Memes will be the heat death of civilization

[sringwal]

To be clear - I think things are much worse. AI and the death of print media, along with the devaluation of libraries make double think and the death of the field of history as we know it. Governments and corporations now have tools at their disposal that make Big Brother feel tame by comparison.

I believe that the way we understand and navigate the past is vastly different than it was 50 years ago, and half a century before that, even more so. But, 50 from now, I think that the past will, essentially, be a dead artifact, for all but a niche group. And I honestly have no idea what that will look like, but it absolutely terrifies me.

And that is why I deeply connect with Hiroshige, looking at the end of the shogun era, and the birth of modernity in Japan.

 

[sringwal]

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.)

I'm not sure that anyone who isn't a middle/high public school teacher can really understand how quickly things are unraveling. The IB programme is all I really believe in now, and I fear that it will soon be viewed as indoctrination, and banned in the states.

 

[finesse]

Not sure that it's germane but if you really want to examine indoctrination in schools in the US, check out the late 50s.

 

[sringwal]

Not sure that it's germane but if you really want to examine indoctrination in schools in the US, check out the late 50s.

I'm not as concerned about indoctrination in schools. Teachers can't get students to focus enough for that. Social media is educating our youth, and anything from the 1950s pails in comparison. Post-covid, students simply stopped trying. The vast majority of this years high school seniors will graduate having never written a complete essay without the use of AI. And three pages of reading, in class, is now a big ask.

 

[finesse]

Put better spellcheck on your bucket list.

Not sure the white supremacist, Christian Nation, John Birchers were an improvement, especially since they had almost no kickback at any level.

 

[donbosco]

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.

Grew up hearing that the Marlboro pack stood for KKK…



Turns out the father of someone that we both know designed it. Not true.

 

[sringwal]

Put better spellcheck on your bucket list.

Not sure the white supremacist, Christian Nation, John Birchers were an improvement, especially since they had almost no kickback at any level.

Fair. But kids are hooked up to 24/7 propaganda machines sending them a variety of deeply disturbing images. Right now. What will it be like a decade from now, when this generation become the teachers of the future? And in 20-30 years, when they are dictating policy?

 

[donbosco]

PS…very few students finish books at present.

They can be tricked however by scanning chapters, posting them to a LMS, and requiring them to read chapter by chapter.

 

[Ddseddse]

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.

You're going to hate this, but foundationally I don't see a lot of daylight between memes and words. Both are packets of meaning. Both can be ambiguous and open to interpretation. The meaning of both can and does change over time. The meaning of both can and does vary by the social context and experience of the consumer.

You can argue one difference is that words have the support of their fellows words surrounding them on either side to add context and clarify meaning, and I'll agree there. But it that really "worse" or just "different"?

I will say that the aforementioned isolation and lack of surrounding context fuels what I believe is your biggest complaint, which is the speed and fluidity with which their meaning changes and morphs in real time. As well as their ability to take on different parallel meanings in different social contexts in the same moment in time.