Meme-mongering

My last post's rant against the viral goddess-attitude opened up a tangent that I wanted to to explore a bit more: memes.

The ephemera-oriented humanities scholar in me is fascinated by memes. They rapidly disseminate culture, they evolve quickly as they do so, and they very soon become subjects of their own discussion. They're a very relevant medium (among many others) by which we write and read culture, and for that reason alone I have always felt that it should go without saying for the literary humanities approach to encompass this kind of cultural artifact.

First, a digression is necessary to set up a bit of backstory:

Year Zero

Quite a few years ago, I had a significant passion for the then-current Nine Inch Nails Year Zero ARG that was taking shape through the combined efforts of people all over the world. The multimedia, immersive, global, self-creating nature of it was exactly the kind of thing I felt compelled to focus on in my graduate work (though that was still a few years down the road), and it felt like an exciting new direction that the humanities' literary branch (best known by restrictive terms like 'Literature' or 'English') could follow. Later, when I started to dabble in the literary-theoretical side of the more ephemeral and digital textual experiences that today's human culture is rich with, this ARG inspired the strongest scholarly passion inside me that I've ever experienced.

It was particularly captivating to my twenty-something self, highly susceptible to resentment-mongering and eager to protest against the political injustices of the oughties. Participating in the ARG was more than interacting with a textual experience: it was being part of a real movement with real objectives for achieving a better world. It became a cause that both grew and spread its message in the methodology of our time: virally. The catchphrase of the movement was "Art is Resistance," inspiring people to realize their voices could be heard, and that these voices could be powerful.

Year Zero: Art is Resistance

The indignance seemed to be about the voice and opinion of "the people" being ignored, and the movement was for taking back power, taking back the democratic voice. But the hype became more about the hype than the message, or more about the idea of a message than any actual message substance. People saw the phrase "Art is Resistance" as an epiphany-in-itself, as some great truth unlocked and now known. But the phrase was meant to inspire action, not serve as an action on its own. "You have a voice: use it, be heard." Okay... great? What's the actual message? The struggle was for the voice, but there was no message in the voice. It was a movement without awareness of its own meaning, a rallying cry without any semantic logic.

Malevolent Virus

Art is Resistance is essentially an example of a well-meaning meme with ambitions of positive social impact, that had limited success due to the very nature of memes as shallow signifiers whose meaning (if any) becomes stripped away in viral transmission.

The bitchess meme, though, has the thinnest of well-intentioned(?) disguises. Its unselfconscious fight-injustice-with-injustice approach merely replaces the perceived problem with a rephrasing/redirecting of that same problem. It's another arena where one group is elevated through degrading another—the old privilege quandary. Again, if we worked toward a society that measured the value of things objectively rather than relationally, far fewer people would be irrevocably damaged.

It's easy for causes to go viral these days thanks to the internet. But in practice, the things that are most viral become memes that are unencumbered by any real substance. Just take any meme, suppress the automatic omg-so-true response, and strip it down to its essence.

Saying that hard-to-handle women know their worth, for example, is pretty much like saying "You have worth; claim it, be respected."

And the ones demanding loyalty: "You deserve blind and unquestioning loyalty. You can do no wrong, and whatever attitudes and ideals you hold [which, incidentally, are irrelevant for some reason], all people everywhere should espouse them."

It's like a TL;DR without the TL even being offered.

The whole concept of "deserving" in these memes (which isn't explicit in the two examples I've used but certainly appears abundantly enough) is a non-sequitur. Memes have a universal appeal, but the idea of deserving is a context-dependent concept specific to the individual.  You deserve this implies that Somebody is malevolently trying to prevent you from having it. That's just not the case. There is no such thing as a unilateral interaction. Where there are humans, there are always multiple perspectives and sides.

Memes are like a virus: they replicate themselves, spread quickly, and can be more resilient than facts. Don't be that person.

Translation: Men's feelings mean nothing, women are infallible,
and the onus of making things work is purely the man's responsibility.

Book vs. Movie: The Eternal Struggle

This is something I've touched on before, but I wanted to devote a bit more time to rounding out my thoughts on media elitism. It also lets me foray into non-issues unrelated to relationship status, which is something I had intended for this blog right from the start.

The other day I met a book-loving friend for coffee, and conversation turned to what we were currently reading. I spent many years following my graduate degree in an anti-reading stupor, largely fueled by my graduate work on the multimedia experiences that I strongly feel constitute a modern sense of "reading." It's all about the way we consume stories and culture, after all, and the frustrating focus on beating dead books served only to alienate me from the medium. But I've recently rekindled (heh heh) my reading through the acquisition of an eReader, and happened to have cracked open The Road the morning of our coffee meeting.

"I saw the movie... I'm not so sure about the book yet," I began.

"Oh, the book is way better. The movie was pretty bad."

"Huh," I replied. "I consider movies and books to be separate textual experiences, separate textual artifacts. I really liked the movie." It was my polite way of saying that I discounted his opinion.

"Oh, well put,"—trying to recover his credibility here—"I think I just don't get film."

But the conversation continued to other "failed" movie adaptations of books. I listened as he expounded on how specific adaptations were not well done, all related in a tone of complete objectivity. I didn't bother to argue; in fact, I didn't bother to say anything, just let him ramble on while I tried to keep most of the smirk out of my smile. Yes. You do not "get" film. Your mistake is in trying to do so.

On the one hand, this is the type of unattractive attitude that reinforces my single lifestyle—but that's not what this is about. This is about that frustratingly nonsensical spectrum of enjoyability that people place things upon. The need to compare, to create a hierarchy, to weigh apples and oranges against each other and determine which is better. It is all pure illogic; that is the only objectivity that can be determined.

I love film as a medium because it plays on many senses to tell a story. A good soundtrack can manipulate my emotions like nothing else, to name just one aspect. And it does all this in a convenient allotment of time. Seeing a movie in the theatre adds the fantastic dimension of being part of a collective readership, a shared experience. What's not to love?

Let's take an example that my book-loving friend might understand. Say there's a book written in another language, and translated to English. A literal translation is not going to be enjoyable; the story has to be retold using different language conventions. In this example, we're only translating from words to other words. What can you possibly expect for a translation from written page to silver screen?

I'm not saying that movies are better, or that books are less multidimensional. I'm saying it's not a matter for comparison, and each should be considered on its own merit.