Memes will be the heat death of civilization

finesse said:
Some of it were things you didn't notice growing. I'm always amazed to find out how many middle aged and younger people didn't realized that the Kountry Kitchens and Kountry Klubs and such were all Klan friend and/or owned.
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I've never heard of those things but I would wonder about the Ks. I was always suspicious about Krispy Kreme.
 
It doesn't address your larger point, but it sounds to me like the Know Your Meme website could be an invaluable resource to you.

It's particularly thorough about the origin, meaning, evolution of meaning, and usage of individual memes.

Here's just one example from the front page: Jon Hamm Dancing In the Club Scene / Turn the Lights Off Trend | Know Your Meme

You still have to actually find the meme you're looking for in their database, but once you do you'll know all there is to know about it.
 
Should clarity always be the goal? That seems awfully boring for anything other than tech manuals. I try my best to have some sort of hidden joke or double meaning, if only for myself, in most of the posts I make.

No, I don't care if all of you are tired of it.
 
Ddseddse said:
It doesn't address your larger point, but it sounds to me like the Know Your Meme website could be an invaluable resource to you.

It's particularly thorough about the origin, meaning, evolution of meaning, and usage of individual memes.

Here's just one example from the front page: Jon Hamm Dancing In the Club Scene / Turn the Lights Off Trend | Know Your Meme

You still have to actually find the meme you're looking for in their database, but once you do you'll know all there is to know about it.
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I appreciate the suggestion; I was aware of the site but maybe I don't use it enough. But it's not a panacea. It's indeterminate. That page lists multiple different kinds of meanings. It says, at the top:

"as a way of representing the feeling of coping with negative circumstances, "dancing through the pain" and general feelings of desiring something more from life,"

But then later, " @makoandkonasmom posted a version of the meme using the dancing clip to represent the feeling of joy when you pet a dog, "

And then

@thatgingerbrandon posted a version of the meme referencing a scene in Final Destination 2 in which one of the characters is killed by logs falling off the back of a truck. In the meme, the man sees the logs, embraces his death, and then the video cuts to the dance scene, garnering over 2.7 million views in a day.

Those are three very different meanings, so if the meme is being used variously to communicate all three depending on context, then I think it illustrates my point very well. The first is ennui. The second is zen. The third is a form of stoicism. Language is much cleaner as a form of communication. As I said, memes are as much intertextually artistic as they are communicative.
 
finesse said:
Should clarity always be the goal?
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No, poetry exists. Great art is usually ambiguous to some degree.

But if you're trying to communicate the truth about vaccines, clarity very much should be the goal. Pretty much all political discourse should strive for clarity.
 
superrific said:
Boy is this a predictable and errant response. My personal gripe is that I don't understand them. My larger point, though, is undeniable: we are becoming so polarized that it is often difficult for different groups to communicate. And while memes aren't solely responsible by any stretch, they are contributors.

Again, take Pepe the Frog. What does he mean? When you see a cartoon featuring Pepe, what does it mean? Pepe's presence is to obfuscate. It's to allow the cartoon to mean different things to different people, which is why they build coalitions of amorphous fluid groups. Someone who is virulently racist might take a different meaning from the cartoon as someone who is merely anti-woke (these are distinct concepts, even if they often overlap empirically). That's by design.

That is a valid complaint that isn't just me getting old.
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Gosh, if only there was some sort of widely shared cultural concept to describe the way Pepe the Frog is used... Oh wait, there is. It's called a "dog whistle."

When I use the phrase "dog whistle" are you confused? Cuz the phrase dog whistle is a meme - A discrete unit of cultural thought capable of conveying a larger concept. You understand the concept of a dog whistle, and you do not object to the term dog whistle being used.

Our culture is becoming fractured but the memes are not the fracturing agent- they are a visible byproduct. Coded language has existed for almost as long as language has existed, but you're not writing a screed on how there are too many words which can all be taken too many ways. I've never seen you pen a treatise in favor of Newspeak.

Again, you're conflating cause and effect.

Honestly you can rest easy. If my fears about generative AI are realized then individual media consumption will be so specifically tailored to the user that there will be no common frame of reference for anyone, and there will be no more memes.
 
StrangePackage said:
Gosh, if only there was some sort of widely shared cultural concept to describe the way Pepe the Frog is used... Oh wait, there is. It's called a "dog whistle."

When I use the phrase "dog whistle" are you confused? Cuz the phrase dog whistle is a meme - A discrete unit of cultural thought capable of conveying a larger concept. You understand the concept of a dog whistle, and you do not object to the term dog whistle being used.

Our culture is becoming fractured but the memes are not the fracturing agent- they are a visible byproduct. Coded language has existed for almost as long as language has existed, but you're not writing a screed on how there are too many words which can all be taken too many ways. I've never seen you pen a treatise in favor of Newspeak.

