as “memes”, just pieces of a meme, right?

Also note how every word in this area of thought gets misused. “Meme” means several contradictory things to different people, “meta” is, as I said, ruined, and I almost made an “Inception” reference earlier, even though “Inception” was about planting ideas, not about the self-reference that it’s come to symbolize (particularly on Reddit).

Jan

2012

54 notes