Memes are Lazy Art - An Opinion from 2012

The famous, inquisitive African child and his delightful commentary on the absurdity of the "developed" world. This is one that I actually quite like.

I don't really get memes.  Many people are particularly fond of this form of expression.  Some of my best friends, even my beloved Michelle are hooked on these things.  For those of you who don't know what a meme is, it is a replicating piece of culture that mutates (evolves/devolves).  Now, this is an extremely narrow definition of the idea, but for the purpose of this essay, one just needs to know that the term meme has basically been mutated, to mean that people take a photo and type some text over that top and...that's it (an "image macro" so to speak).  Don't get me wrong, there are some clever memes out there.  Occasionally, Michelle will show me a good one or I'll see one on facebook, but most are decidedly, not funny.

I don't know exactly when the first Internet meme was invented, but the first I remember was the classic, So-and-So Ate My Balls pages from the mid-90's.  It all started with Mr. T Ate my Balls.  Basically, it was websites filled with photos of celebrities and characters talking about eating balls.  It may not sound funny, but at 14, these were genius.  Here's an example, using a modern image-macro template:

This is muti-layered meta-joke, based upon an earlier joke you've probably never heard of.

They were crude in not just their subject matter, but also their execution.  The formula was simple: upload a photo into paint, add a text bubble, type something about eating balls, then post it on your website full of other balls-eating related content.  In 1996, when it was much more difficult to virally spread an online joke, the popularity of such a concept was quite impressive.  The memes were not themselves funny, but the absurdity of seeing Gary Coleman in the midst of a ravenous addiction to the oral consumption of testicles, was a breathe of fresh air from the situational based humor of the time (Whoopie Goldberg is a CEO,  Whoopie Goldberg is a Basketball coach,  Whoopie Goldberg befriends a dinosaur...ok, maybe absurdity was starting to return.).  This was in the days before the neo-dadaist movement of the 2000's with Family Guy, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, or other "random humor" shows were big.  The fact that they were not funny, made them funny; and that was the joke: a viral cultural phenomenon that itself was a meta-joke, a commentary upon a joke that wasn't even funny the first time it was told.  A modern take on the chicken crossing the road.

Around the same time as this was another of these early Internet memes, the hamsterdance.  It portrayed four animated .gif images of dancing rodents, set to a song from Disney's Robin Hood.  I'd first come across it in an online chat room around 1999 or 2000 (for you youngins, before there was facebook, people would join groups for similar interests and send texts to each other for hours), finding it amusing, I started setting it as our school computers' web browser homepage.  Much like "ate my balls" memes, these morphed into other groups of animated .gifs dancing to music.  (Catdance, jesusdance, dancing babies, you name it, they were all dancing in 2000.)  Note that this is pre-flash, everything was purely html and thus rudimentarily done.  It was the simplicity of the technology that allowed these variations to spread so quickly.  I think hamsterdance was a turning point for Internet culture, showing that the Internet was a medium for mass production and distribution of ideas, that was ever changing and evolving.  Also, there was money in it.

Hamsterdance merchandise, including shirts and coffee mugs and calendars and all that started selling like mad.  An extended remix of the 10 second hamsterdance jingle was even reached number five on the Australian singles chart (number 2 in Britain).  People latched onto this idea that a trifle could make money and even more importantly, variations on trifles can mean something.

The technology improved and the flash player made online animation a product that could be easily and quickly viewed, but with the growing ability of C++ to make really anything, animators and creative types with a knowledge of programming began creating sites like Homestar Runner and rathergood.com to show off their talents.  It was a golden age for animation; one didn't need a distributor to show off their art and using the growth of internet advertising and merchandising, one could do it for a living.  All one needed was ability and some luck.  Memes began dying out as the tastes for internet culture became more sophisticated. Simply, the average person was not adept at making cartoons.  For five years, the average internet user was mostly a consumer, not a creator.  (a more accurate portrait is that most focused their creative attentions on the simpler, web-design and blog-creation.)

A velociraptor, who philosophically ponders whatever a person writes on top of the image.

The tide seemed to change after the rise of the LOLcat.  Sometime around 2006, image macros of cats, superimposed with grammatically incorrect leet sayings (cats can't speak well you see), broke out of the message boards and into the general public, and the internet meme was reborn.  The beauty of this was its utter-simplicity.  All one needed was a photo of a cute cat and paint, then boom, instant contribution to internet culture:

From conception to posting, this took me exactly three minutes and 17 seconds.  Though this one admittedly, isn't very good.

I never found the LOLcat thing to be amusing, but more annoying.  I did enjoy the cute photos of pets now and then, but the sayings didn't strike me as clever.  Being an English major, I felt that people should at least be able to spell simple words like "is" correctly.  It had been ten years since I'd had my balls eaten, so the return of this mass-produced commentary on the simplicity of creating mass-media was already a tired concept; and worse, the irony was lost.  It may be elitist of me to say it, but by the time the mass populace caught up with this kind of absurdity, I had moved on.

This one only took 46 seconds to make.

