THE MEME IS THE MESSAGE

September 30, 2021 1:34 AM

From signaling to organizing, memes as mobilizers in the age of viral media. A special report by Taraneh Azar.
posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs (12 comments total)

I'd really hoped I'd never hear the term viral media again after the last 18 months
posted by scruss at 7:38 AM on September 30, 2021 [4 favorites]

Symbolic language is trouble, there must be a better way.
posted by GoblinHoney at 9:05 AM on September 30, 2021 [3 favorites]

Symbolic language is trouble, there must be a better way.

🤷🏻‍♂️
posted by Big Al 8000 at 10:44 AM on September 30, 2021 [7 favorites]

The theory is that soon, human vernacular will start sounding like Tamarian linguistics, being only meme references.
Squidward, his face handsome.
Padme, in the bottom right panel?
Bottom text, when the penguin's background is red.
Drake, in a puffy jacket, points and smiles.
posted by bartleby at 12:42 PM on September 30, 2021 [12 favorites]

Smudge, his face unmoved by two ladies yelling.
posted by briank at 1:02 PM on September 30, 2021 [5 favorites]

Shaka when the walls fell.
posted by Grangousier at 1:14 PM on September 30, 2021

One of the most annoying of these symbols is Pepe the Frog, who started out as an innocent symbol, became adopted by outright hate groups, was disowned by its creator, got listed as a white supremacy symbol by various hate group watch organizations, and now some (including its creator) are trying to reclaim it. Me, I'm just sick of the image entirely and want it to go away now.
posted by JHarris at 1:33 PM on September 30, 2021 [1 favorite]

From the report:

Eric Levitz describes millennials and Gen Z as ubiquitously misanthropic “dystopian socialists,” which is both hilarious and holds up well. That is quite the burn, NYMag — you actually nailed it.

“You can sort of see a generational battle to define who is the naive audience and who is the knowing audience,” explains Keir Milburn, U.K.-based lecturer in political economy and organization and author of the 2019 book “Generation Left,” of meme culture. Zoomers are digital natives in that few remember a time before the internet. So internet culture is yes, real-life culture, but internet culture is especially Gen Z culture.

posted by spamandkimchi at 2:58 PM on September 30, 2021 [1 favorite]

“People in QAnon trust the grainy memes that their friends are posting more than the things that are being said on the evening news. And it’s almost like … the worse something looks, the less polished it is, the more likely it is to be true, because it’s coming from this alternate universe of researchers and diggers and people who assemble shards of internet rumors and old screenshots and Wikipedia pages. It’s like this forbidden knowledge that they’re accessing. And to them, that feels more real than the people in suits on the news reading off a teleprompter.”
posted by spamandkimchi at 3:02 PM on September 30, 2021 [3 favorites]

What's the context for not having pages on this site at all? Like, if you click on one of the side-bar things, it doesn't actually change the URL which makes it impossible to link to The Manny Will Not Be Televised, for instance, directly. If I wanted someone to read that, I would need to provide instructions to visit this site, tell them to page down until they see it on the side, then click on it.
posted by RobotHero at 7:23 PM on September 30, 2021 [2 favorites]

If it's a scroll-to-here link, maybe there's an anchor in the code, then if you could find that you could link to the URL + anchor.
posted by JHarris at 11:04 PM on September 30, 2021

There are separate smaller articles in the side bar, each beginning with Read:

There is no way to link to them easily but they are clickable in the sections which are accessible using the red dots in the lower right.
In Context Collapse, there is Read: Pepe The Frog and Read: The Joker
In Irony, Read: Ok Boomer and Read: Wojak and Doomer
In The Left Can't Meme Read:Kekistan
In Social Justice (The last one) There Is Read: The Manny
posted by Chrysopoeia at 3:01 AM on October 1, 2021