Hello, everyone, my name is kenyatta cheese.
I'm from Know Your Meme which is a real community based on the fictional Rocketboom Institute for Internet Studies which is part of the non-fictional assemblage of writers, coders, mediamakers, and technologists called Rocketboom.
Know Your Meme is a community obsessed with the Documentation, Accreditation, and Understanding of how memes spread on the internet.
To that end we've amassed over 2100 entries in the Internet Meme Database. While most are unconfirmed, this should give you an idea of how much is out there.
For each entry we document everything we can verify about how these things start, how these things gestate, and how they change over time.
Some people geek out over buses, others build collections of air sickness bags, while we geek out over Ken Lee.
So I’m going to talk about internet memes as a phenomenon that is partially both anti-ego and anti-celebrity.
First, let’s have a quick refresher about Celebrity:
Celebrity (as we know it) is an invention of the 20th century.
I’m talking about people who are instantly recognizable because of their exposure through mass media. It’s emergent and it reflects a producer to consumer model that profits off of our scarcity of attention.
Sociologist Chris Rojek calls celebrity a replacement activity for religion. In particular he says:
"The collapse of organised religion, the absence of having saints or a God to look up to, for many people in western societies is being filled by celebrity culture - they are the new saints."
So the attention we once gave to religion we now give to celebrities.
Postmodern philosophy killed God.
Star worship killed the saints.
And Lady Gaga is just killing it.
Celebrity is about the Producer-Consumer dichotomy, believing in the scarcity of attention, and is very much tied to the technologies of Broadcast. So of course, it is also tied to the Dominant Culture.
But there is a side effect of cultural hegemony. Control is never perfect. There is always a counterculture.
And in this space, that was alternative media. While some of it was aspirational -- that is, it wanted to be just like the media it was in opposition to, For the most part it was
Anti-establishment.
Anti-corporate.
Anti-capitalist.
Anti-market.
What made it so? Well, it was hard to make popular b/c it ignored cultural norms. It was hard to exploit because a good portion of it ignored copyright. By re-appropriating many of the signs of the mainstream, they were carving out their own space where their own ideas could exist.
But this also meant that it was hard to sustain. It was this spirit that laid the groundwork for internet memes.
So let’s talk memes. What is a meme? Memes are units of cultural ideas that propagate through media, messaging, content, and communication. Coined by Richard Dawkins (the guy who coined ‘genes’). Spread of ideas separate from linguistics, separate from history.
Internet memes are just like regular memes except that they use the medium of the internet to propagate.
What’s the difference? Well, while the cost of acquiring & passing on an idea IRL has a real cost (if I want to pass along a bible, I have to buy a copy first), the effective cost of sharing and spreading that information within the online ecosystem is near zero. Therefore, ideas often spread on their merit before anything else.
While internet memes are ideas first and foremost, they take several different forms. These include but are not limited to Image Macros (images with captioned text.) Viral Videos. Catchphrases.
Like their offline alt brethren, internet memes are anti-exploitative. They often use copyrighted content that can’t be put back into the mass media machine.
Also, there is little to no central control over message. This makes them often resistant to corruption of meaning and form.
They mutate and iterate. Just because you’re first to a meme doesn’t mean that you get to determine how it will evolve. It can change without you. Last year’s 'Kanye Interrupts' started off as a viral video, became a video mashup, and then changed several times before eventually reaching a stable state of image macro + catchphrase.
But back to 'celebrity'. Does anyone recognize where the title of this talk comes from? It’s a line from William S. Burroughs’ The Soft Machine...
“This is war to extermination - Fight cell by cell through bodies and mind screens of the earth. Souls rotten from the Orgasm Drug. Flesh shuddering from the Ovens. Prisoners of the earth, come out. Storm the studio.
His plan called for total exposure - Wise up all the marks everywhere Show them the rigged wheel - Storm the Reality Studio and retake the universe…"
It’s a statement of opposition to outside control of both our bodies and our lives, written for a 20th century equation. Like proletariat taking over the factory, it’s a marxist-anarchist storming the broadcast centers, and reclaiming the tools of storytelling and persuasion for our own.
But things have changed.
We’re not in the same century. We’ve built so much more. The broadcast machine remains very much the same but we’ve built an entire infrastructure outside of that.
So don’t burn it down. Leave the factory behind, that relies on tightly held control of message and copyrights, and escape the system that creates hegemony, celebrity.
BTW, this doesn’t mean that the factory won’t still be running. Lest anyone believe that the idea of celebrity will disappear within our lifetime, I leave you with this little gem.
Thank you.
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