LOLcats were followed by Fail-memes (or maybe preceded by, it is hard to trace the origins of these things).  Fail-memes were just a bunch of photos of failures, with simply "fail" written on them.  It was an even more simplified way to create a picture joke.  It required no thought in both creation or viewing.  The hardware needed to see and make them were the same.  Mix this with facebook and its ability to share and spread culture quickly and you have an instantly gratifying exchange from producer to consumer.  There isn't really a middleman and grows through word of mouth.  This is one of the most democratic art-forms in the world.

People spend endless hours making and viewing these rudimentary forms of expression.  Valuable work time around the world is lost to blindly scrolling down pages of these variations upon themes, in some sort of Skinnerian reinforcement of finding the 1 out of every 250 that actually generates a laugh.  The internet is now polluted with literally millions of these images and finding one that may have had an original idea is nearly impossible.  When anybody with a computer can not only make something, but expose it to the masses in less than a minute, does it have value?

The evolution of current photo macros are fascinating.  It is a short history (but a dense one given the sheer overload of information created using this format).  The cause, effect, and especially order are hard to trace.  The Simpsons and Family Guy's popularization of dropping obscure pop-culture references in an endless game of nostalgia battles spawned memes thats' origins were simply, images from films, with the corresponding quote written on it.

A favorite scene of mine from the 1989 film Uncle Buck.  All I needed to do with today's simple access to images, was type in Uncle Buck on an image search engine.  Then put some text on top of it.  Time from conception to completion 2 minutes.

The most famous of these is an image of Boromir from The Fellowship of the Ring, exclaiming with great indignation, hand formed into a ring, "One does not simply walk into Mordor."  With only the tiniest bit of an inspirational spark, one can simply, change the words slightly to make a joke.

17 seconds.

Another variation is to change the image slightly or make another nostalgic reference to a different film.  And on and on into infinite variations.

This one took ten minutes because I had to find a picture where Yoda was looking in the same direction as Boromir, then haphazardly cut it out and paste it onto a new image.

The Boromir gags can be traced as far back as 2004, but this summer was its height of popularity.  They ebb, flow, and mutate into new forms.  They'll become popular, people will churn out thousands of variations on the theme, then disappear until one day, as people tire of the joke, or find a new one.  Then somebody comes up with a novel amalgamation old and new ideas, and the meme is reborn and the imitators will follow.  What gets lost, though is the original joke and the idea of original expression.  It is not hard to just find a photo and make a macro.  Just follow the formula:

A photo from some old film + Words (extra points if it makes reference to another popular meme) = My own contribution to culture.  So, let's see....old film....old films.....AH!  I love Touch of Evil starring Orson Wells and Charlton Heston.  So, I can just type in Touch of Evil into google images, scroll through until I see an amusing image, put it in paint, type something on top, upload it onto this blog and.....there, you can all witness my clever wit.

If this doesn't go viral, I can make more and more and more until I find one that people like.  These remind me of a giant photo caption contest, except instead of us being exposed to the best few, we are exposed to every single entry.  Theoretically, society will filter out the ones that aren't funny and the rest will fade into obscurity, but it doesn't work like that though.  For them to be passed on, somebody has to see them and share them.  Even the ones that are popular and funny are still trivial and ultimately forgettable, because the second somebody has a good idea, it becomes absorbed, changed, regurgitated and thus watered down, again and again and again until all you have is just a photo of Boromir with clasped fingers.  What is wrong with this?  Nothing really, I just hope that people who make and view these photos are cognisant of their frivolousness.  We are leaving nothing behind with these.  Nobody is going to look back at this:

1 minute, 23 seconds

...and regard it as equal to a Rembrandt painting, or even a Mondrian.  (I could have found an actually good photo macro to make a better point, but there is something fun about making these things.)  Societies have been doing this with material culture for the history of mankind, and some asshole has written and will write an essay just like this, proclaiming that the current society's folk-art (and really that's what this is) is just a useless waste of time that contributes nothing to world.  Even serious art is filled with in-jokes that will mean nearly nothing when removed from its context, but even a "scherzo" movement took time, skill, study, and practice to create (and it also required education and free-time, a luxury afforded almost solely by a privileged class...I'm going to avoid most discussions of class structures in my commentary) and can still be regarded as something valuable.  This, however, does not:

Will this mean anything to anybody in a year?  Does it mean anything now?

Meme is a wonderful pop-term for these images; I see them as a futile attempt to scream "me! me!"  Paradoxically, now that such a large number of people have the ability to have their voice heard by the world, it just becomes noise because everyone is talking.

This is not all bad.  For sociologists looking to study the effects of mass-media and its effects on the evolution of ideas, this is amazing stuff!  Studying the internet is like the studying life-cycles of fruit-flies, because there are so many participants, mutations happen quickly.  The language of expression is changing and being absorbed by society so quickly, images are taking on more complex meanings in very short amount of time.  Again, this has been happening forever; it is how language was born, but are the implications of photo macros and internet memes on the future of communication?

This is now linked with pondering deep (or not so deep) questions of the universe.