superrific
Master of the ZZLverse
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A longish post. The title captures the meaning but is exaggerated for effect.
1. I hate memes. I've registered my complaints about them before; this post isn't about that. They are usually inscrutable to me, but that's not a reason not to use them except when conversing with me directly. Otherwise it's a me problem.
But I also think that the reason I struggle is that memes are superpositions of meaning and this is important. What collapses them into a shared meaning is a set of social and psychological prior understandings that form the interpretive context. If you don't share the understandings -- or for some reason can't access them -- then the meme looks like a convex mirror. It's not that I can't figure out any meanings. It's that there are many possible ones and I don't know how to sort the ones that are intended from those that are not.
2. In some respects, memes are intentionally obscure this way. Let's analogize them to paintings. The first generation of memes -- static images with captions -- are like representational art in the 19th century. Before the romantics and impressionists, painting was focused on an attempt to reproduce reality. Like ordinary language or even technical language. In art, the impressionists took liberties with the natural world to create vibes, and those liberties usually took the form of imprecision. Different people could see different things, or at least get different feelings. Nonetheless, you knew that you were looking at lilies or a starry night. The newest generation of memes -- the video clips without any context -- are much more like abstract art. Maybe not quite Jackson Pollock, but at least cubism. If you're not told beforehand that you're looking at a mariachi band or the aftermath of a brutal bombing, you're probably not going to be able to extract that from the art itself.
3. Memes are thus intentionally obfuscating. They replace explicit signifiers with assumed, pre-conceptualized norms. That is why, I think, people find them fun. They are like intertextual literature. They are like Tarantino dialogue. A classic scene from Pulp Fiction is where Jules and Vincent are washing their hands and Jules does a better job. There's crisp dialogue which I won't reproduce in toto, but think about the line where Vincent says, "maybe if I had Lava or something." That line works because of the Lava reference. But you also have to know what Lava is. My son had no idea what that meant without me explaining it to him.
4. But fun isn't the same as communicative. The Lava line fails to communicate its meaning without underlying knowledge. So too with memes. And in siloed semantic environments, that loss of communicative effect can be critical. Does anyone here know what Pepe The Frog means? I don't. I just know that white supremacists and alt-right types use it, so if I see it, I know to be suspicious. That's terrible discourse. It's possible that the person is making a legit point, but because s/he chose a meme to express it, liberals can't understand it. We can't sort a good Pepe point from a bad one. We just go with a "rebuttable" presumption that they are all bad, and that rebuttable is largely theoretical.
5. Thomas Pynchon had an idea about the heat death of communication. It was that language is essentially thermodynamic, and each use of language increases the entropy of the system. I find that loose metaphor instructive. There is a sense in which that's true, right? If I tell you that I feel sad, I'm inherently asserting a meaning for the word sad. I'm saying, this mental state and sadness are the same. But you don't know my mental state, and anyway, maybe you think of sadness slightly differently. But now, your understanding has changed a little bit. Apparently the meaning of sadness is broad enough to describe my mental state.
We can see this with linguistic shifts. At some point in the last decade, it became accepted that "reticent" and "reluctant" are synonyms. They are not. To the extent that reticence is reluctance, it is a specific form -- i.e. reluctance to speak. But it's not always about reluctance; reticence is more a description of the world (or precisely the behavior of a person) than an assertion about causality. Alas, we've lost that meaning. If I say that I'm reticent to mow my lawn, who the fuck knows what I am saying. It is just reluctance? If so, why didn't I say that? Maybe I mean something different. Or if people use it that way too commonly, then the original meaning of the word just gets lost. We no longer have a word to describe silence that manifests in a certain way without characterizing it, without assigning causality. That is a loss of meaning.
Do this enough times, and communication becomes difficult. If I want to say that something is paradoxical, meaning that it has no truth value -- well, it's hard to say that, because paradox has come to be a synonym for "ironically." It's been Morrisetted.
6. It seems to me that memes accelerate this process rapidly. If you tell me that my idea is implausible, that I can understand and fix. If what you mean is that it's probably a lie, then I can understand that too. But when you tell me that my idea is Jan Brady, what the fuck does that accomplish? That could mean hundreds of different things. You've no longer provided a critique. You've no longer made any attempt to communicate. All you have done is exclude. You've divided the world into "ideas I like" and "ideas I mock" without any explanation.
Put differently, suppose we tried to create an entire language based on memes. How would that function? I think it would be an utter catastrophe. And while we aren't at that point, not nearly at that point, I think we are trending in that direction.
