Story time, intrepid readers!
Over the summer, I played on my parent's billiards team. One night, the conversation turned to the internet and I asked my mother if she knew what a meme was.
"Of course," she replied. "Like Michelle Obama's hair!"
To date, I still have no idea what about Michelle Obama's hair made its way onto the internet, but my mother was convinced that because it was a heavily repeated "internet sensation" it was also a meme.
Now, I am a child of the LOLcats generation and soemthing of an internet hipster, so I unwisely attempted to convince my mother that whaterver the FLOTUS's hair may look like, it was not a meme.
"Fine," she replied, clearly nearing the end of her patience with my hair-splitting. "What is a meme?"
...
...
What is a meme?
I've carried that question around with me since our conversation, and in Porter and Intertextuality, I think I've found my answer.
I would suggest, albeit temporarily, that there is no difference between my mother's idea of meme and my own experiences of it. To many people, in particular those who spend little to no time lost on the internet, there is no difference. A meme to them is a popular internet fad - somewhat confusing and difficult to identify. There is no word yet (although I hope it will be soon in coming) that denotes a "thing" on the internet that is funny for its individual characteristics.
I suggest the need for such a word because, thanks to Porter, I personally define a meme as a text that derives its humor from one or more levels of intertextual conversation. Of course, all things are comprised of many texts, but some things, such as a book or a movie, can be defined as a group by something other than intertext (i.e. a book is read, a movie is seen). A meme can be spoken, watched, read or seen (or many at once) but it always overtly incorporates two or more texts.
For example:
Another, more complex example:
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Deconstruction: Overly attached girlfriend, as this meme is known, is based on the slightly manic looking woman in question. The memes are defendant on her image (and its visual humor) as well as pithy text that seems like something a too-attached significant other might do. But here, someone has taken an old, accepted meme, well known for its topic and applied current events and the governments violations of personal privacy and combined them to use these two texts (not to mention the layers therein) to create a social commentary.
Which brings us to:
Deconstruction: Because memes are created using the texts of our times, so to speak, they are privy to our worst pettiness, as well as our most brilliant commentary. One example of pervasive, but less-than-savory, intertext memes is the Fake Nerd Girl. This meme takes the worst of society's internalized misogyny and gives it artistic and occasionally humorous form.
To break down the above image, we have a girl (conventionally attractive, nicely dressed, ) wearing glasses popular in "scene" style and NERD written on her hand. Beside her, we have a boy (conventionally attractive, nicely dressed) wearing glasses popular in "scene" style and NERD written on his hand. Both appear to be dramatically posing for a picture. That is all. We have no other visual or textual clues as to who these people are and what they like.
What the meme form allows us to do is take the visual image of a girl who does not look like the cultural expectation of "nerd" and attach a vapid, petty comment (although I object that Harry Potter is a soft-nerd book). The comparison of these texts tells us that she is a fake.
Meanwhile, her nearly identical (MALE) counterpart is assigned "real-nerd" books and taken seriously. Following my argument of intersectionality, the reason the Fake Nerd Girl meme is so easy to laugh at is because of a cultural reading of the feminine as less intelligent and passionate than the masculine.
The only reason this second image was made is because of a society-deep inability to accept that the women you know are not the exception to the rule: there is no rule. This is intersectionality in action for me; practiacl application of rhetoric to examine societal trends and pressures.
Wow, sorry. It's late and I got a little into my feminist soapbox ranting. But the potential of intersectional modern texts to show us how we actually see things, as opposed to how we think we see them, is crazy huge.
So thanks for your patience. My new text would be meaningless without you.
I knew the day would one day come when my massive, useless knowledge of internet culture would stand me in good stead.
This is a great post, and using the meme to illustrate intertextuality is brilliant, so I totally agree with you.
ReplyDeleteIt's just so perfect - because memes rely on a communal understanding of the underlying theme (Fake Nerd Girl) which we see in different texts as well - just yesterday I watched an episode in Season 3 of Portlandia (find the PSA here: http://youtu.be/Ir3v5yDk9Ws) where a young girl in Scene glasses talks about how much of a nerd she is - a man in the same place then goes off screen to report how demoralizing it actually is to be called a "nerd" and how that girl isn't really a nerd. A lot of things are happening in the clip, but this meme as well as the clip depend on that social commentary and on that social "cause" if you will, to open up an issue by satire.
That's the cool thing about memes, too, is not only are they intertextual, but they rely on the discourse community to continually adapt them, create new meanings and discuss new issues out of them.
Concurred, your post did a fantastic job of outlining the concept of intertextuality in a refreshingly light and fun way. I appreciate how you used a concept that is so evident in our culture and explained that one of the reasons it works so effectively is due to its ability to play by the rules of rhetorical theory (so to speak).
ReplyDeleteIn a way, your delineation of how this works with a meme makes me question if the same might be said of all mechanisms that make up the genre of comedy, and that's something I'd never considered before. Sweet!