In this fragmented world of ours, memes an invite to play
OVER the weekend, as I was watching a video by my colleagues Adriana Usero and Danielle Kunitz that walks viewers through 25 years of memes, I found myself feeling something rather unexpected: nostalgic.
It’s not so much that their journey through the junk shop of internet ephemera made me feel old, although it’s certainly been a while since some of these phrases and images crossed my mind. Instead, it’s that watching through 2 1/2 decades of internet games made me both anxious and hopeful about the fragmentation of culture, and the ability of weird and wonderful things to survive in an increasingly corporate media environment.
Joe Randazzo, former editor of the Onion, made what is probably the best case against memes here in the Washington Post as part of the Outlook section’s annual “Spring Cleaning” feature, where writers recommend ideas they’d like to do away with.
“What used to be an amusing byproduct of internet use has mutated into something horrible: an insatiable parasite that impairs its host’s judgment, rendering it totally useless. Instead of acting as an organic cultural touchstone, the modern meme – from LOL, which hasn’t been used to signify physical laughter since 1997, to Lolcats – now sucks the joy out of our interconnectedness,” he argues. “It destroys uniqueness. Once an ‘enjoyable thing’ becomes a ‘meme’, we stop enjoying the thing for its own sake, but consume and regurgitate our enjoyment of it as a symbol of hipness, as if to say: ‘I am aware of this thing’s popularity – therefore I, too, exist!’”
But as pop culture has become increasingly fragmented, I’ve come to cherish those moments of recognition and fluency more and more.
Loving a television show, movie, novel, musician or even a really good joke can sometimes feel like being one of the few remaining speakers of a lost language, or frankly, a dialect that never had that many speakers to begin with. For all that I’m a professional writer who loves The Americans, for example, I’ve sometimes felt as if no matter how much I try to explain why I adore the show, and what I think other people might get out of watching it, nothing I’m saying is truly comprehensible to people who are caught up in other objects of devotion. And that’s fine! In a lot of cases, it’s terrific that so much other truly distinctive, excellent art is getting distributed and finding audiences. But we can still be a little bit lonely in our bliss.
The number of remaining cultural events that actually unite us – or at least get us all together to consume the same thing – is dwindling. And while I enjoy the Super Bowl, and Star Wars movies, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I recognise that these things have in common a kind of prepackaged corporate glossiness. Even the big controversies and debates that emerge from these spectacles are relatively predictable.
Memes are, by contrast, one of the last shared cultural experiences that have room for genuine weirdness. Sure, plenty of them get picked up by morning shows or turned into going concerns, a la I Can Has Cheezburger, which started as a meme and is now the flagship site in a comedy website company. But watching, say, Gary Brolsma rock out to Dragostea Din Tei, or seeing people turn Harambe, a gorilla killed at the Cincinnati Zoo this year, into an icon capable of expressing all the strangeness of the 2016 presidential campaign and life in 2016 in general, still feels genuinely, delightfully eccentric.
And sure, there’s plenty of bandwagoning and unoriginal thinking, not to mention hipster social signalling, that coalesces around memes. Even the downsides of memes Randazzo identified, though, make me feel a little bit better. It’s nice to know that people will rush to get informed about and become fluent in something that’s not prepackaged for them by Warner Bros. or the Disney behemoth, that oddities can emerge from the smallest corners of the Internet and excite everyone enough to participate in their silliness.
We may be more tethered to the internet than ever before, but memes are a continually renewed invitation to everyone to come out and play.
Watch the video 25 Years of the Internet in 25 Memes at http://wapo.st/2bQDJV9.