1. I hate memes. I've registered my complaints about them before; this post isn't about that. They are usually inscrutable to me, but that's not a reason not to use them except when conversing with me directly. Otherwise it's a me problem.
But I also think that the reason I struggle is that memes are superpositions of meaning and this is important. What collapses them into a shared meaning is a set of social and psychological prior understandings that form the interpretive context. If you don't share the understandings -- or for some reason can't access them -- then the meme looks like a convex mirror. It's not that I can't figure out any meanings. It's that there are many possible ones and I don't know how to sort the ones that are intended from those that are not.
2. In some respects, memes are intentionally obscure this way. Let's analogize them to paintings. The first generation of memes -- static images with captions -- are like representational art in the 19th century. Before the romantics and impressionists, painting was focused on an attempt to reproduce reality. Like ordinary language or even technical language. In art, the impressionists took liberties with the natural world to create vibes, and those liberties usually took the form of imprecision. Different people could see different things, or at least get different feelings. Nonetheless, you knew that you were looking at lilies or a starry night. The newest generation of memes -- the video clips without any context -- are much more like abstract art. Maybe not quite Jackson Pollock, but at least cubism. If you're not told beforehand that you're looking at a mariachi band or the aftermath of a brutal bombing, you're probably not going to be able to extract that from the art itself.
3. Memes are thus intentionally obfuscating. They replace explicit signifiers with assumed, pre-conceptualized norms. That is why, I think, people find them fun. They are like intertextual literature. They are like Tarantino dialogue. A classic scene from Pulp Fiction is where Jules and Vincent are washing their hands and Jules does a better job. There's crisp dialogue which I won't reproduce in toto, but think about the line where Vincent says, "maybe if I had Lava or something." That line works because of the Lava reference. But you also have to know what Lava is. My son had no idea what that meant without me explaining it to him.
4. But fun isn't the same as communicative. The Lava line fails to communicate its meaning without underlying knowledge. So too with memes. And in siloed semantic environments, that loss of communicative effect can be critical. Does anyone here know what Pepe The Frog means? I don't. I just know that white supremacists and alt-right types use it, so if I see it, I know to be suspicious. That's terrible discourse. It's possible that the person is making a legit point, but because s/he chose a meme to express it, liberals can't understand it. We can't sort a good Pepe point from a bad one. We just go with a "rebuttable" presumption that they are all bad, and that rebuttable is largely theoretical.
5. Thomas Pynchon had an idea about the heat death of communication. It was that language is essentially thermodynamic, and each use of language increases the entropy of the system. I find that loose metaphor instructive. There is a sense in which that's true, right? If I tell you that I feel sad, I'm inherently asserting a meaning for the word sad. I'm saying, this mental state and sadness are the same. But you don't know my mental state, and anyway, maybe you think of sadness slightly differently. But now, your understanding has changed a little bit. Apparently the meaning of sadness is broad enough to describe my mental state.
We can see this with linguistic shifts. At some point in the last decade, it became accepted that "reticent" and "reluctant" are synonyms. They are not. To the extent that reticence is reluctance, it is a specific form -- i.e. reluctance to speak. But it's not always about reluctance; reticence is more a description of the world (or precisely the behavior of a person) than an assertion about causality. Alas, we've lost that meaning. If I say that I'm reticent to mow my lawn, who the fuck knows what I am saying. It is just reluctance? If so, why didn't I say that? Maybe I mean something different. Or if people use it that way too commonly, then the original meaning of the word just gets lost. We no longer have a word to describe silence that manifests in a certain way without characterizing it, without assigning causality. That is a loss of meaning.
Do this enough times, and communication becomes difficult. If I want to say that something is paradoxical, meaning that it has no truth value -- well, it's hard to say that, because paradox has come to be a synonym for "ironically." It's been Morrisetted.
6. It seems to me that memes accelerate this process rapidly. If you tell me that my idea is implausible, that I can understand and fix. If what you mean is that it's probably a lie, then I can understand that too. But when you tell me that my idea is Jan Brady, what the fuck does that accomplish? That could mean hundreds of different things. You've no longer provided a critique. You've no longer made any attempt to communicate. All you have done is exclude. You've divided the world into "ideas I like" and "ideas I mock" without any explanation.
Put differently, suppose we tried to create an entire language based on memes. How would that function? I think it would be an utter catastrophe. And while we aren't at that point, not nearly at that point, I think we are trending in that direction.