Again, you're conflating cause and effect.
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To say Pepe is just a dog whistle is to confuse effect with meaning. Here's what ChatGPT has to say:

The most accurate answer is: it doesn’t have a single meaning—and that isn’t evasive, it’s the core property.

Pepe functions as a floating signifier whose content is supplied almost entirely by context, user intent, and audience projection. Historically it has passed through several partially overlapping uses: an expression of detached irony, then nihilistic humor, then trolling, then meta-trolling (“using Pepe because people react to Pepe”), and in some contexts explicit far-right signaling. None of these ever fully displaced the others.

What unifies those uses is not a proposition but a stance: ironic distance from normative discourse. Pepe says something like “I am not playing the language game you think we’re playing,” sometimes playfully, sometimes maliciously. That stance can be weaponized, which is why it became politically charged, but the weaponization depended precisely on the lack of fixed meaning.

So when people say “it means X” (e.g., “it’s a dog whistle”), they are performing a forced semantic collapse for practical reasons—often justified ones—but they are not describing the object as it actually functioned.

If you want a clean formulation:
Pepe does not mean a thing.
Pepe marks a position relative to meaning.
 
finesse said:
Please tell me you couldn't type that last sentence with a straight face. It's not that I disagree but seriously...
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Seriously what? That's an is/ought distinction. That we ARE very, very far from the ideal doesn't mean the ideal OUGHT to be different, nor that we should strive for the ideal.
 
superrific said:
I'm not talking about propaganda. I'm talking about structural collapse of the foundations of a free society. If we can't communicate, then we can't collectively deliberate. Then society becomes internecine war. If we use memes as a foundation for generalized mockery, then we get rounds of cancellation, not understanding or constructive engagement.
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You are talking about propaganda, though, at least in part. You keep coming back to pepe the frog. That's a propaganda meme.

And to repeat my prior point: how are memes different than any form of cultural symbolism/allusions?

Cultural symbols often have myriad meanings - and different cultures approach the same set of symbols from extremely different background knowledge bases. I struggle with novels by Japanese writers because I have to learn to key in on a different set of spoken and unspoken ideas. But I also get to. And that's the point. Each new type of symbol broadens, rather than narrows, my horizons.

Ultimately, I think that you are shoehorning something you don't personally enjoy - the meme - as a metaphor for a much larger cultural shift, while also keeping one foot in the literal.

Here's why:

My great fear, like yours, is that younger generations find the long held collection of cultural symbolism and allusions to be foreign to them, and therefore as inaccessible to them as memes are to you. But that's because kids aren't reading anymore and even lack the shared experience of television/movies that we had (due in part to a glut in available stories AND shortened attention spans). We agree on that. And we agree that it will lead to a rise in fascism (as it already has). But I'd argue that you are being too literal in attributing it to the memification of society. As a symbol of larger cultural trends, sure. I get that And I'd have (and did) make the same argument in the mid 2010s. But, IMO, you are late to the game on this one.
 
superrific said:
They are intentionally obscure. They hide meaning, and require the viewer to supply it.

They are not discrete units at all. They are like packets of super-imposed meanings that can only be observed with calibrated measuring equipment. The disaster girl meme? What does it communicate? The girl is looking at a fire. Is she pleased? Did she start the fire? Is she just posing for the camera? Why is she looking away instead of watching the firefighters? Is she resigned to loss? I think the point is that all of those meanings are included. In physics terms, there are multiple eigenstates that are smeared together. Clarity is not the goal.
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That's symbolism in a nutshell. And the myriad ways that a symbol can be interpreted is what makes symbolism beautiful.
 
StrangePackage said:
Gosh, if only there was some sort of widely shared cultural concept to describe the way Pepe the Frog is used... Oh wait, there is. It's called a "dog whistle."

When I use the phrase "dog whistle" are you confused? Cuz the phrase dog whistle is a meme - A discrete unit of cultural thought capable of conveying a larger concept. You understand the concept of a dog whistle, and you do not object to the term dog whistle being used.

Our culture is becoming fractured but the memes are not the fracturing agent- they are a visible byproduct. Coded language has existed for almost as long as language has existed, but you're not writing a screed on how there are too many words which can all be taken too many ways. I've never seen you pen a treatise in favor of Newspeak.

Again, you're conflating cause and effect.

Honestly you can rest easy. If my fears about generative AI are realized then individual media consumption will be so specifically tailored to the user that there will be no common frame of reference for anyone, and there will be no more memes.
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Yes. All of this. But more than anything else, that last paragraph is where I am at as well. And it is why I believe that super is making a valid argument, but about 10 years too late.
 
sringwal said:
You are talking about propaganda, though, at least in part. You keep coming back to pepe the frog. That's a propaganda meme.

And to repeat my prior point: how are memes different than any form of cultural symbolism/allusions?

Cultural symbols often have myriad meanings - and different cultures approach the same set of symbols from extremely different background knowledge bases. I struggle with novels by Japanese writers because I have to learn to key in on a different set of spoken and unspoken ideas. But I also get to. And that's the point. Each new type of symbol broadens, rather than narrows, my horizons.

Ultimately, I think that you are shoehorning something you don't personally enjoy - the meme - as a metaphor for a much larger cultural shift, while also keeping one foot in the literal.

Here's why:

My great fear, like yours, is that younger generations find the long held collection of cultural symbolism and allusions to be foreign to them, and therefore as inaccessible to them as memes are to you. But that's because kids aren't reading anymore and even lack the shared experience of television/movies that we had (due in part to a glut in available stories AND shortened attention spans). We agree on that. And we agree that it will lead to a rise in fascism (as it already has). But I'd argue that you are being too literal in attributing it to the memification of society. As a symbol of larger cultural trends, sure. I get that And I'd have (and did) make the same argument in the mid 2010s. But, IMO, you are late to the game on this one.
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1. My understanding is that Pepe was not originally a propaganda meme. It became a propaganda meme through exactly the process I am describing/criticizing. I think it's a good example of my point. I suppose it depends on what you mean by propaganda, though.

2. I don't know if memes are different than symbols. I compared them to poems. Maybe they are similar to all symbols. But there are contexts in which symbols are useful and contexts where they are worse than nothing.

If you're saying, "super, your argument has force only because memes are more ubiquitous nowadays than other symbolic forms," I'm not sure I would object. That might be accurate. But the ubiquity is a problem.

3. Am I shoehorning something I hate and trying to turn it into a larger metaphor? I don't think I'm doing that, but if we learned anything from Freud, it's that first-person narratives -- internal or external -- are not fully authoritative. I mean, maybe.

4. I'd more readily admit that I'm talking about memes and anything that functions like a meme, with the qualities I'm focusing on. It's not memes in themselves, but what they do.
 
superrific said:
Boy is this a predictable and errant response. My personal gripe is that I don't understand them. My larger point, though, is undeniable: we are becoming so polarized that it is often difficult for different groups to communicate. And while memes aren't solely responsible by any stretch, they are contributors.

Again, take Pepe the Frog. What does he mean? When you see a cartoon featuring Pepe, what does it mean? Pepe's presence is to obfuscate. It's to allow the cartoon to mean different things to different people, which is why they build coalitions of amorphous fluid groups. Someone who is virulently racist might take a different meaning from the cartoon as someone who is merely anti-woke (these are distinct concepts, even if they often overlap empirically). That's by design.

That is a valid complaint that isn't just me getting old.
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I 'get' most memes, but I don't get Pepe the Frog either.
 
sringwal said:
My great fear, like yours, is that younger generations find the long held collection of cultural symbolism and allusions to be foreign to them, and therefore as inaccessible to them as memes are to you. But that's because kids aren't reading anymore and even lack the shared experience of television/movies that we had (due in part to a glut in available stories AND shortened attention spans). We agree on that. And we agree that it will lead to a rise in fascism (as it already has). But I'd argue that you are being too literal in attributing it to the memification of society. As a symbol of larger cultural trends, sure. I get that And I'd have (and did) make the same argument in the mid 2010s. But, IMO, you are late to the game on this one.
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Sure, I suppose. I think the uncaptioned video memes have become prominent since the pandemic, and the captioned static ones were prominent before then. But I'm hardly an expert. Am I too late? Perhaps. You'd know better than me, I think.

At least we agree that this type of cultural production is pro-fascist. That's hard for a lot of people to accept.
 
sringwal said:
That's true of all forms of language.
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I didn't bold face that. I just copied and pasted. Usually I ignore the summations at the very end because they aren't too helpful. I think the point about Pepe being a floating signifier is apt. Floating signifiers are hardly unique to memes but again, I think the anti-linguistic nature of memes amplifies the effects.
 
sringwal said:
Fun fact: today was Meme Day for our school's spirit week. By and large, it is the one day that students haven't really participated. Take that for what you will, but memes are not necessarily embraced by this generation of youth as much as they were for millenials/gen z.
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I think there are 2 reasons for what you observed today…

1) For today’s terminally-online kids, memes typically “live fast & die young”. They have a super short shelf life and so any particular meme isn’t likely to stay popular for long (except for 6 7, which may be immortal).

2) I think that for Gen Alpha, TikTok videos are their image/gif memes. Was it made clear they could do TikTok memes? (Although TikTok memes are often about audio & movement rather than a certain visual dress.)
 
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